But thanks to Ducky, Asel does not get to fulfill his fate, and instead careens from one unfortunate circumstance to another, getting double-crossed at every turn, making friends, stumbling onto enemies, and moving ever-westward, despite all his best intentions, until he ends up, as we always knew he would, face-to-face with Jackie Cee in the tree-palaces of Sekwoyah Heights.

It's amusing stuff, this, though not quite amusing enough to sustain 244 pages, no matter how breezy. Fifty pages in, we understand exactly what Barrett is up to -- we've had plenty of time with the devolved English that mangles every noun into a near-miss of its contemporary incarnation, we've realized that the world of the novel is one of corporate feudalism, and we've admired the fertility of Barrett's imagination. Yee haw, good fun. But a third of the way through, a question nags: What's the point?

The structure is picaresque: something happens and then something else and then something else. There's an element of quest, though the nature of the quest is as unclear as in anything Kafka wrote. The tone is satirical (think Candide), but gently so. The characters are cartoons. The ending could be that of Samuel Johnson's eighteenth-century novel Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, which sports the description, "The Conclusion, in Which Nothing is Concluded."

The problem with The Prince of Christler-Coke is that its first third is tremendously entertaining, funny, and fascinatingly odd -- but the novel doesn't get any more entertaining, funny, or odd than that. It is no sin for a story of this sort not to have characters and a plot that develop over the course of the narrative, but it is a problem if the events and settings of the book don't display richer and richer imagination, if the satire doesn't deepen, if the reader is left with the sense that nothing will be gained by continuing to read.

Neal Barrett, Jr. has not gotten the credit he deserves for being as fine a writer as he is (see his other book from Golden Gryphon Press, the short story collection Perpetuity Blues), but Prince of Christler-Coke is unfortunately mediocre, particularly for as fine a writer as Barrett, who could have written a brilliant short story from this material. Alas, he decided to write a novel.