John Edgar Wideman

Man I have never felt more like having a multiple personality then ever after reading Our Time. Wideman leaps from different perspectives with the ease of a fawn frolicking in a meadow. It is a strange feeling, like in The Fly when the dude swaps heads with the fly so that his body becomes that of the fly , while the fly’s body becomes human. I’m talking about the original fly mind you, not the Jeff Goldblum remake (wasn’t good, wasn’t bad just Jeff Goldblum) where the lady walks into the lab and pulls the cloth of the body to reveal a ginormous fly head and then loses it and lets out that blood curdling shriek.
I also have to admit that writing this way is almost a kind of genius. Especially the parts where he is writing his brothers perspective right down to the way he feels “Choked up by the way he gets in Hospitals. Hospital smell and quiet, the bare halls and bare floors, the echoes, something about all that he can’t name, wouldn’t try to name, rises in him and chills him. Like his teeth are chattering the whole time he’s in the hospital.” It’s like writing in the fourth dimension. It even has it’s own space and time…weird I know.
Another thing is the impossibility of writing in another persons perspective. “ Do I write to escape, to make a fiction of my life? If I can’t be trusted with the story of my own life, how could I ask my brother to trust me with his?” For me this is easy, because as I have said too many time before, I have the unique ability to remove myself from the picture. I am as invisible as the air. However for someone who hasn’t been shown or that has stumbled across this ability then it would be tantamount to climbing Everest the day after you first conceived of doing it. With now practice or preparation you’d be setting yourself up for disaster.