Two Cities.

John Edgar Wideman. Two Cities. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 242 pp. $24.00.

The Bible and the dictionary are not the typical cornerstones of love stories, but they rest at the foundation of John Edgar Wideman's Two Cities alongside the musicality of Black speech and the sounds of memory. This may be in part because Wideman explores, among other things, the kind of love James Baldwin called a "tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth."

This Baldwin-esque notion of love foregrounds Wideman's most recent look at contemporary urban Pennsylvania via the two cities of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. The three main characters in the novel, Kassima, Robert, and Mr. Mallory, deal simultaneously with repeated personal and community losses in addition to their longing not only for healing but also for the courage to love again. In weaving their stories together, Wideman expands our notion about what a love story may be as he advances the long history of African American orality and literacy with innovative stylistic choices.

Written texts such as the dictionary and the Bible are crucial to the narrative but play no more important role than Black vernacular speech, whether vocalized or only "uttered" in a character's memory. Wideman highlights the lyricism of Black speech in his text: His words seem well-suited to the page yet they resonate in the ear. The absence of quotation and question marks in Two Cities enhances the written word by forcing it to yield to the world of sound. A rhythmic labyrinthine effect results from Wideman's time-collapsed mixture of the narrator's voice, characters' voices, letters, seemingly unvocalized speech, and dialogue.

The struggles of enslaved Africans who used the Bible to obtain literacy echo in this novel. Kassima, following in her ancestors' footsteps, uses her literacy to re-claim this classic in Black letters. The younger member of a May-December romance, she must first wrestle the Bible from the "Bible crazy, church crazy" people who "hurt [her] bad as a child." Freed from their scriptural monopoly, she "finds her story" in the book of Lamentations. After Kassima uses a dictionary to complement her reading, she reflects on what she thought "Lamentations" meant, saying:

Looking at the word, not having the slightest idea what it might mean, my guess was it might be something happy, a happy, dappy, fa-la-la ring to the word, something maybe to do with music, bells and tambourines and drums and long curvy goat-horns, you know, kind of stuff they play music with in the Bible days movies. Lester and the Lamentations, I thought that dumb thought too, thought the word sounded like Temptations or Sensations or Sweet Inspirations, the la-la-la names singing groups give themselves. Latin Lester and the Fabulous Lamentations. Little did I know, no clue what I was getting into when I started to read myself the book in the Bible with that name.

Although the actual biblical book "Lamentations" and Kassima's early associations share little similarity, they both return her to ritualistic places in human emotion: love and mourning. After her dictionary consultation and in-depth reading, Kassima rescues Lamentations from the all too righteous to address the mind-numbing grief following a ten-month span in which she loses her husband to AIDS, which he contracted in prison, and two sons, casualties of the inner-city plague of gang violence. Kassima soothes her wounds with the ancient sorrow songs "about people beat down so low they got to pray for a reason to pray."

Kassima's boarder and a veteran who never makes it back to his family after a traumatic tour of duty in World War II, Mr. Mallory is haunted by his war experiences and the bombing of the MOVE community. The remembered conversations between Mr. Mallory and John Africa, one of the victims of state-sanctioned violence, reads like a conversation between Lamentations' voice of mourning and a combination of Isaiah's prophetic alarm and Revelations' apocalyptic dirge.

Mr. Mallory, who travels around his community with a camera in a shopping bag, also writes to Italian artist Alberto Giocometti that his "work is taking pictures." In his letters (which result in a kind of one-sided conversation) to "Mr. G" he notes, "I'm not an artist but I'm learning from your art to use my camera in new ways. Difficult ways that will probably wear me out before they produce decent pictures. . . ." His passionate devotion to his art stems from his desire to create "one among countless ways of seeing, [a] density of appearances [his] goal" and an art that can speak "the language spoken by the people who taught [him] to feel, to live in a body." Mr. Mallory not only writes and paints but also fuses these two genres to reflect each other. His love for his art and attentiveness to mastery prompt his deathbed request that his unfinished project be burned, although Kassima's refusal to honor his request assists a community in crisis.

Robert reunites with Kassima when she requests his help after Mr. Mallory dies. He is elated that their breakup, prompted by Kassima's fears, has ended, and distantly sad about Mr. Mallory's demise, for he only knew him as an "old dude [with a] shopping bag" who was so common an appearance that he was "just part of the street."

Robert comforts Kassima as they take care of Mr. Mallory's arrangements, and he slips back into their relationship, which navigates the crossroad of his adult desire and his childhood memories. Just as quickly as Robert and Kassima's presumed one-night stand blossoms into a mature love between two people familiar with hurt, Robert surrenders to the remembrances that flood his childhood neighborhood of Cassina Way, the street on which Kassima lives. Understanding the power of this intersection of memory, love, desire, and awakening, Robert fortifies himself so that he can share his story without losing himself. He explains:

Yes indeed, it was some night and quite a day too and everything that happened comes back when I let it come back but I'll only tell you bits and pieces. Turning it all loose would wear me out. Couldn't stop it coming. Story catch me before I got to the end, swallow me in one bite.

The synchronicity of Wideman's multidirectional style and richly drawn characterizations make it worthwhile to read Robert's story, told in the "bits and pieces" he can offer. Because John Edgar Wideman finds a storytelling style that befits the characters' complexities, this "love story" has many textures. This love isn't satisfied with what's easy or necessarily comforting; it pushes those determined enough to keep it to strive for more.