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Reed spares precious few of his brothers and sisters. (He even offers a veiled suggestion that Angela Davis is the modern equivalent of the stern black mama figure trying to shape up her offspring in the absence of a father.) A minister named the Rev. Rookie is replaced by a Moog synthesizer; Maxwell Kasa-vubu, a button-down black literary critic, hallucinates that he is Richard Wright's illiterate murderer Bigger Thomas. Reed even brings back those veteran moochers from Amos 'n' Andy, the Kingfish and Andrew H. Brown, now trying to cash in on the street-corner Hindu racket. "Andy," says the Kingfish, "I think it's about time we went into the Karmel bizness."
Reed himself admits that he has more in common with Calvin Coolidge than with Dionysus. Bacchanalian plots and extended riffs of funky prose scarcely disguise the conservative folksiness within. Born in Chattanooga and raised in Buffalo, Reed had an early ambition to become a concert violinist. His writing talent surfaced at the University of Buffalo. One of his admirers is another musician-writer, the ranking wizard of experimental fiction, John Barth. After sampling the edges of New York literary life in the early '60s, Reed headed west to Berkeley where he teaches writing at the University of California and is a partner in a new publishing company that supports young talent.
He has obviously found the multicultural gumbo of California ideal for developing a fiction in which facts, academic speculations and just plain jive freely cohabit. The overall effect in Louisiana Red is thoroughly disarming. His approach to the novel is not unlike a Dixieland band's approach to music: a native American diversity that adds up to a unified style—authentic and endlessly fresh. -R.Z. Sheppard