Hard Love

By Paul Gray

John Edgar Wideman subtitles his eighth novel, Two Cities (Houghton Mifflin; 242 pages; $24), "A Love Story," but his version of that familiar genre seems at times the antithesis of standard romance. Robert Jones, 50, meets Kassima, 35, at a dance club, and she eventually invites him back to her house. Good sex leads to good conversation and then to love, an emotion that fills Kassima with terror and dread. Within a recent span of 10 months, both of her teenage sons were killed by gang violence in her Pittsburgh neighborhood and their father died of aids he contracted in prison. After she sees a gang member threaten Robert on a playground basketball court, Kassima decides that he is another doomed black male and tells him, "I've loved my last dead man. Can't take it anymore... Love you but I got to cut you loose, baby."

This is not, of course, the end of the story. Kassima has a strange sort of angel in her house, her tenant Mr. Mallory, an elderly eccentric who moved from Philadelphia late in his life to wander the streets taking photographs. Against her will, Kassima begins to care about her increasingly enfeebled housemate, another death in her life waiting to happen. If she can let Mr. Mallory matter to her, why not Robert Jones?

Wideman refracts his novel entirely through the thoughts and memories of his characters. Reading Two Cities can be demanding: abrupt, unannounced shifts from one point of view to another, foreshadowings and flashbacks, no quotation marks to signal dialogues in progress. But a novel easier to read might also be easier to forget.

--By Paul Gray