Most fiction built along musical rather than traditional narrative lines quickly sinks under the weight of its own pretensions. Not so Two Cities, John Edgar Wideman's multivoiced improvisation in the key of life. Ranging from funk to blues to jazz, Motown to gospel to pure high classical, these wise and gritty riffs tell the story of Kassima, who's had hard luck with her men--two drug-dealing sons shot dead and a husband downed by AIDS within ten months: "Just boys and men the whole time I been in this house. Men who act like boys, boys trying to be men. One run-ragged woman trying to teach them the difference between man and boy. As if I knew. As if they ever had a chance."

As the novel opens, Kassima is stepping out for the first time since her bereavement, looking for considerably less than the good and sexy man she finds on a stool in the neighborhood bar. Her encounter with Robert Jones, told by both in lusty counterpoint, is delicious, but she is still too raw from her losses to love easily again and sends Robert packing. In the bluesy interlude that follows, we hear solos that blow across 50-odd years, linking Kassima's story to that of her aged tenant Mr. Mallory, who looks like a bum but takes multiple-exposure photographs and writes lofty, unanswered letters about aesthetics to the Italian sculptor Giacometti. All the while, echoing through the same grim streets, we hear the soundtrack of gangsta rap, punctuated by the sounds of real guns killing real young black men. The two cities of the title are literally Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but here place swallows time, history, grief, violence, and love--giving us both an indelible experience of real people experiencing real pain and real joy and a shivery suspicion that in life as in art, a hundred different and contradictory realities coexist in any given moment. Does love or disappointment or anger conquer all?

You know the old story about the big fish that got away. How the guy telling it keeps cheating, his hands getting wider and wider apart every time he shows how big the fish was. Well, here's a funny thing about the story. Something I never understood before I met and lost her. The guy's not lying. He feels the empty between his hands growing each time he tells the story, each time the damned fish gets away again. You see, the funny thing is the sorry motherfucker's right. No matter how far apart he spreads his lying hands, he's right. The story's true. Beautiful exaggeration, inspired sociology, and first-rate fiction, Two Cities reverberates with just such truth. Don't miss it. --Joyce Thompson

From Publishers Weekly
A dark and brooding fugue on the nature of violence, Wideman's latest novel (after The Cattle Killing) again dispenses with conventional narrative development to compose a many-charactered testament to the suffering of people affected by the brutal force of power. Among the people who make cameo appearances are blues singer Bessie Smith, sculptor Alberto Giacometti, jazz musician Thelonious Monk and John Africa, the black revolutionary who led the back-to-Africa movement known as MOVE, and whose Philadelphia settlement was bombed by the police. They are part of the world of the three lost souls who wander sadly through the novel in a fashion by now familiar to readers of Wideman's fiction. Kassima is a widow in mourning for her husband and two sons who died in the streets of Pittsburgh. Soft-spoken, mysterious Robert Jones is the man who is trying to break through the barriers of her long suffering. Martin Mallory is Kassima's tenant, an eccentric photographer whose works depicting the 50-year history of life in the black neighborhoods of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia?the two cities of the title?help to heal old wounds and bridge the gap between differences. The first two-time PEN Faulkner award winner, Wideman blends some of his nonfiction themes from Philadelphia Fire and the memoir Fatherlong into the present work. The narrative segues in and out of time and place settings and points of view, often without transition. It is the hypnotic pull of his characters' distinctive monologues, the short, musical sentences flowing with easy vernacular, that bring this story to life. In the end, this dreamlike blend of unsparing realism and charged fantasy carry the reader along to a climaxing vision of cathartic force and clarity. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
"Beautifully structured, cunningly interlaced, and sensuously immediate," this novel by the highly regarded Wideman (The Cattle Killing, LJ 7/96) presents the story of an African American woman afraid to love after losing both husband and sons to street violence. Photographs documenting a half-century of black experience help call her back to life. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Walter Mosely
Two Cities is as enjoyable as it is important.

The New York Times, Richard Bernstein
There is no doubting Wideman's writerly craft or his remarkable ear for black American cadences and jive. From those points of view, Two Cities is a great pleasure.

The Washington Post Book World, Clarence Major
I enjoyed reading Two Cities. John Edgar Wideman is unquestionably one of our finest novelists because he remains focused on great American themes--the most central one being "the human heart in conflict with itself," to quote Faulkner. Wideman's success depends equally on his sensitivity to language and his understanding of the valuable dislocations created by his unique approach to fiction-making.

From Booklist
Wideman is getting increasingly experimental, which is not necessarily good news, for he is also getting increasingly opaque. His latest novel is a series of vignettes about events in the lives of a small group of individuals, told in their voices, almost as confessions. The two main characters are Kassima, whose husband died of AIDS in prison and whose two boys were killed on the streets, and her tenant, Mr. Mallory, who roams their Pittsburgh neighborhood taking photographs with his camera, his "toy," his head crowded with memories of his past. Their words extract considerable poignancy from their hard lives; in their attitudes toward themselves and others are couched much pride, defensiveness, despair, and hope. But these are disembodied voices speaking to us; the speakers do not seem like clear-cut, rounded individuals, but more like actors lined up onstage reciting lines rather than acting out roles. Also, it is not always clear who is speaking, and once readers get used to a certain character's voice, that character may reappear later with a voice that sounds different, adding to the narrative confusion. Granted, much of Wideman's language is beautiful, but is that enough to compel the reader to work so hard to gain a feel for these characters, to recognize them as individuals and fully comprehend their plights? Wideman's numerous fans will have to determine for themselves how much effort they want to bring to the novel to make it a successful reading experience. Brad Hooper

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This redemptive, healing love story brings to "masterful" (Philadelphia Inquirer) culmination the themes Wideman has developed in fourteen previous acclaimed books. "A harmonic blending of high and low, of the music of the streets and the music of the spheres" (New York Times), Two Cities celebrates the survival of an endangered black urban community and the ways people redeem themselves in a society that is failing them.

FROM THE CRITICS

New Republic

Wideman is now our leading black male writer...and one of our finest writers, period.

Bernard W. Bell - American Book Review

Two Cities is a compelling culmination of the theme of contemporary balack urban male double consciousness develped in Wideman's thirteen previous critically acclaimed books. It interweaves a legendary political tragedy of Philadelphia with a blues love story of Pittsburgh. It is a novel that thematically and stylistically explores the boundaries and bridges that paradoxically separate and connect fact and fiction, past and present, places and poeple, black and white, men and women, young and old. It is an experimental novel that linguistically celebrates the resourcefulness and resiliency of the African American blues voice.

Clarence Major

[Wideman is] unquestionably one of our finest novelists because he remains focused on great American themes -- the most central one being "the human heart in conflict with itself." -- The Washington Post

Walter Mosley

...[G]oes beyond the conventions of a simple love story....one after another...passages open uschange usand then move on....Two Cities...[captures] images of...everyday surroundings to reveal the crimes and passions of our world. — The New York Times Book Review

Dean Bakopoulos