Randy Jones is a melting pot on the brink of boiling over: trying and failing to fit into racial and cultural niches, hoping his shelves of spiritual and metaphysical books will keep him from caring. Acquaintances find that asking of his ethnic heritage is an invitation to embarrassment. Even his self-employment from home is partly a retreat from the stench of being misunderstood. Then the shampoo bottle speaks to him in the shower. With exotic yet primal assistance from a host of unusual characters, Randy's trials reveal the paradox of race's importance and unimportance. His plunge through the rabbit hole of race does for the cynical, feigned-integrated, postmodern mind what Huck Finn's did for the intractably segregated one.