Farmer tells Chib's story through a dazzling series of puns, wordplay, and allusions, often interrupting the narrative with bizarre headlines — "Excretion Is the Bitter Part of Valor" — and equally strange "quotations" from such imaginary works as Grandpa's How I Screwed Uncle Sam and Other Private Ejaculations. The precedent for this literary extravagance is James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (1939). Joyce, the archetype of the rebellious artist in our era, sensed a deadening atmosphere of frustration and disintegration in modern society. His refuge (like Chib's) was in art, where he worked the most absolute and brilliant experimentation ever per-formed on the novel. Finnegan's Wake contains multiple levels of meaning in each word and jams several English and even foreign words into one. The result is a unique Joycean language that is a dismaying puzzle to some readers and soaring poetry to others. As well, Joyce...