Jujitsu for Christ, with its characters, setting, and concerns, must certainly be classified as a "Southern novel," and its author therefore as a "Southern writer." The designation, however, no longer necessarily means the same thing it used to mean when applied to Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and the others whose works Butler has referred to as "our grand canon." The South, and Southern writing, have moved out of themselves and more into the broader world. And that world has penetrated into the South: both have become more like each other. As Marcus, as narrator, observes in Jujitsu for Christ, "America is Mississippi now.

You don't think it is? You wrong."

Nevertheless, Butler's fiction has deeply ingrained in it those elements that in the past have been thought to characterize Southern writing: the distinctive voices, the peculiar ways the people speak; the ponderous...