John Edgar Wideman's "slaveroad" is a palimpsest of physical, social, and psychological terrain, the great expanse to which he writes in this groundbreaking work that unsettles the boundaries of memoir, history, and fiction. The slaveroad begins with the Atlantic Ocean, across which enslaved Africans were carried, but the term comes to encompass the journeys and experiences of Black Americans since then and the many insidious ways that slavery separates, wounds, and persists.
A searing rumination ... Defies categorization. It’s neither a novel nor a memoir nor an essay collection, though elements of all those forms are present ... Wideman is not a straightforward writer. In the midst of exchanges with Sheppard and Protten, he will suddenly grow introspective, as if jotting down journal entries ... This author revels in the shattering and the reconfiguring of language, in tinkering with the English lexicon, bending it to his authorial will. He’s not going gently into any good night.
Not easy reading, both for its moral starkness and its profound inwardness ... A book worth getting lost in. A work of bruising candor and obsessive originality, it makes sense only outside the constraints of clock time, beyond trends or movements or even any contemporary notion of 'relevance.'
In short chapters marked by riverine sentences and blunt self-reproach...both of which are compelled by his imaginative trespass into other people’s experiences, Wideman reveals the slaveroad’s presence in his own life and in the world ... A late chapter, is far stronger if uneven. Here, Wideman imagines from a variety of perspectives his son Jacob’s ongoing imprisonment for murdering a fellow teenage camper in 1986. The story is raw, affecting and unsettling in the main, but ends with a graphic sexualized fantasy that comes across as inchoately performative. Indeed, when Wideman doesn’t indulge in showy provocation or hyper self-consciousness, he tells and retells powerful, miry tales in Slaveroad that are incantatory, transporting and incendiary.
