Posts tagged john edgar wideman

Across the Tracks I guess my question about transportation was a bit leading.  I had a number of scenes from Wideman’s novel (Sent for You Yesterday) in mind at the time.  The train seems to play a lot of neat roles in the novel, namely confining the characters to the relatively small area in Homewood shown in the novel.  The tracks, in addition to the land’s geography, are a very real boundaries that separate the neighborhood from surrounding neighborhoods like Point Breeze and Shadyside. I’m especially interested in one episode in the novel in which Brother has a dream in which he is Albert Wilkes on his way back to Pittsburgh after fleeing the town years earlier.  The train is consistently used in the novel to bring characters back to the city rather than leave it.  But despite the way the characters are confined, the novel spends a lot of its time bringing characters together and creating a community that sustains the neighborhood.

Across the Tracks

I guess my question about transportation was a bit leading.  I had a number of scenes from Wideman’s novel (Sent for You Yesterday) in mind at the time.  The train seems to play a lot of neat roles in the novel, namely confining the characters to the relatively small area in Homewood shown in the novel.  The tracks, in addition to the land’s geography, are a very real boundaries that separate the neighborhood from surrounding neighborhoods like Point Breeze and Shadyside.

I’m especially interested in one episode in the novel in which Brother has a dream in which he is Albert Wilkes on his way back to Pittsburgh after fleeing the town years earlier.  The train is consistently used in the novel to bring characters back to the city rather than leave it.  But despite the way the characters are confined, the novel spends a lot of its time bringing characters together and creating a community that sustains the neighborhood.