I find myself with a troublesome voice sounding off warnings about what I should and should not say about Ishmael Reed's new novel, The Terrible Twos. And I wonder to what extent that voice is a phantom of white liberal guilt I thought I had exorcised.

Exorcism is a good place to begin with Reed. He is the darling of a number of new fiction critics who see him as the all-purpose literary necromancer, the black shaman who conjures vital new myths against the backdrop of the dead carcass of white western aesthetics. This version of Reed as the juju man incanting powerfully pyrotechnic amulets called "words" to rouse us from our cultural decadence is itself a bit moribund. Reed's powers—and I am speaking here of the literary rather than the hierophantic—have been on the wane for quite some time. Like Kurt Vonnegut, he began as...