—Seattle Times
“Paul Beatty is the poet laureate of black humor. His novels resemble the work of the best kind of stand-up comics—Richard Pryor, Sarah Silverman, George Carlin—who use taboo and an acute attention to the details of language to shock one into thinking in new ways. He incorporates the art of the one-liner much the same way that Junot Diaz and Michael Chabon incorporate pulp fiction and comics into their novels, in the process making both pop culture and literature more visceral, intelligent, and interesting. The searing brilliance of his riffs is dazzling.”
—Barnes and Noble.com
“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 . . . as inimitable as ever. Beatty’s outrageous novel aims to provoke, and it succeeds.”
—Time Out New York
“A lyrically inventive novel.”
—Philadelphia City Paper
“Ferociously witty and original . . . virtuosic and hilarious. Whether he’s warning against the ‘cutie-pie cabal’ of The AllNew Mickey Mouse Club; spinning a track for a philosopher skinhead; hypothesizing about Harriet Tubman or Nabokov or Big Daddy Kane; rhapsodizing about every sound he’s ever heard (he has a “phonographic memory”); or brilliantly spinning an analogy between East Germans after reunification and African-Americans during Reconstruction, DJ Darky brings the full funk. Marvelous.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The narrative touches on oppression and the inexplicable, transcendent power of music, both of which translate to the American race struggle. Beatty’s rolling Faulknerian prose has been praised for its “dazzling linguistic flights” (Salon), and this newest novel is no different; the dense imagery and sound create a synesthesia carnival.”
—Library Journal
“With its acerbic running commentary on race, sex, and Cold War culture, the latest from Beatty contains flashes of absurdist brilliance in the tradition of William Burroughs and Ishmael Reed.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Furiously written . . . another bravura performance from the searingly talented Paul Beatty. A no-holds-barred comedic romp that crushes through the Fulda Gap of Black/White, East/West relationships like an M1 tank.”
—Junot Diaz
“Nobody riffs like Paul Beatty. Uproarious, incisive and thrillingly original, Slumberland is a masterful journey into sound, a diatonic/Teutonic search for love, identity, the perfect beat and the perfect beatdown. Like any great soloist, Beatty reveals entire worlds with each note, some of them heartbreakingly familiar and others heretofore unknown. This is an epic mash-up of race, music, culture, history, and everything else worth throwing on a turntable.”
—Adam Mansbach, author of The End of the Jews
“In Paul Beatty’s brilliant comic novel, an American deejay in Berlin declares the end of blackness even as he finds himself the object of a million racial projections. Every sentence is a moment of fierce and intelligent wit, and all of our preconceived notions—of racial-uplift narratives, of Germany, and of the nature of music—are turned squarely and rightly on their heads.”
—Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia and Symptomatic
Copyright © 2008 by Paul Beatty
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Every reasonable effort has been made to contact copyright holders of material quoted in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.
2004 BONDE assembly instructions used with permission of Inter IKEA Systems B.V.
Cal Worthington radio jingle used with permission of Cal Worthington.
“Tom Sawyer,” words by Pye Dubois and Neil Peart, music by Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson, copyright 1981 Core Music Publishing. All rights reserved.
Used by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.
Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Beatty Paul.
Slumberland : a novel / Paul Beatty.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-59691-240-3 (hardcover)
1. African American men—Fiction. 2. Musicians—Fiction. 3. African Americans—Germany—Fiction. 4. Berlin (Germany)—History— 1945–1990—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.E19S57 2008
813’.54—dc22
2007045049
First published by Bloomsbury USA in 2008
This e-book edition published in 2011
E-book ISBN: 978-1-60819-649-4
www.bloomsburyusa.com
*Obscure but seminal L.A. garage band that in 1982 had one groundbreaking gig at the Roxy during which the lead singer, Manuel Ozuna, is reputed to have invented crowd surfing.
*Every film post – Apocalypse Now has been directed by a lookalike hired by the movie industry to keep the dream alive.
*The first being a Budweiser tall boy I’d snuck into a Mothers Against Drunk Driving fundraiser.
* 1. If God exists, then he/she/it/whatever is like mad perfect.
2. If God exists, then he/she/it is the creator of the universe.
3. And if God is perfect, the universe should be perfect.
4. But the universe ain’t perfect, as evidenced by this specious-ass logic argument and the pathetic state of contemporary everything.
5. Matter of fact, if God exists, then there would be no need for if/then statements.
6. Unless, of course, the if/then statement is God.
*Adios Motherfucker: A popular and potent ghetto cocktail introduced to Berlin by Slumberland’s American clientele. Warning: This drink is strictly for professionals. Never drink it alone. Psilocybic. Liquid antimatter. Never mind about operating heavy machinery; you’ll have trouble lighting a cigarette. Good thing, too, ’cause it’s highly flammable.
*Gerald Early, Ph.D., Ken Burns Jazz. I remember the entire series word for word and note for note, but what I remember most is that no one ever mentioned Sun Ra. Not once.
*Once, in a fit of neologic haughtiness, I submitted nigriscence to my main lexicographer Cutter Pinchbeck at Kensington-Merriwether, who wrote back, “S’up wit chu, N-Word? Nigrescence is already an N-word.”
*Iceland Is Hot! tells the story of an African-American volcanologist who travels to Iceland to practice his craft, but fails to be taken seriously by the volcanological community there because of his inability to correctly pronounce fjord. Once ostracized, he correctly predicts the eruption of Mount Hekla and becomes a celebrated scientist, only to die of frostbite when he falls into a snowbank after being accidentally shot by his illegitimate son, Halldór, founder of the Reykjavik Crips, in a vicious sleigh-by shooting.
*The most embarrassing moment of my life came in college when Alizah Silverman caught me in the student union stuffing my face with McDonald’s and reading The Fountainhead minutes before I was supposed to march in a demonstration against corporate globalism.
*Oprah Winfrey was then in the process 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. Thus carrying the historical burden that only she has the strength to bear.
†arrière-garde noun (usu. the arrière-garde) unacted-upon ideas, esp. in the arts or among the people who have such ideas: Roland is a writer who’s never written and thus a longstanding member of the Venice Beach arrière-garde. Coined by Ferguson Sowell, inclusion in the Kensington-Merriwether Fourth Edition pending.
*Properly pronounced turnt out regardless of educational background or geographic locale.
*Sure, anyone can say ’hood and nigger with a modicum of
credibility, but the infinitive to front implies a contextual and historical betrayal that goes back to the days when Java Man first fronted on Peking Man at the water hole. Big-brained mother-fucker hoggin’ all the arrowheads ’n’ shit. Today when most people say frontin’, they don’t even know they frontin’ on themselves.
*Generation @ is pronounced “Generation At.”
*My own IQ is said to fluctuate between 89 and 174. A quotient categorized as “haphazardly intellectual.”
*“Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”
*Formally known as the Schaumschläger-28, but the “beater” in Egg Beater-28 was too, you know, aggressive.
*Funny, you can convey tone in a telegram, but you can’t in an e-mail. I think it’s because it costs money to send a telegram. If somebody cares enough to pay cash money to tell you something, it’s not so hard to infer what they mean. And if you can’t properly intonate Blaze’s telegram, well...
Paul Beatty, Slumberland
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