High literary seriousness is easy. Satire is hard.
Several of the great nonwhite literary hopes for American literature have managed the balancing act, imploding the cage of identity politics, telling good yarns about deadly serious stuff, and otherwise creating a Big Bang that expanded the universe of which of our stories were "publishable."
About 10 years ago, the names of some of these writers would be invoked in tandem: Sherman Alexie, Junot Diaz, and Paul Beatty.
Alexie has been consistently productive, with eight books in a decade and a half. If you read this blog, you've already read plenty about Diaz's "don't call it a comeback" of last year. But Beatty? After the great White Boy Shuffle and Tuff, the only sign of writerly life had been an edited collection of African-American humor, Hokum.
And now Slumberland. The best he's ever done. This is what satire is supposed to look like. No target is safe: bling-blinging beat cannibal rappers, Europeans who fetishize African American culture, DJ geekdom, suburban disillusionment, the plight of Afro-Germans, Ken Burns, Wynton Marsalis.
And this is one of the best music novels I've read in quite a while, capturing music obsessiveness the way High Fidelity and Hopscotch do, bohemian living the way The Gangster of Love does. With great psychedelic descriptions of music, of beats and melody and of the in-time, out-of-time transcendental relation between great music and the listener. Aside from historical works like Love Saves the Day, I haven't seen a better explanation of the magic of DJing.
Ferguson Sowell, aka DJ Darky, is searching for the perfect beat. And he thinks he almost has it, if he can just add in the sonic umami of the Schwa, aka Charles Stone, a lost bebop-era jazzman. He follows clues -- such as a chicken-fetish porn video -- to just-before-reunification Berlin, where he becomes a "jukebox sommelier" (such a job exists, almost: check the curated jukeboxes of every cool Brooklyn bar).
Sample of Beatty's unrelenting cleverness: Stone is called the Schwa because "his sound, like the indeterminate vowel, is unstressed, upside-down, and backward."
Ferguson says he has a phonographic memory, and recalls and can identify all sounds he's been exposed to. Like Jean Baptiste Grenouille in Perfume, he's a connoisseur. The sound of his mother turning pages of the New Yorker in the 1970s is his Rosebud:
Those pages had an intellectual and textual heft to them. They felt like parchment, a parchment that no family ever had the temerity to throw away. Ma would turn through the Bellow and the pages rustled as though the story had been printed on numbered autumn leaves. I decided that if I could collapse all my memories into one sound, it would be the sound of those pages turning. Crisp. Mordant. Pipe-smoke urbane.
If the middle-class LA upbringing, the quest for release from the straijacket of race and for artistic fulfillment sound familiar, yes, the plot and several of the references share the arc of Passing Strange. Coincidentally, I ran into Stew this weekend on a Park Slope sidewalk, and
he said the Slumberland bar really exists, and is a few blocks from his
Berlin home. And that, yes, he's heard he should read the book, and now
will, on my hearty recommendation.
Funny how the colored person in Berlin trope has become of late so ubiquitous. Berlin is the new Paris, it seems, for liberation from American racism. Not just for Blacks, either. Though he doesn't write about Germany, to me Abraham Rodriguez's South by South Bronx is as much suffused in his current Berlin home as in his former Bronx environs.
But back to Beatty. Even with a couple of anachronisms, which I'm always quicker to forgive in comedy than in drama (effect reigns supreme in the funny, I think), there is so much in Slumberland that evokes the late 80s and a certain political moment, the ways many of us felt released at last from the legacy of the 1960s even as we respected what was worth keeping.
And it also plays out, quite convincingly, the moment when away from home we find a new home, where we've become the self we dreamed about in our childhood rooms.
