Review: "Slumberland" by Paul Beatty

Across four brilliant novels, his third, Slumberland, I just finished this morning, American author Paul Beatty has given his readers one of the most brilliant satirical journeys of our current moment. They feel necessary and relevant while being interesting, thought provoking and pee your pants funny even during their most bleak moments. No topic is safe, whether that be race relations, pop culture, both prominent and forgotten or our relationships with one another, it all gets skewed by Beatty’s musical wit that can be as harsh as a snare drum but as soft as the notes on a grand piano. His narrators, black men wise beyond their years with deep rivulets of knowledge about esoteric topics that instead of being better off for being smart, are instead harangued by it and the absurdity of what they experience, crumbling under the weight of their awareness that the world can be a better place if only people listened to them. And all of this is conveyed with the most musical of prose filled with double entrendes, crass jokes and impressively deep references to our country’s rich cultural history, mindful of its darker parts and most of the time, its most embarrassing. The man at the center of this novel is Ferguson Sowell, aka DJ Darky, a skilled DJ who belongs to possibly the only group of musically talented people who treat the art of DJing with such love and respect. He describes himself as having a phonographic memory, where he remembers everything he has ever heard, from the crack of his broken arm as a little boy and the sound of Norma Desmond’s dress as it descends the stairs in Sunset Blvd. The thing he seeks most in life is the perfect beat, the perfect collections of sound that would symbolize a kind of rhythmic nirvana. He thinks he has found the path toward this in the music of Charles Stone, aka, The Schwa, whose music he first hears as the soundtrack to a porno film where a man is doing unspeakable things to a live chicken. His search for The Schwa takes him to Berlin on the eve of the fall of The Berlin Wall. There, he takes a job as a jukebox Sommelier (crafting the perfect collection of music for a jukebox) at the Slumberland nightclub, a place where blacks in Berlin go to be ogled and pursued by white women. He soon ingratiates himself in a small group that includes a woman Klaudia, his future love interest and her sister Fatima as well as Doris, who works at Slumberland and the Schwa himself, whose true purpose will be recognizable to anyone whose read a Beatty book before. All this leads to some very funny and very gut wrenching scenes, like the cruel fate of Fatima as well as the climax, where a large, anarchic concert brings with it the fruits of everyone’s labor, even if they do not want them anymore. There is not a weak link in any of Paul Beatty’s books, and this cruel, hilarious journey through the modern collective consciousness is no different. 

Rating: 5/5

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