Lion Man Among the Ruins

By R.Z. Sheppard

PHILADELPHIA FIRE by John Edgar Wideman

Henry Holt; 199 pages; $18.95

Limelight suited John Edgar Wideman, a former University of Pennsylvania basketball star and Rhodes scholar who became a novelist once heralded as the "black Faulkner." But in 1976 the light began to darken. Wideman's younger brother Robert was convicted as an accomplice to a murder and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment. Ten years later, the writer's 16- year-old son Jacob stabbed a camping companion to death and, like his uncle, was given a life term.

How the golden writer and the convict brother could come from the same Pittsburgh family was the burden of Wideman's nonfictional Brothers and Keepers (1984). The theme of the lost son pervades Philadelphia Fire, a novel that, like the earlier book, pits the author's refined literary sensibility against the crudity and violence of racism around him.

Wideman's narrator, known as Cudjoe, is a mask for the 49-year-old author. Fiction and fact are freely blended; the style is a mix of directness and allusion reminiscent of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Cudjoe, in fact, is invisible to himself. He has been an expatriate, living on a Greek island where he tended bar by day and tried to write at night.

Cudjoe/Wideman is a man in search of a myth that will unify his conflicting selves: the ghetto kid and the man of letters. The central images are not to be found among the classical ruins and blinding light of Greece but in the ashes of Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia. There, on May 13, 1985, readers may remember, a police helicopter dropped a bomb on 6221 Osage after its occupants, members of a black organization called Move, resisted orders to vacate. Six adults and five children were killed. The blast also started a fire that destroyed 60 other houses.

The assault was one of the most boneheaded decisions ever made by a municipal authority -- Keystone Kops reinventing Vietnam as a minifarce in which a neighborhood is destroyed in order to save it. For Cudjoe, the big bang represents creation in the form of a mysterious survivor, a boy known as Simba Muntu (Lion Man) seen walking away from the burning wreckage. The search for Simba provides the novel with an open-ended structure that allows Wideman to display his talents.

He can play it hot or sweet, highbrow or low-down. Wideman takes risks that do not always pay off. Writing in dialect is dangerous, and there are labored passages of multicultural rap that combine Shakespeare's Tempest and Third World politics: "Today's lesson is this immortal play about colonialism, imperialism, recidivism, the royal f over of weak by strong, colored by white, many by few, or, if you will, the birth of the nation's blues seen through the fish-eye lens of a fee fi foe englishmon."

Wideman is best when he is most personal: a description of a schoolyard basketball game, a grieving meditation after a telephone call from a son in prison. Or this bitter college recollection about feeling as if he were in a test tube from an uncertain liberal experiment: "I was walking down the street with this cute little white coed, thinking we're minding our business, strolling to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee, and blam. Run right dead into the glass wall." To Wideman, the stares seemed to say "Wait a minute, boy . . . You still in the tube, nigger, and don't you forget it."

By turns brilliant and murky, seamless and ragged, Philadelphia Fire is on to something big. Wideman's vision of racism in the U.S. suggests nothing less than a genetic disorder present at the birth of the nation. Impervious to cure, it can only be controlled, and in this Wideman is more fortunate than most. Through his art, he has the power to turn curses into blessings.