Volume 52, Number 6 · April 7, 2005
The Hunted
By Darryl Pinckney
God's Gym
by John Edgar Wideman
Houghton Mifflin, 175 pp., $23.00
In the title story of John Edgar Wideman's last collection, All Stories Are True, published in 1992, the first-person narrator is looking at his mother on her porch one quiet morning, 'May 10, 1991.' Their Homewood neighborhood has always been rough. He is afraid for her, though her hair has begun to grow back after nine months of chemo. She isn't up to going with her son to visit another of her sons in prison. The 'pardons board' has just turned him down, without a hearing. They talk about her neighbor's Job-like endurance of his sufferings and the unnamed son observes, 'You know, Mom, people look at you and what you've had to deal with and you're just as much a miracle to them as you say Wade is to you.' She answers that God doesn't give us more than we can handle. 'Not everybody has that kind of god,' the son says.
Review, 3552 words
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