The Cattle Killing

John Edgar Wideman. The Cattle Killing. Boston: Houghton, 1996. 212 pp. $22.95.

Reviewed by Philip Page California State University, San Bernardino

John Edgar Wideman has done it again. He has written another spellbinding, provocative-and difficult-novel. This tour de force, like his previous three novels-Sent for You Yesterday, Reuben, and Philadelphia Fire-weaves multiple stories, storytellers, times, and places into a complex fabric focusing on the issues of individual identity and isolation, the need for community but its potential breakdown, and the therapeutic power of telling and listening to stories.

Like Wideman's novella "Fever," the primary setting of The Cattle Killing is in and near late-eighteenth-century Philadelphia during a plague. The primary narrator, an unnamed young African American preacher, retells his story of meeting and falling in love with an African American housemaid; her impregnation by her white employer, Dr. Thrush; and her disappearance into a lake carrying a dead baby. Wideman intersperses this story with many other stories, principally those of the young preacher's two years' residence with an interracial couple, Liam and Mrs. Stubbs; of Liam's indentured servitude in England; and of Mrs. Thrush's work in an African American orphanage. Hovering behind these interrelated stories is the reported story of the Zhosa who, facing subjugation by Europeans, killed their cattle in response to a false prophecy. And the novel is framed by two pseudo-autobiographical sections, which depict the author leaving a writers' conference to read portions of the novel to his father, and his son Dan reacting to the novel.

As in his previous three novels, Wideman complicates this one not only by incorporating multiple stories, but also by entangling the telling of these stories. Within the primary narration by the young preacher, Liam becomes the first-person narrator of his story of working for Mr. Stubbs in his slaughterhouse and of spying on Stubbs's son in his escapades with male-midwives and "resurrectionists" looking for fresh cadavers to dissect. Wideman's persona narrates the opening section, and his son narrates the epilogue, which includes a letter from Dan to his father; Dr. Thrush's wife, who is blind, dictates her story in the form of a diary to her maid; Dr. Thrush writes letters to his wife; and the orphans testify in the form of depositions and first-person...