SLUMBERLAND - PAUL BEATTY

I won’t bury the lede, this book is quite good but not as good as THE SELLOUT, the other novel of Beatty’s I’ve read. Beatty manages that rare trick of being a poet turned novelist whose novels aren’t language-only affairs. In this sense, he’s like Bolaño, who is also a poet-turned-novelist and who also manages to write novels that have compelling plots while still conjuring interesting and poetic sentences and phrases. This novel concerns an American DJ who travels to Berlin to get a largely forgotten free-jazz genius to add the finishing touches to a perfect beat he’s cooked up. In the meantime, he works in Berlin as a jukebox sommelier at a bar that primarily serves Black men and YT women. The book focuses on race-relations, especially race-relations in Germany which is not something I think too much about, and music (and, obviously, these concerns overlap) and Beatty has a lot to say about both. Not unlike FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, you can tell the writer has a dozen music essays inside of him, all sorts of personal theories and obsessions he’s cultivated over the years, which he’s chosen to put in the mouth of a character in a fictional work, rather than writing a book of nonfiction. For instance, we learn that Ken Burn’s Boomer masterpiece “Jazz” excluded Sun Ra, which is unforgivable and totally predictable. I looked it up afterwards, and this is, apparently, true (I’m not going to watch 6 hrs of his boring-ass doc to actually confirm that). The narrator is in Berlin during the fall of the Wall which he attempts to recreate with sound. There’s some great comic set-pieces, like the protagonist’s gig at a YT power rally where he’s excited he finally gets to play his collection of rare Nazi-music 45s. There’s a self-immolation, lots of stuff about DJing, and tons of throw-away jokes, like a supercomputer, named Deep Blues, that plays jazz. In the hands of someone like Reed or Pynchon, digressions like that would have taken up pages of rambling asides, so while Beatty has some of these author’s zaniess and omnivorous interests, he’s more focused on the story at hand. I prefer Beatty writing about America directly since I don’t know/care a ton about Germany and their race issues or the nature of Berlin but damn if the man can’t write a sentence. This book was quick and fun, I wish the man would write more. Perhaps I should read some of his poems. 1989 45’s.