God's Gym

God's Gym, as reviewed in the Denver Post, sounds good.

C.S. Lewis once said that for stories to be stories, they must be a series of events; yet at the same time it must be understood that this series is only a net to catch something that has no sequence, but rather something more like a state or quality.

John Edgar Wideman has struggled with this hard truth that the means of fiction are always at war with its ends throughout his writing career. In "Brothers and Keepers" (1984), he insisted, "people and events take shape not in orderly, chronological sequence but in relation to other forces and events, tangled skeins of necessity and interdependence and chance."

In his new group of 10 stories, "God's Gym," as in earlier collections, "Damballah" (1981), "Fever" (1989) and "The Stories of John Edgar Wideman" (1992), Wideman often rejects linear narrative for a lyrical form of meditation and improvisation characteristic of the jazz riff, a form that derives from the repetitive call-and-response patterns of West African music.