Review of Slumberland by Paul Beatty
By Mohsin Hamid
I couldn’t help reading parts of Slumberland aloud. The inside jacket says this is Paul Beatty’s third novel. It also says he’s a poet with two collections to his name. It doesn’t say that he’s a musician but, on the evidence of this book, he must be.
At one point in the narrative, an old jazz maestro uses a paperback for musical accompaniment. He “ruffled the pages of the book over his pant seam, and the resulting sound rivalled that of the best Max Roach brushwork”. He lifted it “to his mouth and played chapter seven like a diatonic harmonica; blowing and drawing on the pages like leaves of grass in the hands of Pan”.
Formally, that’s what Beatty is doing as well. He is making music with this novel. It has a cadence, a beat, and when read aloud the sound of it slapped a grin on to my face.
It’s true that reading is a visual act. We absorb meaning through light reflected off ink on pulped wood. But thinking also has an auditory element: we “hear” words when we think them. Musicians and novelists instinctively understand that there is a relationship between sight and sound. That’s why so many singers work on their “look” and so many novelists work on their “voice”. And Ferguson Sowell, Beatty’s protagonist, has one hell of a voice.
Ferguson is a DJ from Los Angeles. He is a black man who thinks being black is passé. He is a black man who hates “Wynton Marsalis in the same manner Rommel hated Hitler”. He is a black man who accuses Oprah Winfrey of “buying the rights to the life story of every black American born between 1642 and 1968 as a way of staking claim to being the legal and sole embodiment of the black experience from slavery to civil rights”. He is a black man who thinks Germans are like blacks because both “are loaded with so much historical baggage it’s impossible for anyone to be indifferent to the simple mention of either group”. And so he moves to Berlin.
Ferguson’s story involves, among other things, his search for a mysterious old musician known as the “Schwa” who can help him perfect his almost-perfect beat; his part-time gig at a sandy-floored German bar called the Slumberland, where white women come to pick up black men; and the fall of the Berlin wall, with its transformative impact on a city full of characters whose identities, like his own, have been constructed with barriers at their core.
Plot in this novel serves a similar purpose to melody in music. It is merely a jumping off point for improvisation and variation, executed by Beatty in virtuosic style. So what we have in Slumberland is the familiar structure of a quest narrative – Ferguson’s search for the perfect beat – coupled with a series of unfamiliar and arresting inquiries.
Nothing is safe from Ferguson’s shockingly original reflections, or riffs, as he searches for self-knowledge and self-fulfilment. Blacks, Germans, the Holocaust, reunification, America, racism, miscegenation, tampons soaked in alcohol and used as anal suppositories so music-industry types can “show up for work stone-bachelor-party drunk with no one the wiser, because their breath is odorless”, are all subject to his unflinching engagement.
Ferguson’s project is to transcend his group identity without denying it, a project that strikes me as being of the utmost importance to our dangerously poised 21st century. His agenda is one of transgression. His technique, with its sonically masterful literariness, is remarkably well-suited to this. Here, for example, is how Ferguson describes a white German journalist responding to his music:
“I switched on the sampler and calmly dropped the needle on the record ... The crispy highs caused his neck to snap and jerk back and forth. The pounding lows dropped his ass halfway to the floor, rolled his shoulders, and turned his pelvis into a gyroscope of grinding sensuality. Meanwhile his pronated hands hovered mummylike in front of his chest and surfed the midrange. I finished my groove and Lars bit down hard on his bottom lip. I knew what he wanted to say. He wanted to say, ‘Damn, nigger, so that’s what it feels like to be black.’”
Ferguson is confronted with “the cult artist’s eternal bugaboo, Who’s your audience? ... Who listens to that wild, screaming, arhythmic, keening, vinyl-scratching capriccio anyways?” It could be a question Beatty asks himself as well.
If you are eager for something that is utterly fresh, that pushes the boundaries of the novel as an art form, that shatters politically correct dogma, that sincerely attempts to locate the human in a stereotyped world, and that makes you laugh until you shake – then the answer to his question should be you.
(From: The Financial Times)
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