With two novels already published and two more in progress, Charles Richard Johnson has already established himself as a significant new writing talent. Despite a fair amount of commercial success, he is one of the few contemporary young Afro-American novelists whose work is not, according to one critic, trendy or opportunistic and who continues to enrich contemporary American literature with each new fictional work. Johnson was barely twenty-six, already a well-known political cartoonist and journalist, when his first novel was published. His shift in careers was not so much a change in direction as a culmination of the skills and resources he had available to him.

Both his published novels present the objective world of the Afro-American experience, but subject that world to many different levels of interpretation. Johnson's novels are fascinating, unusual, and often difficult to comprehend. He has not limited himself to one particular school or...