Outside the box

This is a John Edgar Wideman novel, and if you've had any acquaintance with such creatures, you'll know before turning the first page that whatever Wideman's ostensible subject may be, he will write about many other things besides, and often brilliantly. Ideas will spawn ideas. Voices will multiply. Fictions will jump the fence and cohabit with facts. Lines will blur and cross and be suddenly abandoned. The picture will escape the frame.

In past novels, Wideman's frame has been the history of lynching in America, a 1793 epidemic of yellow fever in Philadelphia, the 1985 police bombing of the black radical collective MOVE in the same city and, repeatedly, the streets of the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh, in which Wideman grew up. In all his books, race and racism color everything, eat away at everything, leave everything broken and internally divided. So it feels almost inevitable that Wideman would at some point turn his attention to Frantz Fanon, the West Indian psychiatrist and theorist of anti-colonial revolt, diagnostician of both the multilayered madness of white supremacy and the tortured pathologies of the oppressed. "Pinpoint of light in a darkening world," Wideman calls Fanon. "Doctor, philosopher, freedom fighter, writer, a man of color, man of peace who said no to color, no to peace if the price of color or peace is hiding behind a mask."

But, once again, this is a John Edgar Wideman novel, so don't expect much in the way of biography. (Wideman dismisses the genre outright: "Thinly disguised voyeurism . . . a costume drama.") Here, though, are the skeletal details of Fanon's short but oversized life: Born in Martinique in 1925, when that island was still a French colony, he ran away from home at 18 to join the Free French Forces, defending the colonial power that he would spend much of his later life fighting. Wounded in 1944 and decorated for valor, Fanon went on to earn a medical degree in Lyon, then took a job at a psychiatric hospital in Algeria, where he treated Algerians broken by torture and the policemen who tortured them. He later joined the anti-French liberation forces, was expelled from Algeria and died at 31 of leukemia in a Maryland hospital on the same day that his masterpiece, "The Wretched of the Earth," was banned from French bookstores.