Peppered with spit-out-your-drink absurdities and killer similes, Mateo Askaripour's debut novel, Black Buck, is an unflinching and satirical look at racism and corporate culture.
Written in the form of a how-to manual-cum-cautionary memoir, Black Buck--a Read with Jenna/Today Show book club pick and longlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize--is about Darren, a young man from Bed-Stuy who's "fine doing my own thing" and working at Starbucks, until a tense and unusual exchange leads to a job at a startup called Sumwun.
Riotous scenes "straight out of Any Given Sunday" and seemingly supernatural portents mark Darren's transition from slinging coffee to his rapid rise at Sumwun. Despite being the only Black person in a brutal atmosphere, surrounded by co-workers who reek "of old money and blood-splattered gallows," as well as "privilege, Rohypnol, and tax breaks," Darren excels professionally.
"Every day in my house was deals day; everything was up for negotiation." "The sell" comes in many guises--not just the corporate and corner hustlers, but the activists trying to "get over" and the mother urging her child on to their fullest potential. It's hard to reconcile Darren's awareness with some of his subsequent deals with devils, yet his messiness is compelling. When it's not heartbreaking, it's certainly entertaining. The highs, lows and twists are masterfully dizzying.
Whether or not a system constructed of "rules... to make [people of color] never able to win" can be turned into a vehicle of freedom by its own means is debatable. Black Buck exhibits an enthusiastic and trenchant heart in grappling with the proposition. --Shannon Hanks-Mackey, writer and editor