In this corner, weighing seven pots of gris-gris gumbo, the challenger, Ishmael Reed. And in that corner, weighing four ex-wives worth of alimony, the champion, Norman Mailer. Ding! The battle's on. Reed comes out swinging a mighty Papa LaBas roundhouse that goes over the head of Mailer, who is crouched and snarling like the Devil. Now Mailer swings an O'Shaughnessy uppercut that misses Reed's chin by an Erzuli hair. Reed counters with an iron-fisted Ogun jab that just grazes Mailer's Jehovah-cocked ear. Look out, now Mailer's really pressing the fight with some fast and flashy Marilyn Monroe footwork, but Reed hasYou can invent the rest for yourself, reader. What puzzles me is that the bookselling machine has not yet exploited the natural, built-in, box office potential of lshmael Reed. The star-making system was practically invented to sell books and records and movies, and here they have this lively contender for the crown, and what are they doing? 1
Even the most casual reader of lshmael Reed's novels is aware that Reed is a formal gamesman. His prose is pun-packed and grooves to a variety of jazz rhythms; exuberant parody abounds in his fiction; the cinema informs his scene changes, which occur in quick-splice fashion; a metafictional impulse plays through his tales; and purposeful anachronism penetrates his reader's defenses. Published between 1967 and 1976, Reed's five novels-The Free-Lance Pallbearers, Yellow Back Radio BrokeDown, Mumbo Jumbo, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, and Flight to Canada-shatter the mold of traditional Black American fiction in a manner anticipated by Ralph Ellison in his 1952 novel Invisible Man: Realism, seriousness, and the engage give way to surrealism and pointed, often hyperbolic comedy and satire.But it is not Reed's formal pyrotechnics I wish to address in this essay so much as it is his thematic use of games and game imagery-especially as these motifs take shape in Flight to Canada, his most recent, and most polished, fictional creation.