Two Cities: A Love Story [Hardcover]

John Edgar Wideman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 9, 1998

A redemptive, healing novel, Two Cities brings to brilliant culmination the themes John Edgar Wideman has developed in fourteen previous acclaimed books. It is a story of bridges -- bridges spanning the rivers of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, bridges arching over the rifts that have divided our communities, our country, our hearts. Narrated in the bluesy voices of its three main characters, Two Citiesis a simple love story, but it is also about the survival of an endangered black urban community and the ways that people discover for redeeming themselves in a society that is failing them. With its indelible images of confrontation and outrage, matched in equal measure by lasting impressions of hope, Two Cities is a compassionate, lacerating, and nourishing novel.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Most fiction built along musical rather than traditional narrative lines quickly sinks under the weight of its own pretensions. Not so Two Cities, John Edgar Wideman's multivoiced improvisation in the key of life. Ranging from funk to blues to jazz, Motown to gospel to pure high classical, these wise and gritty riffs tell the story of Kassima, who's had hard luck with her men--two drug-dealing sons shot dead and a husband downed by AIDS within ten months: "Just boys and men the whole time I been in this house. Men who act like boys, boys trying to be men. One run-ragged woman trying to teach them the difference between man and boy. As if I knew. As if they ever had a chance."

As the novel opens, Kassima is stepping out for the first time since her bereavement, looking for considerably less than the good and sexy man she finds on a stool in the neighborhood bar. Her encounter with Robert Jones, told by both in lusty counterpoint, is delicious, but she is still too raw from her losses to love easily again and sends Robert packing. In the bluesy interlude that follows, we hear solos that blow across 50-odd years, linking Kassima's story to that of her aged tenant Mr. Mallory, who looks like a bum but takes multiple-exposure photographs and writes lofty, unanswered letters about aesthetics to the Italian sculptor Giacometti. All the while, echoing through the same grim streets, we hear the soundtrack of gangsta rap, punctuated by the sounds of real guns killing real young black men. The two cities of the title are literally Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but here place swallows time, history, grief, violence, and love--giving us both an indelible experience of real people experiencing real pain and real joy and a shivery suspicion that in life as in art, a hundred different and contradictory realities coexist in any given moment. Does love or disappointment or anger conquer all?

You know the old story about the big fish that got away. How the guy telling it keeps cheating, his hands getting wider and wider apart every time he shows how big the fish was. Well, here's a funny thing about the story. Something I never understood before I met and lost her. The guy's not lying. He feels the empty between his hands growing each time he tells the story, each time the damned fish gets away again. You see, the funny thing is the sorry motherfucker's right. No matter how far apart he spreads his lying hands, he's right. The story's true.

Beautiful exaggeration, inspired sociology, and first-rate fiction, Two Cities reverberates with just such truth. Don't miss it. --Joyce Thompson

From Publishers Weekly

A dark and brooding fugue on the nature of violence, Wideman's latest novel (after The Cattle Killing) again dispenses with conventional narrative development to compose a many-charactered testament to the suffering of people affected by the brutal force of power. Among the people who make cameo appearances are blues singer Bessie Smith, sculptor Alberto Giacometti, jazz musician Thelonious Monk and John Africa, the black revolutionary who led the back-to-Africa movement known as MOVE, and whose Philadelphia settlement was bombed by the police. They are part of the world of the three lost souls who wander sadly through the novel in a fashion by now familiar to readers of Wideman's fiction. Kassima is a widow in mourning for her husband and two sons who died in the streets of Pittsburgh. Soft-spoken, mysterious Robert Jones is the man who is trying to break through the barriers of her long suffering. Martin Mallory is Kassima's tenant, an eccentric photographer whose works depicting the 50-year history of life in the black neighborhoods of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia?the two cities of the title?help to heal old wounds and bridge the gap between differences. The first two-time PEN Faulkner award winner, Wideman blends some of his nonfiction themes from Philadelphia Fire and the memoir Fatherlong into the present work. The narrative segues in and out of time and place settings and points of view, often without transition. It is the hypnotic pull of his characters' distinctive monologues, the short, musical sentences flowing with easy vernacular, that bring this story to life. In the end, this dreamlike blend of unsparing realism and charged fantasy carry the reader along to a climaxing vision of cathartic force and clarity.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First Edition edition (September 9, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395857309
• ISBN-13: 978-0395857304
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,692,216 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN is the author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including the award-winning Brothers and Keepers, Philadelphia Fire, and most recently the story collection God's Gym. He is the recipient of two PEN/ Faulkner Awards and has been nominated for the National Book Award. He teaches at Brown University.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is tight, June 10, 2005

By 

docsplice "docsplice" (DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Two Cities: A Love Story (Hardcover)

John Edgar Wideman's incredible book two cities makes an exceptional use of language to deal with trauma and perspective. This is one of the most touching love stories I've ever read, mostly because of the way wideman seamlessly shifts perspective from one lover to the other, a choice which makes the two characters bleed into each other. As anyone who's ever been in love knows, sometimes you blend together so well its hard to tell where one person ends and the other begins. On top of that Wideman takes on the limitations of art in decpicting the depth and complexity of human feeling, ironic in a book that is so brimming with passion and sentiment.

5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Like Philadelphia Fire, Two Cities doesn't sustain itself, December 5, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Two Cities: A Love Story (Hardcover)

Wideman again demonstrates his amazing facility with language and voicing, with a slender story that nevertheless gives rise to a vast array of emotional shadings and expressive nuances. However, much as with Philadelphia Fire (1990), Wideman doesn't seem interested in sustaining his bravura beginning. By the end of the book, the riffs have become repetitive and desultory, and the book dribbles to an unconvincing end. It's deeply disappointing, but only because the first third is so riveting. His treatment of the 1985 MOVE bombing is not as polemical or negative as Richard Bernstein's Times review would have it--if anything, Wideman blurs many of the details of that story, and those not familiar with the actual history may be confused.

1 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I really didn't care for this book, November 27, 2000

By 

Shannon Smithey - See all my reviews

This review is from: Two Cities: A Love Story (Hardcover)

I found this book a bit depressing in its bleak depiction of urban life for African-Americans, particularly those in violent inner city neighborhoods. I might merely take this as a sign that it was an effective book, except that it does not explain the causes of all the youth violence it depicts. And it is often hard to determine who is speaking, since the main voice changes within chapters and even within chapter sections. I often found it hard to follow the shifts in voice and time, not to mention place, as it is not clear when we are in Phili and when we are in Pittsburgh.