Drop.

Drop by Mat Johnson Bloomsbury Publishing, October 2000 $23.95, ISBN 1-582-34104-4

Drop is a hip, contemporary morality tale set on two continents. The novel is at times predictable, but the language is so alive, crispy-fresh and musical that you will find yourself reading aloud. "Bring-Bring me somewhere lovely where people are so alive you can hear their pulses bump-bumping as they pass you on the street," whines Chris Jones. He is a victim of the Philly ghetto who would sell his soul to escape his fate. He does manage an escape by "pimping perfection" to the public as a top young creative wizard, putting a London advertising agency on the map.

Chris' savior is David, a substance-abusing has-been in the London advertising field who has sense enough to know his dying black agency has promise. However, Chris and David's co-dependent relationship must flow to its inevitable, destructive end before Chris can learn to be the man he was meant to be.

Johnson deviates from the norm in contemporary black popular fiction. His prose is fast-paced and funny, displaying a full range of black experience from the inner-city homeless to the spiritually colonized Nigerian Londoners, who tell slavery jokes while they eat. Drop is about self-love and running away only to be forced back to confront the demands left behind.

Jiton S. Davidson is a novelist and the publisher of FYAH, an online literary magazine (www.fyah.com).