Bug Jack Barron is the tale of a muckraking talk show host who takes on a powerful, unscrupulous entrepreneur and gets more trouble than he bargained for. It is not much of a novel of character. The vivid images in the stream-of-consciousness soliloquies do not reveal character as much as they set mood and milieu. We do learn that Bennie Howards is a thoroughly nasty man, willing to do anything to attain his goals. Lucas Greene both enjoys his perks and power as the first black governor of Mississippi, and worries that he has sold out to the system by the very process of gaining power.

Other secondary characters merely act out their roles in the plot.

Only Jack Barron and his ex-wife Sara come across as more complex people. Their values were shaped in the counterculture of late 1960s Berkeley, which they both look back to as...