Though not recognized as an experimental author, John Edgar Wideman is one of the most demanding writers in America today. His novels, and even his short stories, are part of a densely woven conversation, one that depends on the reader’s knowledge of Mr. Wideman’s past books and his biography. It’s a one-sided conversation, and often less than involving. But even readers who sometimes wonder if Mr. Wideman lets the sound of his voice carry too many verbose passages, will admit that few novelists believe in the power of writing as he does.

And Mr. Wideman’s biography makes his writing more powerful still. Two facts trump all others. First, Mr. Wideman’s brother is serving a life sentence, for a murder committed during a bungled robbery; this is mentioned in “Brothers and Keepers.” Second, as is hinted in other books, Mr. Wideman’s youngest son is also in prison, for murder, committed as a minor, at a summer camp.

Searing, and for many readers incomprehensible, these two facts join Mr. Wideman’s diligent engagement with racism to create a seriousness — in many instances a bitterness — that shades all of his recent work, even when it is at its most playful, full of self-conscious puns and metafictional conceits. In fact, he calls wordplay “a common symptom of aftershock,” drawing a connection between his style and his deadly serious subject matter.

Initiates to Mr. Wideman’s self-interested monologues will not be surprised to learn that his new novel, “Fanon” (Houghton Mifflin, 288 pages, $24), has less to do with the radical philosopher Frantz Fanon than its packaging would make you think.

As a more conventional book about the subject might tell you, in good order, Frantz Fanon was born in francophone Martinique in 1925. He cut short his studies there with the great poet Aimé Césaire to travel to France and join the Allied forces in the war against Nazi Germany. After the armistice, Fanon studied psychiatry and became a leading theoretician of black identity and, in particular, the psychic costs of colonialism. He is a hero to many interested in postcolonial theory insofar as he put his philosophy to the test of action, organizing resistance to French rule during the Algerian War. Fanon eventually advocated a united Third World revolution in Africa, but died of leukemia, in 1961, before he had a chance to see what form postcolonial Africa took.

The irony that Fanon had once served in the French army he now organized against is the sort that Mr. Wideman likes to draw out, and he does so here, tracing Fanon’s attempt to establish a supply line between Mali and Algeria, traveling by Range Rover in search of forgotten Bedouin trade routes, thus opening up a second, Southern Front. The story, though, is only tentatively imagined: “Riding shotgun, bouncing, shaking in the lead truck driven by Comandante Chawkwi, Frantz Fanon is thinking the thoughts above or similar thoughts it’s my duty, my mission, my folly to represent.”

Anxieties over writing about Fanon are not new to Mr. Wideman. A story in his recent collection, “God’s Gym” (2005), also titled “Fanon,” addressed the idea that Fanon, an illiberal critic of miscegenation, would not have liked Mr. Wideman’s own interracial marriage.

In the new novel, however, Mr. Wideman’s angst becomes the subject of timely parody. Indeed, with “Fanon,” Mr. Wideman is brilliantly daring the reader to disapprove of a middle-class African-American’s identification with a Third World revolutionary. He begins the novel’s first section, “A Letter to Frantz Fanon,” with a comic instinct for class situations: “I’m sitting with the last of a glass of red wine in the small garden of a small house in Brittany,” he writes. The author invites us to roll our eyes. At other moments, he makes pointed reference to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to the tsunami of 2004, and to Hurricane Katrina, all the time heightening the contrast between himself and the world-historical territory of a Fanon.

Mr. Wideman softens the effect by disclosing that the author is not exactly himself — he is sometimes a man named Thomas, an author as well, who is merely trying to write a book about Fanon. But as the book gathers speed, Thomas gives way to Mr. Wideman’s signature themes — he recalls visits to his brother in jail, and re-creates his elderly mother’s life in Homewood, near Pittsburgh.

In its final third, “Fanon” finally starts spending most of its time with Fanon. But Mr. Wideman’s self-parody also intensifies. The author notes that Fanon first crossed the Atlantic on a ship called the Oregon, and pounces on this detail like a desperate English major grasping at straws.

Check it out. Oregon, the name of the troopship on which Fanon crossed the Atlantic, is also the name of one of the states of the United States of America. [. . .] Oregon not only identifies how and where Fanon’s journey commences, Oregon foreshadows where it terminates.

And yet Mr. Wideman also makes more room in these final pages for his brother, whose presence goes against the grain of parody, lending the author the same moral authority he seems desperate to discard. Throughout “Fanon,” it is the familiar presence of Mr. Wideman’s family that slows the reader down, arresting us with their lived-in fullness. But it is the sly portrayal of a middle-class American author’s sketchy relationship to the likes of Frantz Fanon that makes this book stand out in Mr. Wideman’s ongoing conversation with himself.

blytal@nysun.com