With a clear nod to Kafka's The Metamorphosis and faint echoes of Griffin's Black Like Me, Nigerian author A. Igoni Barrett's first novel, Blackass, tells of a man whose life is turned upside down by an inexplicable physical transformation. In Lagos, Furo Wariboko awakes one day to find himself a full oyibo--a white man ("the pink life lines in his palms, the shellfish-coloured cuticles, the network of blue veins that ran from knuckle to wrist") in perhaps the largest black city in the world. Modestly schooled, unemployed, living at home with a failed chicken-farmer father, tech-savvy younger sister and smothering mother, Furo slips out of the house before his family discovers his startling new look. Queuing behind a long stretch of applicants for an entry-level book sales job, he is suddenly bumped to the head of the line and immediately offered much higher-level employment. With a business-provided car and driver, a new name and a fat salary, Furo leaves his dead-end black youth behind to become an envied white adult. Except, he soon discovers, for his still-black ass. One's past can never be left behind.
Prize-winning short story writer Barrett (Love Is Power, or Something Like That) brings the sprawling, traffic-snarled, bureaucratic Lagos to life with a narrative full of pidgin patois, incessant radio play of Fela songs and newly rich young mall rats glued to Twitter. But Blackass is as much a probing novel of identity and social class as it is a satire of the pell-mell Lagosian life. Barrett is one to watch. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.