Review: "Tuff" by Paul Beatty

Even with a book like his second novel Tuff that, along with another novel is sandwiched between his debut The White Boy Shuffle and his momentous breakthrough The Sellout, American writer Paul Beatty produces nothing but the highest quality of work, with every hilarious sentence, every oddball character and every off the wall plot device not only serving a purpose, but is intricately and masterfully executed with staggering and enviable skill. I can’t think of a writer who has as good as Beatty who makes me laugh harder, and once the laughter dies down, you can’t help but read into the undercurrent of tragedy that seems to follow these characters around. Comedy and tragedy are inexorably linked, and Beatty never forgets that and his books depend on it. These stories about black men caught up in a whirlwind of agendas, politics and things beyond their control are never simply about their oppression by the system they live under. Beatty takes a very interesting and satirical (although in interviews he has stated that he does not like to be called a satirist) look at our current tumultuous racial divide that lampoons both sides and shows the somewhat not so innocent victims that become it’s casualties. Much like the narrator of The Sellout and Gunnar Kaufmann in The White Boy Shuffle, Winston “Tuffy” Foshay (or Tuff to his friends) is a young black man with little direction in life and nothing to lose. We first meet him after a botched drug robbery where he is the only survivor (thanks to a well-timed fainting spell). Seeing this as a sign to turn his life around, Tuff brainstorms ideas with his motley crew of characters, such as the crippled Fariq, his wife Yolanda and Charles, a white man of Irish descent and essentially a relic of the old New York. It is not until he connects with Inez, his Asian/black power surrogate mother and a Spencer, a black Jewish convert Tuff hilariously meets through a Big Brother program and whose adult circumcision scene is one of the book’s many highlight, that he gets the idea to run for city council. Tuff is a hard character to like. Infinitely less sympathetic than Beatty’s other creation, Tuff is a at times little more than a violent thug, with one scene where he shoots a police dog (to protect his baby boy Jordy) being one of the book’s more gut-wrenching scenes. But to see him in over his head, to see his family’s tragedies, his wastrel of a poet dad, his absent mother and his dead sister, whose apparition hangs over even the book’s funnier scenes, it is hard not to feel bad for this mercurial man whose being unwillingly used for something greater. Another apparition that founds its way into the book’s pages was the unexpected ghost of David Foster Wallace, with scenes taking place on a stoop and in a classroom matching the scenes at the halfway house and tennis academy for hilarity and pathos. This is another great book from a writer I suspect will be well regarded and appreciated in years to come.
Rating: 5/5