Cool collection of anarchic flash fiction from Faulkner award winner

Briefs: Stories for the Palm of the Mind / by John Edgar Wideman. [S.l.]: Lulu, c. 2010.

Fittingly enough, John Edgar Wideman has twice won the Faulkner award for fiction. William Faulkner, you will recall, is famous for, among other noteworthy works, As I Lay Dying, a stream-of-consciousness novel which investigates the psychology of a “subnormal” family. In similar vein, Wideman explores the psyche of the protagonists in his latest collection of what has been described as “hip-hop Zen”. The settings for his stories range from Darfur to Manhattan, and from Pittsburgh to Paris.

The titles of these short stories certainly do not tell “the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. An innocuous title such as “Manhole” heads up a tale of racism and violence in “the biggest, baddest apple in the world” (a.k.a. New York, natch). Many of his stories contain characters who are physically challenged, such as “Witness”, which is related from the perspective of an onlooker who, though emotionally aware of, and responsive to, what he perceives in his surroundings, is, nevertheless, physically bound to the confines of a wheelchair. Many of his characters are also emotionally constrained in their outlook on the world – each story is the narrator’s own vision of the world around him or her, telling what he or she sees as through the eye of a single-lens camera.

His empathetic (though his protagonist denies, in “Wall” that a writer can have such empathy, but is limited to his own focus on the world) portrayal of such characters reveals that, apart from his political awareness, to which he has given voice in sundry articles on such leading figures as Malcolm X, Wideman is keenly aware of social issues as well. His awareness of the plight and sensitivities of others is, in fact, the mainstay of Briefs: Stories for the Palm of the Mind.

An outstanding characteristic of Wideman’s style is his use of sentence structure, which ranges from his widespread use of enjambment (“Bereaved” consists of a single sentence of ten lines, for example) to short explosive fragments (such as “My, my, Miss May. Oh-blah-dee. Watch out, girl.” in “Party”). The bitter cynicism of “Oh Shit” is counterpoised against the sensitive portrayal of grief in “Witness”: “Art worth a shit these days comes from bums not worth a shit but their shit sells for incredible money and then the shit-faced bums got the nerve to treat everybody like shit.” counterpoised against “Forgive me, Jesus, but look like they grief dancing, like the sidewalk too cold or too hot they had to jump around not to burn up.”

Miniscule as these stories may be, being small enough to hold on “the palm of the mind,” they are yet capable of packing a powerful punch – all the more so for the seething maelstrom of insidious inner-city living that they portray. The voice of the physically challenged rings out from these pages, as does the unconquerable spirit of the socially dispossessed. A collection that will definitely hold more appeal for the open-minded than for the staid and placid reader, Briefs: Stories for the Palm of the Mind holds anarchic potential for those who enjoy slam dunking their fiction. Cool, bro, cool! [Reviewer for BookPleasures.com]