MIDDLE PASSAGE by Charles Johnson (Plume:...

MIDDLE PASSAGE by Charles Johnson (Plume: $8.95). Johnson won the National Book Award for this picaresque novel about a most unusual freedman’s journey on an illegal slave ship. Rutherford Calhoun, an unrepentant liar, lecher, petty thief and gambler, flees New Orleans in 1830 to escape an array of debts and the formidably virtuous woman who wants to marry him. He embarks on a stormy, improbable voyage aboard the not-so-good ship Republic, where he encounters mutinous white sailors, a tribe of African sorcerers and their terrifying god. The numerous anachronisms and tongue-in-cheek humor Johnson uses to leaven this otherwise grim journey recalls James Branch Caball’s “Jurgen,” but the reprehensible yet appealing Calhoun, who manages to puncture the dignity of white capitalists and blacks who aspire to be too much like them, represents a unique addition to American fiction.