Alice Randall is a literary celebrity, famous - or infamous - for her attempt to re-tell Gone With the Wind in her parody/revisionist novel The Wind Done Gone.

Her new novel, Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, is less a parody than an attempt at exploding black stereotypes. Blacks, she suggests, can be just as brilliantly complex, neurotic and eccentric as everyone else.

How else could one explain the black NFL linebacker named Pushkin X (named after Alexander Pushkin and Malcolm X, respectively) who jokes with lines from Chaucer? Or his mother, the Detroit-born scholar of Afro-Russian literature who re-writes Russian lyric poetry in hip-hop style? (The 39-page poem appears near the end of the novel.)

If these characters seem unlikely, well, so does the historical Pushkin, great grandson to an African slave in Russia and revolutionary Russian poet. That's probably Randall's point. She implicitly asks the question: "Why do we have trouble believing in African-American characters like these?"

Randall sets out to answer these questions by tracing the lives of her characters, especially the scholar of Afro-Russian literature.

The path Windsor Armstrong (what a name for a woman) takes is remarkably close to that of Randall herself. Some might wonder if the semiautobiographical nature is meant as a kind of apology for the controversial The Wind Done Gone.

In any case, Windsor moves out of Detroit when her mother leaves her father, and she and her mother end up in Washington, D.C. There, she is enrolled in a prep school and makes preppy white friends. She makes it into Harvard and, after earning her academic lumps, eventually lands tenure at a university in Nashville.

Many of the characters in her life are stereotypes. Her mother, for example, is a stereotype of the self-hating black who adopts white culture wholesale. Her mother always sends Windsor the message that she, Windsor, is worthless because she is black.

In fact, just before leaving for Harvard, Windsor becomes pregnant and chooses to carry the child to term. There is some suspicion that her mother is complicit in her becoming pregnant (more information would be a plot spoiler), as a means of subconsciously fulfilling the prophecy.

So much of understanding this novel is about politics and sociology, it becomes difficult to spend words on the storytelling.

The setup is fine: An intellectual black mother who had academic ambitions for her son has to deal with who he has become: an NFL star who is engaged to a white immigrant lap dancer from Russia.

She feels, among other things, that he has betrayed everything she has taught him. Horror of horrors, in her mind, he has reverted to a stereotype: "My son was some kind of strange blend of high and low. I kept waiting for the pieces to separate."

It's all interesting enough, but there are problems with the way these facts are related.

At first the tale appears to be a first-person narrative, told as from Windsor's journal. Later, it appears to be an extended letter from Windsor to her son. It jumps back and forth, as if Randall had forgotten which it was. (Is this by design, or did Windsor actually forget what she was attempting?) The timeline skips and jumps all over the place, as does the voice.

Sometimes the voice is folksy and filled with expletives. Sometimes it's highbrow, with gratuitously academic references thrown in:

"I'm still waiting for Gabriel (her husband). Waiting for Gabriel is something I like doing. It's a lot better than waiting for Godot. Gabriel will arrive."

Sometimes it seems like a salad of one-liners and clichés; sometimes it's beautifully poetic.

In this passage, Windsor reflects on her grandmother's hillbilly father. Her grandmother was named "Dear.":

". . . I have something to hang against the sins of white folks: Dear's white daddy got down on his knees and taught his brown daughter to tie her shoes with a rhyme about rabbit ears and rabbits chasing each other around, under, and over a hedge. He was a patient teacher with a way of getting and keeping his pupil's attention. So much depends upon a gesture, a gift of teaching. He taught her to tie her shoes and blow her nose.

"On this act of mercy I will build my grace."

Then of course, there's that long hip-hop paean to Pushkin at the end, entitled "The Negro of Peter the Great" after a poem of the same name by Pushkin. Here's a sample from the end of the second stanza:

"Pushkin's mama's daddy's daddy / Pushkin's great-grandpappy / In the genealogy of you, in the genealogy of me / Preeminent will be the eminent Russky / Pushkin the O.G." Earlier, "O.G." is defined as "Original Gangster".

It's hard to get that one.

Like some of the gambling gangster characters from Detroit that Randall describes, she bets long odds on Pushkin and the Queen of Spades.

While she wins big on courage, audacity, wit, heart and talent, she loses almost as big on disorganization, gratuitousness and inaccessibility.

Eric J. Blommel is a freelance writer living in Centennial.

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