A Glance Away

Description for A GLANCE AWAY by John Edgar Wideman:

In this work John Wideman, who won the 1984 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, explores the basic theme of our failure to understand one another. The two central characters are both "outsiders," but of radically different sorts. Eddie Lawson, a young black man, has returned to his home in a small city after a year spent kicking drug addiction. Robert Thurley is a middle-aged college professor obsessed by his homosexuality, his incipient alcoholism, and his memories of a domineering mother and an unhappy marriage. Skillfully interweaving the two life stories, Wideman brings the men to confrontation in a smoky Dostoevskian tavern with dramatic and surprising results: the assuagement of guilt in one, the restoration of human dignity to the other. The action of the book take place in one day, but it presents the lives of it s characters in far-ranging depth.