In the following excerpt, Kenan discusses the manner in which Wideman manipulates time in "Fever."

Like present-day cosmologists, Wideman seems to have in mind not merely a blurring of the two concepts [Time and Space] but their elimination. He metajokes about our Western cultural bias toward "clock time, calendar time," to time "acting on us rather than through us" and "that tames space by manmade structures and with the I as center defines other people and other things by nature of their relationship to I rather than by the independent integrity of the order they may represent." Wideman's true mission appears to be to replace the I at the center of all his stories, to make it subject to an internal order of things rather than to external structures and limitations. Unlike Ishmael Reed, his humor does not slice to the bone to the truth; Wideman's humor...