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HOOP ROOTS
By John Edgar Wideman.
242 pp. Boston:
Houghton
Mifflin Company. $24.
At the book's outset, he reveals his hope that the very act of writing ''Hoop
Roots'' will make up for letting go of his passion, that it may even afford him
the kind of fluidity and timelessness and unconscious grace provided by a good
pickup game on a hot summer afternoon. Perhaps it will even allow him a mastery
in the realm of writing comparable to Michael Jordan's in his domain. ''In my
chosen field,'' Wideman writes, ''I can strive to accomplish what Michael Jordan
has achieved in playing hoop -- become a standard for others to measure
themselves against.'' And so he boldly freelances from one topic to another, an
improvisatory method that results in a book of loosely gathered riffs and
stories that range in style from soul-rending confessional to warm recollection
to playful fiction to blistering polemic to tweedy, insufferable lecture.
Wideman movingly describes growing up in the Homewood section of Pittsburgh,
fatherless and coddled by women. As a child, he sat for hours every day in his
grandmother's sickroom, keeping an anxious vigil. Wideman's memories of that
time form a sepia-tinted family scrapbook of heroic women, queens of nurture and
household industry. The men are rarely home. They hang out in train yards
drinking wine and shooting craps, and at the basketball courts. And it is there
that young Wideman lights out for the territory, after being introduced to the
sport by white workers on their lunch break who let the 8- or 9-year-old boy
hoist a feeble shot at a raggedy hoop.
By themselves, these remembrances are often stirring. But ''Hoop Roots''
suffers from a herky-jerky movement between its various sections that dissipates
its overall force. Wideman's free-and-easy way with structure is reminiscent of
a player who goes up into the air not knowing whether to shoot or pass.
Sometimes he twists in a dazzling layup. Sometimes, having nowhere to go, he
comes back down and travels.
In fact, if you viewed ''Hoop Roots'' as a basketball game, its less
felicitous moments would look like a contest played by graduate students in
critical theory. Shall we say that their game lacks flow? Though the players are
erudite and enthusiastic, they're clanging shots off the backboard and booting
the ball out of bounds and bouncing off one another like competing
interpretations of ''Middlemarch.'' When what you really want to witness is a
point guard with a mean crossover dribble getting into the lane, what you get
instead is an old guy sermonizing about the semiotics of ball -- Derrida in
baggy shorts. ''If playground hoop is about the once and only go and flow of
time,'' Wideman writes, ''writing foregrounds the alienating disconnect among
competing selves.'' As they say on the playground, take that weak stuff out of
here!
Wideman can't resist showing how much he's learned as an English professor --
he mentions Proust, Poe's rules for the short story (with which Wideman
interrupts an absorbing stretch of fiction), ''the dominant language culture''
and the Prix Goncourt. When he breaks up the narrative, he's like a guy doing
commentary on his own game as he plays alone in the backyard. Wideman fakes the
short story, goes to his left to deconstruct, but fails to score -- because
there is no self to score!
''Hoop Roots'' succeeds when it embodies (or, at least, addresses) how it
feels to play the game, not what the game means. Wideman's prose comes across as
truest when he rhapsodizes and when he tells stories. ''The game,'' he writes,
''like gospel music, propagates rhythm, a flow and go, a backbeat you can tune
into so time's lonely, featureless stretch feels as charged, as sensuous, as
accessible a medium as wind or water.''
His eye for the particularities of the sport is so keen, so informed by his
years of prowess (Wideman turned down the chance at a professional career to
accept a Rhodes scholarship), that one often wishes he would just report what he
sees. At a downtown New York court that appears to be the legendary West Fourth
Street hardtop, Wideman carefully observes a young, bare-chested,
bandanna-wearing player he calls ''the do-rag man.'' Wideman's simultaneous
admiration for and discomfort with the fellow's exhibitionistic flash constitute
the same ambivalent attitude that pervades the American view of black basketball
players. ''His drive to the hoop part serious business, part mesmerizing
razzle-dazzle like the flying rags of shoeshine boys, the airborne hand jive of
three-card monte hustlers over their little handkerchief-covered, folding tables
on the tracks of Harlem and Times Square. Now you see it, now you don't.'' In
its jitterbugging eloquence, this passage is a vastly superior expression of
Professor Wideman's following declaration: ''Playing hoop, African-American men
act out a symbolic version of who they are, who they want to be.''
Another section of ''Hoop Roots'' also calls to mind the theatrical swagger
of street ball. It is an imaginary+account of the Harlem Globetrotters
barnstorming into the nearly lily-white town of Hinckley, Ill., in 1927. This
pulpy cartoon of a narrative surges forward with a burlesque rapacity that
mingles history and+fiction in a fashion reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard's
political movies of the 60's.
In such moments, Wideman's memoir becomes the place where Michael Jordan
meets the do-rag man, where strut and swoop is the inevitable byproduct of
intense focus and desire. If only every page resonated with such stylish play.
And yet, even with all of its academic mumbling, the book manifests considerable
power as an act of furious compensation. Rather than just another ''old head''
peering querulously at a new generation of players through the chain-link fence
of a court he once ruled, the Wideman of ''Hoop Roots'' is a tortured solitary
desperately looking backward, trying to collect enough of the past to give him
strength in a darkening future.
AT 59, the novelist John Edgar Wideman has recently given up the game of
playground basketball. His new memoir, ''Hoop Roots,'' originates in that loss,
which is monumental, the terrifying and inevitable fate of every graybeard still
trying to eke out another season on the asphalt, surrounded by fresh-legged
youngsters who, with no intentional malice, call him ''sir.'' ''I'm lost without
the game,'' cries Wideman of the sport he played for nearly 50 years, and his
abandonment of it owing to age summons up nearly every other sorrow in his life
-- a failed marriage, a son and a brother in prison for murder, the injuries of
racism.
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