Brothers and Keepers (Paperback)

by John Edgar Wideman (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
With novels like Damballah and Hiding Place, John Edgar Wideman began his career in an explicitly modernist vein--indeed, his chronicles of life in the Pittsburgh ghetto of Homewood had more than a trace of a Joycean accent. The autobiographical Brothers and Keepers, however, allowed the writer to find his own voice. Perhaps this dual portrait of the author and his brother Robby--serving, then and now, a life sentence for a murder committed during a bungled robbery--finally forced Wideman to fuse the modernist trappings of his earlier work with the storytelling traditions of African American culture. "My memories needed his," the author recalls. "Maybe the fact that we recall different things is crucial. Maybe they are foreground and background, propping each other up." In any case, the Rashomon-like result is a raw meditation on fate and family, as well as an indictment of our entire notion of crime and (especially) punishment.

From Publishers Weekly
Wideman, novelist and professor at the University of Wyoming, seeks to understand how he and his brother, who is serving a life sentence for murder, could have such disparate lives after a childhood together in a Pittsburgh ghetto. Ruthless about himself, particularly about his move into the upper middle-class as a "black intellectual," Wideman characterizes his brother as an intelligent, loving, proud dreamer. He raises "existential questions" about culture, racism and the "grief and guilt of a brother," PW wrote. November
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage Books ed edition (August 29, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679756949
• ISBN-13: 978-0679756941
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #747,359 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A compelling biographic memoir, August 5, 2001

By	C. Dondiego - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

John Edgar Wideman's brilliant prose breaks through the humdrum of standard biographies and presents readers with a combination of family memoir, true crime narrative, and a scathing indictment of the "justice" system. His own learned, scholarly discourse and his brother's street dialect alternate throughout to give readers a dual perspective of family, culture, and society.

Wideman neither lionizes nor blames his brother, Robert, but not so ironically, he recognizes in his little brother the true modern day romantic: the chance-taker, the rebel with a cause, and the convict who retains his dignity through loss and ordeal.

Nevertheless, I would not undermine or degrade Wideman's book by calling it "uplifting" or "inspirational." There are enough canned chicken-soup books for those who prefer spoonfeeding to hard realism and true brotherly love.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not Wideman's Best Work, But Still Interesting, April 4, 2000

By	"noashtray" (Ohio) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Brothers and Keepers (Paperback)

Perhaps Wideman should have let his brother Robby tell more of his own story because John's rants about the injustice of prisons wears thin quickly. Robby Wideman comes out as honest through his words, but neither Wideman seems to think Robby's crime was really not that important of a matter. I do not understand this, but every person is entitled to their own thoughts. An encouraging aspect of this book relates to the progress Robby makes in becoming a more genuine person. This is often a frustrating book, but it is still engaging in many passages.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Too many techniques distract from the story, February 16, 2003

By	John Hartnett (Santa Fe, NM) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I started this book really wanting to like it. From the jacket blurbs it looked like a book right up my alley (creative non-fiction.) Brothers&Keepers seemed like a book where the author had stretched the limits of creative nonfiction -- brought in different perspectives, used different voices, used different narrators. Overall, for me though, the book did not work. Ironically, I don't like the book for the very reason I was attracted to it. I think he went to far in adding new techniques and tricks at the expense of the story I thought he was trying to tell.

Wideman covers just about every possible combination of voice, tense, point of view, and narration. One of the old "rules" of fiction was to keep POV changes to a minimum. This is supposed to help the reader identify with a character and not have to reorient himself or herself and thus "fall out of the story." Likewise, the rules of writing discourage tense changes, hoping to keep a supple continuum going in the reader's mind. But in this book, Wideman wanders all over the place, sometimes shifting three or four times within the same page. (see page 8). Although I admire Wideman for trying this, for me as a reader, breaking the rules had exactly the effect the rulemakers fear -- I fell out of the story and became confused, disoriented, and disinterested.

But If You Must Do It, DO It.

To compound this problem, Wideman makes one more mistake in shifting realities. He doesn't keep it up. The first chapter of the book makes it seem as though we are going to get a heck of a ride, running all over the place looking for the truth. But in the last two sections, Wideman seems to fall into a reporter's notebook and never come out. Granted we do get to see Robby's words both printed and spoken, but the mishmash of thought, opinion, different tenses and voices is much quieter as the book drones on.

Many times it felt like he was showing off the fact that he was breaking the rules, rather than breaking the rules in order to tell a story that could not be told any other way. This may be because he is an academic, a professor who discusses the structure of literature all day long. He might feel a certain obligation to approach his writing from a litcrit perspective and deliberately do things in his writing that would make for good English papers.