The Fire This Time : PHILADELPHIA FIRE <i> By John Edgar Wideman (Henry Holt: $19.95; 199 pp.) </i>

The bloodiest and--relative to the level of disorder that provoked it--most violent government repression ever undertaken in an American urban black community was the helicopter bombing of a Philadelphia slum house in 1985.

The house was occupied by MOVE, a Rastafarian-like commune that had resisted repeated municipal orders to vacate. The group was armed, and some level of force was required to accomplish the eviction. It turned out to be a mini-holocaust. The bomb killed 11 commune members, including five children, and burned down 53 houses.

That horror provides the central imagery of the agonized fictional meditations and variations that make up “Philadelphia Fire.” John Edgar Wideman’s novel is a blaze of rage, but what makes the blaze hotter and the book more stunning is the despair that lies under it.

Mayor Wilson Goode, who ordered the bombing, is black. He was elected in the hope that Philadelphia, with its prosperity and strong civic and cultural traditions, might be the city where black voices and white resources could come together to reverse the spiral of urban decay and racial degradation.

The cruel irony of Goode’s decision provides Wideman, our most powerful and accomplished artist of the urban black world, with a theme so overwhelming and painful that it threatens to burst his throat. Sometimes it does, and his voice splinters and becomes inchoate. Sometimes, Wideman’s genius for impassioned imagery triumphs and “Philadelphia Fire” delivers its message with a careening momentum and astonishing precision.

If the telling is multifarious and passionate, the theme is straightforward and harsh. There is a narrator figure who, much like Wideman--a Rhodes scholar, acclaimed writer and professor--managed to rise out of disadvantage, thanks to talent, struggle and the opportunities that the ‘60s briefly opened. The thought was that such individual successes would in some fashion bring a whole people along.

Instead of a rising tide lifting all boats, a few rising boats were supposed to raise the ocean. For the achievers, the hope seemed genuine, despite uneasiness at enjoying the benefits of being its chosen instrument. Such uneasiness has flavored Wideman’s books, and given them edge, anger and art.

Now he uses the Philadelphia fire as the turning point, the end of the road. It stands, dramatically, for the less dramatic and more lethal turning of the last dozen years. Instead of tentatively holding out their hands, the privileged classes were encouraged to tuck them back in their pockets. And Wideman’s black mayor, who thought he was to deliver his people, bombed them instead.

Whether it was a forced choice, in view of MOVE’s violent resistance, and whether a white mayor would have felt empowered to make it, are debated questions. Whether any mayor would have ordered such a bombing in a middle-class white neighborhood, and if he had, whether the neighboring houses would have been so wretched and flimsy as to burn up, seems much less debatable.

Do you try to join a society that is ready to bomb you? The question splits the narrator in two. One half is Wideman, writing and teaching in western Massachusetts. The other half is a figure named Cudjoe, who represents a Wideman in transition from a belief in peaceable means to a hesitant, despairing identification with extremes. Cudjoe lives in a comfortable literary exile in Greece; news of the fire sets him on a voyage of discovery back to Philadelphia.

An image drives him. A boy named Simba was briefly spotted fleeing from the burning house, and subsequently disappeared. Cudjoe thinks of Simba--he visualizes him caught in the cross-hairs of a policeman’s sniper-scope--as part of himself. And Wideman, in his own voice, reminds us of his own real son, jailed for a killing and seemingly lost to his father’s world of achievement. Success is a fraud if you cannot bring your children too.

“Fire” tells of Cudjoe/Wideman’s search. He talks to Margaret Jones, one of the “slaves” of King, the leader and prophet of MOVE. He talks to Timbo, a former classmate now ensconced in power--and bitterness--as an aide to the mayor. He talks to the young men hanging around the neighborhood basketball court. And he recalls or imagines others: a white publisher who helped him get into print, members of a violent gang of boys for whom Simba is symbol and hero, and a ragged, picaresque wanderer named J. B. who also seems to be the dead King.

It is a swirl of stories, images and voices. Some burn indelibly. Wideman has made fire his own, and there are fire figures everywhere, illuminating us and driving us back with heat and smoky confusion.

There is the clotted, dreadlocked J. B. roaming implacably through the business district, begging, singing rap songs and transfixing the city’s prosperous heedlessness like a risen Lazarus. Even more memorable is Margaret Jones’ account of coming under the spell of King.

An office worker with “my little bit of degree,” determined to keep her place clean and rear her two children decently, she is repelled when she first sees King lounging in front of his house. He has J. B.’s dreadlocks, filth and stink. He is everything she abhors. Yet after a month or so, she is living with him. Her mother spent her life on aching feet, working as a maid and cleaning up for white folks. King’s blazing defiance suddenly shows her that she is simply a better-paid maid. Her feet still hurt. “He got to me through my feet,” she says. “Though he did it wrong, he did it right.”

Feet are Wideman’s recurring sign; the most literal image of oppression. An oppressed body discharges its burden on its feet. In an extraordinary passage, the author describes a mound of sneakers beside a city fountain where the slum kids go to cool off.

They are beat-up, “the way kids’ shoes always are, but these scattered around on the wet steps, these were worse, gaping holes in the bottoms, shredded uppers, laces missing, shoes taped, patched, lined with cardboard. Cheapest concoctions of glue and foam and canvas that money could buy.”

But a lot of money. The ad-driven status symbol that exploits poverty and despair while seeming to promise that you can jog right away from them. And in a tremendous extrapolation, Cudjoe:

”. . . constructs a room to match the shoes, fills it with sleeping bodies, many funky pairs of sneakers set out overnight to dry. Constructs a row house to hold the room, matches it with house after house till there is a street, then a neighborhood matching the sorry-assed shoes he’s ready to lace now and thinks of miles of streets he must negotiate to reach the fountain, how pebbles and grains of glass punch through the thin soles, how after walking awhile with his brothers and sisters in tow, it’s like walking barefoot on burning coals, you don’t stop and wait for a light to change, you charge through intersections, daring cars to hit you. Constructs a city to hold the neighborhood. . . .”

Cudjoe never finds Simba but the mayor’s aide, Timbo, tells him about Simba’s disciples, a gang of 15- and 16-year-olds that calls itself the Kiddie Kars Korps--or KKK. (We will think of the Ku Klux Klan and register Wideman’s savage irony.) They wild around the city. Their target is adults. In scrawled flyers--did they write them? did some adult radical or police provocateur?--they proclaim that the world belongs to them; that “olds” must be killed, robbed and exiled to islands.

“Everything for the young,” is their slogan, Timbo explains. “It’s fair, they say, because everybody’s young once. And nobody has to grow old if they don’t want to.” It is a bitter twist. Adults have eaten their children’s seed corn and denied them decent schools and jobs, and made a profit by selling them drugs. Many of the young never will grow old, but not because they don’t want to. They have no choice.

It is in passages like these that Wideman’s book comes to its burning focus. Elsewhere it rambles, clumsy and sometimes indecipherable. When he writes of a Maine vacation, of Cudjoe’s troubled marriage, of the book editor, his control wavers; mainly, perhaps, because his heart doesn’t seem to be in it. A long section about staging “The Tempest” with a cast of slum children has a diffuseness, even a sentimentality, that overwhelms a rather academic point about Caliban as the symbol of black oppression.

Wideman holds nothing back. The unevenness, the repetitiveness, the partial chaos of “Fire” are, in a sense, the embodiment of his theme. An authentic culture is entangled and choked in a culture that is superimposed. The book can be as ungainly as Caliban or the dreadlocked King. The defect may be partly willed, but it is a defect in any case; a form that struggles to encompass its theme and often fails.

Yet the successes are indelible. Wideman offers himself as a casualty of the struggle, but he is its victor as well.