Butler's fiction offers three attractive and fruitful areas for discussion: plot; form and technique; and characters. In Jujitsu for Christ especially, the plot should provoke spirited discussion of questions involving the civil rights movement and its continuing legacy, as well as broader questions having to do with race relations, the role of religion in society, and other problematical areas. As far as form and technique are concerned, investigation of the relationship of the author to his work and his apparent relative presence in it or absence from it can be conducted on a fairly sophisticated level of inquiry.

The identity of the narrator as it is gradually revealed can be an intriguing puzzle for many readers. (It is said that in a book club discussion of Jujitsu for Christ the reviewer began her remarks by saying that she was certain of two things about the author...