In the opening pages of his latest novel, John Edgar Wideman directly addresses writer and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), whose brief life took him from Martinique and the crucible of French racism to colonial Algeria, where he worked as a military psychiatrist before joining the Algerian revolution. Best-known today for his damning indictment of the psychological effects of racism, Black Skin, White Masks, and his anti-colonial manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon remains a powerful and complicated black intellectual icon. But just as Wideman gets started with his book, he finds himself digressing. Unable to continue, he imagines an alter ego — an African-American creative-writing professor like himself, who, one fine day, receives a severed head in the mail. It's an ominous beginning, and a symbol of everything a "Fanon project" has come to mean for him.

This surreal scene is the first stop in a narrative that braids together places and people, both real and fictional. Wideman's own ailing mother encounters Fanon in a Maryland hospital. There's also a pitch session with Jean-Luc Godard for a film about Fanon's life and a moving conversation with the author's incarcerated brother. Anyone who's followed Wideman's (MacArthur-winning) career shouldn't be surprised that this is no dry biography — the amount of empathy, rage, and fluid prose packed between the covers is simply astonishing. Haunting every page, of course, is Fanon himself. Wideman constantly invokes him, but the enigmatic Antillean always seems just out of reach.

Wideman pays tribute to Fanon's own self-referential style in his willingness to immerse this story in so many others. Fanon was famous for transforming personal anecdotes, case studies, and literature into modern parables of race and identity — he disdained tidy debates in favor of passionately messy essays. Perhaps that's why Wideman constantly refers to this as his "Fanon project." A book might sound like something you could just up and be done with, but the questions that swirl throughout Fanon are as real and persistent as that head on the doorstep.

-Toby Warner