A Review of John Edgar Wideman's "God's Gym"
by Kristofer Collins
(As part of the #WidemanChallenge I am reprinting my review of John Edgar Wideman's short story collection God's Gym, which originally appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on February 13, 2005. For more information on the #WidemanChallenge and author Karen Lillis, who started the project, read this. If you would like to participate in the #WidemanChallenge by writing a book review or an essay please contact us at pghbookreview@gmail.com.)
I remember Sunday mornings when I was a boy attending Mass at Sacred Heart Church with my grandmother, and afterward we would always go grocery shopping.
It usually took the entire morning to get everything. And then the afternoon was spent making dinner. If there was time, we would play cards while the food steamed and simmered on that greasy old stove of hers.
If I were to tell the story of my family properly, then these special Sundays with my grandmother would play a major part in the tale.
But why would I do such a thing? Why reveal such personal matters? In some way, wouldn't that be a betrayal of the very same people I was trying to honor?
In his new collection of 10 short stories, Pittsburgh native John Edgar Wideman confronts that possible betrayal head-on. Wideman has visited this territory before, most notably in "Brothers and Keepers," a memoir about his own younger brother's imprisonment.
In that earlier book, Wideman takes great pains to allow his brother to tell his own story, even though by necessity the story is told through Wideman himself.
He examines his role as the writer and how difficult it is for him to step aside, as it were, and not to write the story of himself writing the story of his brother.
It's a difficult balancing act, a tightrope that the writer walks every time he pulls the very real lives of the people around him into the fiction he is compelled to create.
The story "Weight" is a deeply emotional dissection of a writer attempting to venerate the struggles of his mother's life in the words of a short story.
But words are a mercurial tool, very slippery, and slide easily away from a writer's intended meaning. The story is a eulogy for a mother who has yet to pass on and, understandably, she is hurt,
"That's what upset you, wasn't it. Saying goodbye to you. Practicing for your death in a story. ... Saying aloud terrible words with no power over us as long as we don't speak them."
All families struggle with the stories that they don't want told. The secrets and fears, the shames and sadnesses that once said, once given flight by simple words, can soar back at us with cold talons, unsheathed and razor sharp, cutting the flesh and rending the heart.
These are the hidden stories never to be uttered aloud. A writer in the family just plays havoc with such things. As Wideman writes:
"How would such unsaid words sound, what would they look like on a page. And if you uttered them, surrendered your stake in them. ... Would it have been worth the risk, even worth the loss, to finally hear the world around you cracking, collapsing, changing as you spoke your little secret tale."
The stories are the sound of worlds cracking and collapsing. Whether it's two neighbors of many years having their first, and what will ultimately be their last, conversation in "Sharing," or the disintegrating love affair at the center of "Fanon," these stories are conveyed by characters who are almost painfully aware that they are telling a very private story.
Even when the intended audience is not present, as in "The Silence of Thelonious Monk," the story must be told.
"So I pretend you hear me telling what I need to tell, pretend silence is you listening, your presence confirmed word by word, the ones I say, the unspoken ones I see your lips form, that form you."
Although the narrator is speaking here to an ex-lover, he invents a story about Thelonious Monk to convey his own struggling emotions. Much like the mother in "Weight," Monk is unamused by someone appropriating his life to tell someone else's story.
"Are you crazy, boy. Telling my story. Putting mouth in my words."
In a more perfect world, a new book by John Edgar Wideman would be cause for celebration, even more so than a Steeler victory.
Wideman unflinchingly analyzes his chosen art form in these stories. And while he may not offer an answer to whether the telling of a tale is worth its inherent risk, we as readers are much better off for the gift of his work.
Kristofer Collins is the longtime Books Editor for Pittsburgh Magazine. He is a frequent contributor to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. His criticism has also been featured at Lit Hub, 1839, The New Yinzer, and The New Antiquarian. He is the co-curator of The Hemingway's Summer Poetry Series. His latest book The River Is Another Kind of Prayer: New & Selected Poems was published in 2020 by Kung Fu Treachery Press. His latest project, The Pittsburgh Book Review. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA with his wife and son.
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