• Books Home
• Features
• 
• 
• Bookmark this site

With the publication of his 1996 novel, The White Boy Shuffle, Paul Beatty blazed a trail into what can now be called urban-geek territory, clearing the way for works such as Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Beatty’s book—in which a sensitive African-American teen moves from the suburbs to the ’hood—tackled racial stereotypes with satirical aplomb. In his new novel, Slumberland, Beatty’s black-nerd aesthetic remains as inimitable as it ever was, featuring a DJ who possesses a phonographic memory and who obsessively seeks to create “the perfect beat.”

The novel’s hero is Ferguson W. Sowell, a.k.a. DJ Darky, who pays the bills by scoring porn films in L.A. He’s also hard at work on his mash-up masterpiece, one that will, he says, herald the end of blackness. But to reach the sublime, he needs the improvisations of Charles Stone, a saxophonist who once wrote the soundtrack to a porn sequence in which a man shtups a chicken. Darky’s search takes him to East Germany just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, to a bar called Slumberland, patronized by African-American men and their German Fräulein admirers.

With laugh-out-loud parodies of everything from the SAT’s cultural bias to neo-Nazi musical tastes, Slumberland shows that Beatty can still crank out the acerbic riffs. Sometimes all the jokes about porn, Teutonic mythology and black history stifle the novel’s bigger conundrums about identity and authenticity. As much as our DJ hero seeks to transform culture, he doesn’t exactly rewire anyone’s ideas about race and gender. Still, Beatty’s outrageous novel aims to provoke, and it succeeds. Evan Narcisse