Chappie Puttbutt, neoconservative black academic and protagonist of Japanese by Spring, is described as having reviewed an earlier Ishmael Reed novel with the remark, “For those looking for plot, character development, and logic, skip this one.” It must be admitted that Aristotle might be hard-pressed at times to recognize the logical progression of Reed's writing. The narrative tends to ramble in and out of extended didactic digressions on the virtues of linguistic pluralism, the wrongs supposedly done to Clarence Thomas, Japanese American trade conflicts, and almost every other issue of interest to the author. The plot speeds through more twists and turns than a Moroccan bus on a narrow road in the Atlas Mountains. Many of his characters are more caricatures than they are believable, three-dimensional individuals.

So why did I like the book so much? Part of the reason must be that Reed's enormous gift for social satire enables him to get away with breaking many of the normal rules of fiction. Chappie Puttbutt is recognizable as a composite of a number of contemporary black intellectuals: Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, William Julius Wilson. Puttbutt's chief goal in life is to receive tenure at Jack London College in Oakland, where he teaches courses in both the African American Studies department and in something called the “Humanity department” (Reed's renaming of the Eurocentric discipline known as “the humanities” is one of the little jokes scattered throughout the novel).

In order to get his tenure, the former sixties Black Panther (who used to wear an Afro “so big that once some blackbirds tried to make a nest in it”) will say or write anything that might please the academic establishment. In the eighties, when feminism was the defining ideology of academia, Puttbutt memorized Zora Neale Hurston and Sylvia Plath. Now, he has jumped on the anti-affirmative action bandwagon. He specializes in explaining why all of the problems of blacks in America are their own fault, and why blacks should play on the guilt of whites.

Always attentive to changes in the winds of power, Puttbutt is also studying Japanese in downtown Oakland with the mysterious Dr. Yamato. This proves to have been a wise move when the Japanese buy Jack London College and Dr. Yamato turns out to be something more than a simple language tutor. The tables are wittily turned as Japanese culture becomes the basis for the curriculum and the former Humanity department is relegated to “Ethnic Studies.”

The various strands of racism, militarism, nationalism, and Japanophobia that weave through the collective awareness of contemporary America all come together in Puttbutt's unlikely person. His father is an Air Force general who has fought in wars against Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, and who trumpets the virtues of the American military as “the most integrated institution in American life.” His mother is a CIA operative being held hostage in the Middle East. Chappie himself initially pursued his studies of the Japanese language at the Air Force Academy until, as a result of bizarre events related in several chapters that suddenly and unexpectedly jump back 20 years, he was expelled and turned to pacifism, as later frustrations push him to turn to neoconservatism, to a passion for things Japanese, and finally to revolt against Japanese takeover. Reed's central character is an American Everyman, a child of wars hot and cold with opinions that change as often as the figures in the Gallup Polls.

Reed's unorthodox style of storytelling is also bolstered by the author's playful erudition and broad intellectual scope. When he himself appears in the novel to give a lecture at Jack London College, Reed the narrator says of Reed the character, “The topic merely provided a theme on which his mind could improvise, sort of like a jazz musician stating a song and then dancing around it elliptically.” In the course of his elliptical dancing through this novel, the author steps into knowledgeable discussions of Afrocentrism, the English Only movement, Jack London's racism, the debate over multiculturalism, Yoruba mythology, and a host of other topics.

This digressive, hyperkinetic stream of opinion is a descendent of the jazz-influenced spontaneous prose of the Beats. The spontaneity lends it a sense of breathless excitement, particularly when expressed by a writer as nimble and knowledgeable as Ishmael Reed. The chief danger of Beat spontaneous prose, though, was a tendency to get so wrapped up in the flow of writing and thinking as to lose the overall form of a piece of literature.

It is this loss of overall form, rather than the winding plot or unlikely characters, that constitutes the primary flaw of Japanese by Spring. Dancing around a theme is fine, so long as one retains the theme as a center. But Reed seems unable to decide, in this book, whether he wants to write a novel or an essay. The author's wide-ranging ideas make the individual passages of the book appealing to readers, but the ideas tend to get out of control, take over the book, and weaken its coherence as fiction. Reed's formidable intelligence gets the better of his artistic sensibilities.

Toward the end, the author appears to abandon fiction as a vehicle for his thinking. In the epilogue, Puttbutt disappears altogether, replaced by Ishmael Reed, who has moved from playing one of the minor characters in the book to occupying center stage. The last 20 pages lapse into a series of disjointed meditations, similar to journal entries, on the subject of cultural pluralism in America and in the world.

In spite of the novel's structural flaws, though, Japanese by Spring is an intelligent, funny, insightful book. Such an opinionated work is bound to contain something to provoke almost every reader. Many will find Reed's antifeminist tirades objectionable. But fairness, after all, is not necessarily a property of satire, and this is a witty, biting satire that takes on some of the biggest issues in contemporary academia and world affairs. Don't skip this one.