Intermittently "Riddley Walker" brings to mind books by several contemporary authors—Anthony Burgess's "The Clockwork Orange," John Gardner's "Grendel," the complete works of William Golding. But in vision and execution this is an exceptionally original work, and Russell Hoban is actually his own best source…. [He] has earned his living principally as an author of children's books (among them such classics as "Charlie the Tramp" and "Bread and Jam for Frances"), and the authority and ease with which he explores the interior of Riddley's pre-adolescence derive in part from this extended experience in imagining youthful minds. The theme of flight in this book is more complex than anything I'm aware of in Mr. Hoban's earlier novels, but his fictional studies of comic and romantic truancy in "Kleinzeit" … and "Turtle Diary" … are now clearly recognizable as preparations for the bolder experiment at hand.

The book has flaws, inevitably, chief...