Two Cities: A Love Story.

• Author: Bakopoulos, Dean

Two Cities: A Love Story by John Edgar Wideman Houghton Mifflin. 256 pages. $24.00.

John Edgar Wideman is a master of the musical narrative. His words wail like the blues, echo like gospel hymns, and float like melancholy jazz grooves.

In his latest novel, Two Cities: A Love Story, Wideman writes with anger and fire about Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. At the same time, the novel is a pensive exploration of love and hope amid chaos and fear.

Two Cities does not have a strong linear plot. The three voices of the narrators eyewitnesses to the difficulties of life in poor neighborhoods controlled by gangs, form the book's loose structure.

The novel tells the story of Kassima, a woman who has lost two sons and a husband to the violence of Pittsburgh's Homewood neighborhood. She now lives alone except for an eccentric old boarder named Mallory. Kassima, on an impulsive quest for a one-night stand, meets Robert Jones, a middle-aged, gentle, quiet man.

What follows is a passionate relationship burdened with obstacles: The grieving Kassima fears falling in love with one more man she may lose to the fighting on the streets. Jones breaks through this fear. But Kassima flees the relationship after watching Jones get involved in an altercation with a gun-wielding gang member during a neighborhood pick-up basketball game.

The novel then moves into a bluesy interlude--beautiful, somber meditations on the urban crisis told in the voices of Kassima, Jones, and Mallory. Wideman deftly links the pasts of these three main characters. In the hands of a lesser stylist, Two Cities would fail as a novel because of its thin plot and rapidly shifting points of view. But in Wideman's accomplished hands, Two Cities becomes a wise and eloquent story of lives torn asunder. At the novel's end, Wideman juxtaposes a truly horrific incident of gang violence with a moment of hope and grace brought about by Kassima, Jones, and Mallory.

Of the three narrators in Two Cities, Jones is the least fleshed out. His past is a murky memory and his present is not well-defined. Scarred by racism and violence, Jones longs to find something in his love for Kassima, but as a character he never fully develops.

On the other hand, Kassima is a multidimensional and finely drawn character, a modern-day Job. Her sorrows underscore the tragedy occurring in our nation's cities. "Can they help it, can they do better? 'Course...