Albert Einstein thought the "prettiest way" to get to the heart of certain concepts in physics was to think up good thought experiments. This seems as apt a method as any for illuminating the deep fissures of class and race at the heart of Jennifer Wynn's wrenching little book about the lives of Rikers Island inmates.

Imagine this scenario: The young Al Gore–who, we know from his own mouth, possessed and used illegal drugs on "rare and infrequent" occasions during the 70's–is living in the South Bronx in the 1990's. Strip him of his family and money and paint him another color; let him then be captured in a drug sweep by the police and accused of selling an ounce of marijuana–a prison offense. Alternative Al has the typical characteristics of a Rikers Island newbie: 92 percent of the Rikers population is black or Hispanic; one quarter can't afford, or can't find somebody else to put up, bail of $500 or less. The predominance of blacks and Hispanics in the system doesn't mean that whites never encounter the criminal-justice system–on the contrary. The large majority (71 percent) of under-18's arrested by the police are white, but even in that age group, the selection bias is tilted against minorities: apply the alchemy of the justice system, and two-thirds of the under-18's who actually end up in jail turn out to be black or Hispanic.

After Al exchanges the clothes he was arrested in for the Rikers greens worn by his 20,000 or so fellow inmates, he'll discover that he has an official commissary account with a $150 charge against it. He has to come up with that sum before he can purchase such luxuries as deodorant or cigarettes. If he leaves the island without paying it back, he can be arrested for it. However, he can discharge the debt with 10 weeks of menial labor. Mind you, at this point he hasn't been convicted of a crime–he's merely being detained for trial, like three-fourths of the Rikers population.

If, like the real Al Gore, our Albert has a problem disguising his own sense of superiority, he is going to have trouble with the guards. Enough of that and you are put in the torture chambers–or, to use the American euphemism, "solitary." In 1988, Rikers opened the Central Punitive Segregation Unit–the "Bing"–for storing the insolent, the ultra-violent and the psychos. These are the hard-core inmates who assault other inmates, "gas" the correctional officers (i.e., throw urine and feces on them) and, if the conditions are right and a sharpened chicken bone, shank or pen is handy, stab the C.O.'s, too. In the early 90's, the C.O.'s responded with overwhelming force. Ms. Wynn records conversations with one of the C.O.'s, "The Captain," who transferred out of the Bing before it was reorganized in 1995. Here's what happened to an inmate who stabbed an officer in the cheek with a pen: "The officers took the inmate into the receiving room and beat him with batons for fifteen minutes," The Captain told Ms. Wynn. "They were playing baseball with his face. Every bone in his face was broken. They did everything but make his brains come out of his ears." When they were done, "Everyone was covered with blood. Eight batons were broken. It made Rodney King look like kindergarten."

Rikers is much less violent now. In 1996, Commissioner Michael Jacobson decommissioned the old Bing. Inmate stabbings and slashings have dropped 90 percent from 1995 levels.

We imagine Al would be too smart to tangle with the Bing, anyway. If he keeps to a low frequency, does his stint right, he'll eventually be taken on a transport and dumped off in front of Twin Donuts on Queens Plaza at 4 a.m. This happens to 350 inmates a day. He'll have a $4.50 MetroCard in his hand, and he'll be wearing the clothes he was arrested in. If Al was nervous when he was arrested–and if he's like the real Al Gore, no doubt he'd have been upset at the police meanly misconstruing his sharing a baggie with a pal as some kind of sale of a controlled substance–and say he threw up, he'd be wearing clothes that reek of mildew and vomit. The Corrections Department certainly hasn't washed them in the interim.

This is from a "recidivism quiz" published in the inmate-written Rikers Review : "When you get off the bus on Queens Plaza, which of the following are you most likely to do? (A) Approach the nearest drug dealer; (B) Call home for a ride; (C) Grab a forty (a 40-ounce can of beer made with malt liquor) and drink it with your buddies; or (D) See if there's some female action in Twin Donuts."

If we look a little harder at the two universes revealed by our thought experiment, we find a deep moral paradox which complicates the choice Alternative Al has to make in Queens that morning. Remember that the real Al Gore, who openly confessed to violating the law, became our Vice President and then a professor at Columbia University–all without having to think too hard about his pot-smoking days. But what are the chances for Alternative Al? Even if, say, he could get accepted to Columbia as a student, it's unlikely he'd be able to attend, thanks to a change in the federal funding law made under the real Al Gore's watch. Alt Al's record of being caught and prosecuted for possession or sale of a controlled substance would make him ineligible for a year for "any grant, loan, or work assistance" under the Higher Education Act. Given his meager resources, the cost of living in New York and the amount of living you can do on a minimum-wage salary, that year-long wait could easily doom him. If you're caught once, you're caught again for being caught: Stigma piles on stigma. In the real Al's world, something like the opposite happens: Success breeds success.

Ms. Wynn has worked since the early 90's with Fresh Start, a rehabilitative program that sponsors classes in Rikers and develops jobs for inmates outside of Rikers. She has been on both ends of the Fresh Start program and has toured other New York prisons under the aegis of the Correctional Association. Her book branches into impressionistic accounts of what's happened to some of her clients over the last decade. There is a certain Newgate Calendar colorfulness to this crew: Frank, the crazy-looking recidivist who is arrested for a robbery he commits out of habit after he's landed a salaried position; Anthony, a Columbia student and heroin addict who got caught up in Rikers' methadone program; and 20 others. But the overall impression is, depressingly, much like what George Orwell once described as the image of totalitarianism at the end of 1984 : "imagine a boot stamping on a human face–forever."

Ms. Wynn is not an elegant or comprehensive writer, and she ignores large chunks of the Rikers Island experience–most notably sex. Although she strives to be nonpartisan, her style betrays her as the classical liberal. It's just not in her to condemn absolutely. This is the kind of thing that has driven the right-wing mind crazy since Eleanor Roosevelt was a pup: To conservatives, restraining one's moral judgment implies not having any. But this reviewer is satisfied that we have more than enough agencies, politicians and pundits out there willing to thunder condemnation. In the meantime, what happens? Three hundred and fifty new Angels, Dwaynes, Franks, Napoleons, Lynwoods, etc., have to hook up each day. Far better if they hook up with a Jennifer Wynn than with the blunt or the 40.

Roger Gathman has written for The American Scholar and In These Times.

Gao Xingjian trails a heavy aura of ex nihilo . Who is this guy? When he won the Nobel Prize–the first Chinese writer to do so–there was no guardian exegete, no Sontag, no Roth, no Kundera to provide us with a gloss on his cosmopolitan canonicity. His name doesn't register in Columbia University's definitive Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature , and even in a book published a month before he received the prize, Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century , the authors, an assembly of professors, mention him just once in 332 very dense pages.

Mr. Gao is the oddest Nobel winner since Elias Canetti (with the possible exception of the Italian clown, Dario Fo). Until he hit the Stockholm jackpot, our latest laureate was not paying the rent on his Paris apartment with any revenue stream deriving from his books; Mr. Gao was subsisting instead, in the true bohemian spirit, on the sales of his ink paintings.

In China, he's best known for the controversy that erupted around his play Bus Stop (1983). It's about a group waiting for a bus that never comes while the years allegorically elapse, and it's Godot-awful. Mr. Gao has written that the play was influenced by Beckett, but it reads more like juvenilia–you know, the kind of play that takes itself so seriously that the audience can't. Nevertheless, rump Maoist ideologues attacked the play for its defeatism, anti-socialist thought and unwarranted criticism of the great Chinese transportation system. The polemic was conducted in that inimitable hack-pack invective, forged during the Cultural Revolution, which gives the reader the sick feeling of a language somehow infected with rabies. It is a language which, in China, is quite literally a vector of death.

Mr. Gao astutely recused himself from the Beijing scene after the blowup. He'd already been sent to one labor camp during the Cultural Revolution. His plan was to travel around the less developed parts of China, lie low, hope that his name wouldn't attract attention. Like the English antiquarians of the late 17th century, seeking in fables and relics evidence of merrie olde England buried under the dour Protestant ascendancy, Mr. Gao found himself searching for something like merrie olde Cathay, a folk empire of shamans ( zhuhuapo ) and portents lying beneath the monuments of Communist dishonesty.

The resulting travel journal forms the heart of Soul Mountain . The story goes like this: Two unnamed men meet on a train going through a backwoods section of western China. One claims to be a journalist, headed for the Qinghai-Tibetan border, where he's going to gather folk customs and artifacts. The other, a middle-aged man of obvious literary inclinations, is intrigued by the journalist's mention of Lingshan, or Soul Mountain, and decides to visit it. The novel tracks the subsequent journeys of these two men–the journalist "I" tending eastward, through wilderness parks and small villages, toward the metropoles; our other narrator, represented by the second-person pronoun "you," enfolded in a slightly more abstract landscape, interminably questing for his mountain. This "you" is a grammatical boomerang, aimed not at the hypocrite lecteur (there's never any sense that Mr. Gao wants the reader to feel that he himself might be drafted for that second person) but returning, unerringly, to sender. The "you," in other words, must be taken as a deviated "I," the self talking to itself, ego to alter ego, as it does in the secret diary we keep in our heads.

The first person's share of the book is less murky. It consists of that string of anecdotal addenda, that absorption into local histories, which are the joy of the travel book. The great set pieces here arise around some fortuitously discovered remnant of old custom, especially among China's tribal peoples–the Yi, the Qiang, the "clever and intelligent" Jiangsu, the Miao. Mr. Gao (or rather Gao–let's drop the honorific to distinguish the character from the author) attends a Miao festival in which the village girls, lining a river bank, holding hands, sing seductively to the village boys at twilight. He finds an old Daoist priest who brings him to a small village and, to the delight of the villagers, treats him to a concert first of magical songs and then, as the night and the liquor take hold, bawdy ones. This episode is interrupted, typically, when an official Party pooper, the village cadre (who happens also to be the priest's son), breaks up this superstitious assembly. Gao runs into forest rangers with stories about the poaching of tigers and pandas, and old scientists worried about the imminent environmental catastrophe about to be visited upon the Yangtze River by the government in the form of the Three Gorges Dam. Gao is especially on the lookout for any stories about the Wild Man, a mythical hominid offshoot that, like Bigfoot, seems to flash into view in isolated backwoods areas only when there are no recording instruments around. Upon this creature, living in the cracks and niches left by civilization, Gao projects all his nostalgia for barbarism, his dream of a life outside the totalitarian Chinese system.

"You" and "I" appear in alternate chapters. The chapters that feature the second person are more lyrical and hornier: "You" is a puritanical cocksman, continually shocked by the wantonness of his conquests, a string of desperate country girls and married vamps. An amusing irony–and sometimes not so amusing, as when the fine line between irony and sexism is callously crossed.

Both of these figures represent Gao Xingjian divvied up, reflecting fundamental Daoist beliefs about the dissolution of duality in an ultimate unity. Daoism, like Christianity, has generated a class of images that have been used in Chinese literature and arts over the millennia. For the non-initiated Western reader, however, a lack of familiarity with the symbology isn't going to detract much from the pleasure of the text. There's nothing inscrutable or particularly esoteric about Mr. Gao's mindset: He is that familiar figure in 20th-century literature, an intellectual disenchanted with all systems of belief–the disenchantment a byproduct of the killing state machinery that has been brought to bear to coerce belief.

Mr. Gao is one of those people to whom Baudelaire was referring when he wrote: "but the true voyagers are only those who depart / for the sake of departure." His fellow travelers are such figures as Bruce Chatwin and W. G. Sebald: Wunderkammer writers, curators of curiosa. Mr. Gao is a less consistently intelligent writer than either of those two. His great talent is for pictorial pathos, conjuring, in a few brush strokes, scenes of a disproportionately affecting intensity. At one point Gao approaches a boy fishing on the shore of Lake Caohai and gets stuck up to his knees in the mud. The boy runs off, leaving him stranded, unable to move: "On the lonely lake, even the aquatic birds have gone. The dazzling surface of the water imperceptibly grows hazy, twilight emanates from the reeds and the cold rises from underfoot. I am chilled all over, there are no cicadas chirping, no frogs croaking. Can this possibly be the primitive loneliness devoid of all meaning I seek?"

The forces at work here are amassed in a slightly off-balance way, with the irresistible, immense forces of nature–water, night and cold–poised against the small, ridiculous human figure, given, as it were, in a foreground corner of the entire visual field, like the legs of Icarus in Brueghel's famous painting. There's a tradition in Chinese painting of the master painter becoming one with the painting: The T'ang painter Wu Tao-tzu, according to legend, disappeared into the mist of one of his own landscape paintings. Gao's momentary, absurd plight–actually being sucked into the sensuous texture of the pictorial field–is like the parodic verso of Wu Tao-tzu's recto: the artist too clumsy to escape from his own picture. But whether you like Mr. Gao's work depends, I think, on your feeling about that final sentence, which hovers just on the edge of preciosity. It has to work–as it does indeed work for me–as a sort of quavering flute note over the

silence of the cicadas and frogs, breathing on what would otherwise be a completely closed scene, shaking its very composed surface, rendering it at once less beautiful and more human, and bringing us back, with a tug, to the awkward, the imperfect, the living.

Roger Gathman has written for The Economist , The American Scholar and Green Magazine .