Two Cities: A Love Story.

Two Cities: A Love Story by John Edgar Wideman Houghton Mifflin. 256 pages. $24.00.

John Edgar Wideman is a master of the musical narrative. His words wail like the blues, echo like gospel hymns, and float like melancholy jazz grooves.

In his latest novel, Two Cities: A Love Story, Wideman writes with anger and fire about Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. At the same time, the novel is a pensive exploration of love and hope amid chaos and fear.

Two Cities does not have a strong linear plot. The three voices of the narrators eyewitnesses to the difficulties of life in poor neighborhoods controlled by gangs, form the book's loose structure.

The novel tells the story of Kassima, a woman who has lost two sons and a husband to the violence of Pittsburgh's Homewood neighborhood. She now lives alone except for an eccentric old boarder named Mallory. Kassima, on an impulsive quest for a one-night stand, meets Robert Jones, a middle-aged, gentle, quiet man.

What follows is a passionate relationship burdened with obstacles: The grieving Kassima fears falling in love with one more man she may lose to the fighting on the streets. Jones breaks through this fear. But Kassima flees the relationship after watching Jones get involved in an altercation with a gun-wielding gang member during a neighborhood pick-up basketball game.

The novel then moves into a bluesy interlude--beautiful, somber meditations on the urban crisis told in the voices of Kassima, Jones, and Mallory. Wideman deftly links the pasts of these three main characters. In the hands of a lesser stylist, Two Cities would fail as a novel because of its thin plot and rapidly shifting points of view. But in Wideman's accomplished hands, Two Cities becomes a wise and eloquent story of lives torn asunder. At the novel's end, Wideman juxtaposes a truly horrific incident of gang violence with a moment of hope and grace brought about by Kassima, Jones, and Mallory.

Of the three narrators in Two Cities, Jones is the least fleshed out. His past is a murky memory and his present is not well-defined. Scarred by racism and violence, Jones longs to find something in his love for Kassima, but as a character he never fully develops.

On the other hand, Kassima is a multidimensional and finely drawn character, a modern-day Job. Her sorrows underscore the tragedy occurring in our nation's cities. "Can they help it, can they do better? 'Course they can and most of them try," Kassima mourns. "Crazy country of ours accuses them of everything but being citizens and human beings."

Mallory is by far the oddest of the characters in Two Cities. An elderly man who has spent decades photographing the people and places he knows in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, he is a sort of shell-shocked urban philosopher. Mallory was a good friend to John Africa, a leader of the MOVE black separatist movement in Philadelphia, which the city bombed in 1985. Much of Mallory's narrative consists of a series of flashbacks to being ambushed by white soldiers while serving in World War II, talking with John Africa, and witnessing the sad end of the men in Kassima's life. Mallory's photographs help to bring a sort of vague salvation to a bloody climax.

Wideman has, on occasion, been criticized for painting an overly bleak and hopeless portrait of urban America and race relations. Two Cities may ensure that such criticisms continue. But Wideman's subject matter is as bleak as he portrays it. In a world of contemporary fiction that deals all too often with the petty suburban crises of English professors who have affairs and law students who get drunk, he is one of the few novelists exploring urban America with a piercing, relentless vision.

As Mallory writes in one of his letters to his hero, Giacometti: "My pictures are pretty postcards with the world arranged nice and neat. But I don't want to hide the damage. I want to enter the wound, cut through layer by layer like a surgeon, expose what lies beneath the skin.... Excuse me for putting it this way, but is your art a lost cause? ... No solutions to the problems you set yourselves."

Wideman's novel does not offer any concrete solutions to the urban violence of this nation. Rather, like Mallory's pictures, he shows us a seemingly hopeless problem and demands that a solution, somehow, be found.

Dean Bakopoulos is a fiction writer and journalist who lives in Madison, Wisconsin.