Ishmael Reed's new novel, Flight to Canada, is high and wild comedy, sometimes funny, too often forced, acknowledging a painful life, but not deriving from it…. The time is the Civil War, but the jokes are contemporary—jokes about history, religion, education and politics, which are merely okay; and literary jokes which are better by inches….

Reed's central literary joke is also his most sober point: the impossibility of escape (flight) from bondage except by way of oneself; and the attendant conception of North (Canada) as heaven. Writers of black fiction have been dealing with both ideas since the turn of the century, with Walter White's Flight in the '20s and Wright's crucial chapter ("Flight") of Native Son, and countless versions of "Exodus." In a state of slavery, ancient or modern, the problem is not whether to flee, but where. The so-called "great" migration North changed nothing...