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By LAURA MILLER John Edgar Wideman's life is as dramatic as any of his brooding, Faulknerian novels. Born in Pittsburgh to a black working-class family, he became an African-American golden boy — a Rhodes scholar and basketball star, as talented on the court as he was brilliant in the classroom, and the subject of a 1963 Look magazine article titled "The Astonishing John Wideman." As a boy, he planned to leave his background behind for a dazzling future as a novelist, academic and intellectual, but family and politics intervened. Wideman came to see the complex problems of African-American life as inescapable. His brother, Robby, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison (the victim was killed by Robby's partner in a robbery) in 1976. Wideman's struggle to come to terms with his brother's deeds and their consequences became the subject of his memoir, "Brothers and Keepers." Then, in 1986, his own 16-year-old, mixed-race son stabbed and killed a classmate during a field trip. Articles that subsequently appeared in Vanity Fair and Esquire indicated the boy had long been emotionally troubled and characterized Wideman as filled with controlled racial anger. Wideman's newest novel, "The Cattle Killing," however, seems far less angry than tragic and soberly inclusive. A challenging, often impressionistic fiction set during an infamous yellow fever epidemic in 1793 Philadelphia, it traces the path of an itinerant preacher and other blacks who pitched in to nurse the disease's victims, only to be blamed for the plague and massacred later. "The Cattle Killing" weaves together the voices of blacks and whites, men and women, all well-intentioned, all flawed, all struggling to avoid being sucked into the vortex of America's racial animosities. Wideman's potent, lyrical voice picks up strands of Shakespeare and Poe, as well as more ancient storytelling traditions. The title refers to a disastrous prophecy visited upon the Xhosa people, an African tribe who were convinced that they could rid their land of Europeans if they killed off their sole resource, their cattle. Wideman spoke with Salon during the book tour for "The Cattle Killing." Next: The sure path of self-destruction.