Before you set out on any voyage, you better damn well know if you’re running from, or going to. The outlook makes all the difference, and the risk for disappointment, disillusionment or even danger doubles if you’re not sure, or didn’t really think about it. It takes only one verb and a preposition to change the course of a life and when you are a woman like Christine, the designated “Oreo” of Fran Ross’s 1974 novel, then your entire life’s journey, in your mind and on the road, becomes an act of figuring that voyage out. At the core of such a journey must be a mystery, left by her cryptic father about her birth, that she is compelled to solve. Answers never come to you unless you seek them out, which usually means somebody goes on a trip. And why not, since journeys are about discoveries, and if all you encountered is what you already knew, then you might have travelled, but you didn’t really leave.

The quest – that most male of missions – is to find herself, that most metaphysical of missions. But Christine is a black woman on a mission to find her whiteness, a bold contrast to the far more celebrated race book of the time, Alex Haley’s Roots. Maybe a black woman finding herself in whiteness was one of those things that people would have said ain’t nobody got time for. But Oreo is in its own time. More than that, there are so many of us like Christine, mixed-race kids who search for whiteness not because they want to be white, but more often than not because that is the side of the family cut off from them. The absent daddy is white, inverting the common and stubbornly persistent myth of the absent black father, while reinforcing the truth that the white parent of the non-white kid was more often missing in action too. And even if he was present, the rest of his kin were so absent that family still became a mystery.

It’s a novel that reads as the smartest and wildest conversation you’ve ever had

This is why Christine has to go. To leave. To search. To embark on a voyage full of the thrilling, the saddening, the fantastical and the ridiculous, but the kind of voyage where there is never any return. Perhaps this is why Ross had, and has, so few peers. Few writers wanted to go where she wanted to go, and just about none wanted to get there her way. Add to that the rise of the black power and the black arts movements, and her novel – where identity was never a declared absolute – would be one that not many in these movements would have wanted to read (good luck getting past the connotations of the title). It raises the spectre that haunts any person who code-shifts: that in trying to negotiate between two identities, you end up never fully being one or the other, and rejected by both. But the book pulls it off because of its relentless postmodernness, and the fun Ross clearly had writing it. That’s pretty rare too, the work of fiction that reflects the enjoyment the writer had in creating it.

Is it a picaresque? It screams for a Terry Gilliam film travelogue directed by Jacques Tati, or the wizened, satiric eye of Jordan Peele. Even then the novel’s pleasures are too deep, too obscure, too novelish to make it to the screen intact. Oreo remains in flux; it cribs from The Odyssey, and the myth of Theseus, but has no concern for wrapping things up neatly. Hybridity is never neat anyway, since it is both merger and crash. Ross knows that “mixed” is never fixed. There are times in the novel where Christine is 100% black, other times 50%, and other times 25%. And because in this context mix is a verb as much as it is a noun, in any given situation, any identity can rise to the top. And just as quickly retreat, as Ebonics gives way to Yiddish. Or facts give way to gossip, or even narrative gives way to theory, so that a page can look like a table last seen on the blackboard in a chemistry class, rather than in a novel.

This all sounds like a horrendous bore. And yet at all times Oreo buzzes with whip-smart comic ferocity. The book is just goddamn funny. Its most wildly discursive turns are still delivered with a smartass wink, just one degree short of too clever for its own good, meaning just clever. Oreo laughs in the face of the American one-drop ideal of whiteness that produces Oreos in the first place. It revels in yet mocks its own hybridity, and that of the characters. It pulls off the unique trick of slapping white supremacy in the face, while never letting go of the ideal of (and the desire for) whiteness itself.

But what do we do with a novel like Oreo? Back in 1974, the answer was nothing. It vanished before the year was even out, and Fran Ross never wrote another one. When her only novel reappeared in 2015, it was still too far ahead of its time. Yes, Frances Delores Ross was finally taking her rightful place among the great black satirists, and the great 70s fabulists. Yet if satire and mythmaking were all Oreo had going for it, readers wouldn’t have felt as if a great missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle finally snapped into place. That for all its bells and whistles – and the novel is crowded with both – readers could see themselves in it. The belated, though thunderous acclaim was both well deserved and bittersweet. You can’t escape wondering, when you’ve finished this novel, what the landscape of literature would have looked like had she been given her due. Instead, the few magazines that bothered to review her, such as Esquire, were left bewildered by the same kind of sentences that entranced them when they came from Thomas Pynchon, or Joseph Heller.

Maybe, had more people read Oreo, it would have blown wide open all that we have come to expect from so-called metafiction. Primarily because metafiction has always been looked on as a white man’s game and still is, despite the continuing output of novelists such as Chris Abani, Jeanette Winterson and Percival Everett. And if not just a white man’s game, it was certainly a playground for only men. John Gardner, in The Art of Fiction, spends some serious time reckoning with the metafictioners, and boils down the very essence of this kind of fiction to one phrase – jazzing around.

Jazzing around takes a special genius, in which the ability to plan plays hardly any part. It requires inexhaustible imagination … and the taste to know when the magic isn’t quite good enough. The two gifts, one extraordinarily childlike, the other highly sophisticated and mature, almost never show up in one person.

But they did show up in one person. For Oreo is nothing if not jazzing around, and not just because of its incredible rhythm, or constantly surprising turns that recall improvisation, or because it is indeed extraordinarily childlike but highly sophisticated. The novel’s constant dialectical tension recalls jazz itself. Free jazz, intentionally playing with poetry and cacophony, music and noise, meaning and nonsense, black and Jewish. It’s a novel that reads as the smartest and wildest conversation you’ve ever had, with the friend that’s too smart for her own good.

Would Gardner have recognized that Ross wrote exactly what he was talking about? The easy answer is no, because even if he and writers like him could let go of the idea that such narrative bravado had to be tied to a penis, the fact of such prose coming from a black woman was another matter entirely. A homegirl, a soul sister out-Barthing Barth, or Barthelme for that matter. Maybe he would have said it was too scattered, and as a novelist (if not as a woman) Ross needed to settle. Yet that unsettledness is where the novel gets its timeless power. You cannot date Oreo because Oreo flouts date. You cannot read it for a resolution, because one is never coming—certainly not in the way we expect even the wildest story to resolve itself.

You could slot Oreo into the incredible, and incredibly long, list of neglected black classics, which includes The Chaneysville Incident by David Bradley, Thereafter Johnnie by Carolivia Herron and the Messenger magazine, but finding it is more like stumbling on Shuggie Otis for the first time and realising that you’ve missed a crucial building block of funk.

Or maybe Ross is closer in spirit to the writers in the 70s who managed to make this patchwork sell. Of course they were all white men: Vonnegut, Barth, Pynchon, and so on. People playing with style and form, as if the very play on surface was deep enough. In that way Oreo is only skin deep. But deliberately so, because mixed-skin issues are vast enough to cause ambiguity and tension, but also because Ross is more interested in spreading wide.

Many of us are not Oreos. Not as defined by the constant inbetweenness Ross was talking about, or in the forsaking of blackness for the ass-kissing of whiteness that it means now. But many of us people of colour, regardless of race makeup, find that our lives are indeed always in flux. That colour is a fixed thing for only one race. That the messed- up-ness of the novel, at times wise, silly, sad and funny, reflects the messed-up-ness of our lives, and sometimes it takes a work verging on allegory to give us true realness. Of course, back in 1974 heads weren’t ready. Many of us aren’t ready today. But Oreo’s time is most certainly now. Because, more than ever, with the real world skidding off into madness, absurdity and chaos, this crazy, sexy, cool novel now makes perfect sense •

• Oreo by Fran Ross is published by Picador. To order a copy for £8.49 (RRP £9.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.