BOOK REVIEW / ESSAYS : Making a Case for the Many People Who Feel Left Out : BULLETPROOF DIVA <i> by Lisa Jones</i> ; Doubleday $25.95, 350 pages

It’s not a completely new idea; any graduates of that last great cultural rebellion, back in the late 1960s, will remember the concept, which was immortalized (or co-opted, depending on how you felt about the production) by the musical “Hair.”

But writer Lisa Jones, who was too young to participate the last time around, sees our crowning glory as a metaphor identity: I curl, therefore I am. Hair, particularly Afro-American hair, is an emblem of an individual’s spiritual life, of enslaved history, strident revolt, or, with any luck, an unfettered future.

This book of essays--most of them taken from the Village Voice, where Jones writes the “Skin Trade” column, along with a few longer, original pieces--is about figuring out life, especially when the pieces of one’s puzzle are cut in an unusual style.

Jones’ father is black (and seems, from vague hints dropped, to be playwright Amiri Baraka, ne Leroi Jones); her mother is Jewish, and expectations are appropriately jumbled: Mom cooks collard greens better than the black women in the family who are supposed to own that franchise; Lisa knows only a single Jewish aunt because all the other relatives have refused to acknowledge her family; she is not one, not the other.

Jewish law would consider her a Jew, because children inherit their mother’s religion, but Jones places herself black, with a twist, and is fascinated by all the possible permutations she encounters.

In “Looking for Mariah,” she has a very good time investigating the lineage of our latest pop queen, who has no interest, it turns out, in living up to her incorrect image as a white girl who can sing. Her father was black and Venezuelan; her mother, white. There was choice involved, as there was for Jones, who chose the opposite path.

Jones has a robust, staccato style, as evidenced in her essay “Hair Always and Forever,” in which she investigates the history of Charlene’s hair salon in Brooklyn, where a woman can get her hair done 24 hours a day.

This is not reportage, but stream-of-consciousness image bites. Not just information about how places and people look but about how Jones feels about how they look.

She is obsessed with herself--as perhaps any good essayist/memoirist should be--as a symbol of something larger, of a yearning among the disenfranchised to claim a chunk of the social universe. And she makes a persuasive case that the percentage of the population that feels left out is larger and more diverse, and infinitely more energetic, than one might believe.

The moral majority may be nothing more than a massive public relations coup.

What else to say? Filmmaker Spike Lee, with whom Jones has collaborated on books about the making of three of his films, says in a promotional blurb, “It has been a pleasure to watch the growth and maturity of Lisa Jones’ writings.”

Fans should find more pleasure to come. Jones sometimes writes as though the English language were her opponent in a wrestling match, forcing it to the mat just to prove that she can. Her points are strong, and well taken, and she could stand to make them in less florid a style without their losing any emphasis.

Style cartwheels are always fun for the writer, but part of what makes them fun for the reader is if they’re clean and effortless.

The audience doesn’t need to know just how hard it is for a writer to get her linguistic legs pointing heavenward, and then land without skinning her knees.

Nobody’s suggesting that Jones abandon her flamboyance; it’s just that sometimes it seems that the words are running the show.

Still, “Bulletproof Diva” is a bracing race through American culture; a call, if not to arms, then to hair, for people who are trying to find their place--to define it, instead of buying into the stale definitions of generations past.