FICTION

THE STORIES OF JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN by John Edgar Wideman . (Pantheon: $25; 432 pp.) John Edgar Wideman is a major American writer. This bears repeating, because for no very good reason--did black people and their concerns drop even more out of literary fashion in the ‘80s than we thought?--he’s still a largely unknown American writer, despite 10 previous books, including several novels. Again, then: Wideman is major. The 35 stories in this collection alone establish that fact.

Here Wideman adds 10 new stories to those published in “Fever” (1989) and “Damballah” (1981). Although together they range as far afield as South Africa and as far back as a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793 (when blacks first were blamed for the disease, then were declared immune to it and forced to nurse white victims while their own relatives died), most of the stories are chapters in the saga of Homewood, the Pittsburgh ghetto that is Wideman’s Yoknapatawpha County.

The Faulkner comparison comes easily, because of the scope of Wideman’s project, his ear for voices, the hallucinatory rush of his prose, and the way he shows the present as perpetually haunted by the past--the personal past, the tribal, the national. There are differences, of course. Faulkner could portray his society from the top down; it had room in it for Snopeses to rise and Sartorises to fall. Homewood is all bottom; its people--whether young men rotting in prison or a rare college graduate finding racist graffiti in the faculty lounge--all must endure a hostile reality that refuses to change.

Wideman’s later stories are no less angry than the earlier ones, and no less heartfelt. If any story here sums him up, it’s “Daddy Garbage” from “Damballah.” During the Depression, a street vendor finds a dead newborn girl in the snow. He knows that “if you go to the police they find some reason put you in jail. Hospital got no room for the sick let alone the dead. Undertaker, he gon want money. . . . Church peoples got troubles enough of they own.” So he and a gambler friend get drunk and dig for hours in frozen ground to give the child a grave, and then--the only ceremony she’ll ever have--the gambler says a few words over her. Like the words Wideman is saying over all his dead.