Synopsis
A coming-of-age novel set in Los Angeles's inner city, where Gunnar Kaufman, "...the whitest Negro in captivity," becomes a basketball star and a poet.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1996-06-01 |
| Size | | Length: | 225 pages | | Height: | 8.5 in | | Width: | 6.0 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 13.6 oz |
Publisher's Note
Paul Beatty, on the basis of two slim collections of poetry - Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce - has been called "a West Coast word wizard" and the "poet laureate of Generation X". The White Boy Shuffle is a moving, deft satire on issues of race as well as the tale of the coming of age of Gunnar Kaufman, a contemporary African American who is in no way typical. Unequivocally and without apology, Gunnar states that he is not the seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son. Indeed, he wishes he were, but fate has shorted him by six brothers and three uncles, cruelly cheating him out of his mythological inheritance. And thus, unforgettably, begins the story of Gunnar's rocky expedition to manhood. With his unparalleled ability to recreate the rhythms of everyday speech, to cut, mix, and recombine language in order to evoke a whole new world of experience, Paul Beatty here establishes himself as one of the most original and inventive writers of our time. A combination of literary and street, at once intimate and breathtakingly expansive, The White Boy Shuffle is a multicultural, multigenerational epic that is exuberant, engaging, and in the moment.
Industry Reviews
"This first novel by the poet Paul Beatty is a blast of satirical heat from the talented heart of black American life....[A] rich, raucous, hilarious, overdone porridge full of the various ingredients of the daily absurdist American spectacle....Mr. Beatty is a fertile and original writer, one to watch."
New York Times - Richard Bernstein (05/31/1996)
"...[A] bitingly funny, occasionally preachy satire of racism in all its guises....With this novel, Beatty creates a protagonist who enables even someone who is not black to get a sense of what it is like to be...and to experience bittersweet laughter in the process."
Los Angeles Times Book Review - Paul Krassner (07/21/1996)
"This insistent hipsterism may weary some readers, but, mercifully, the novel's trendy, self-regarding ribaldry consistently yields to its surprisingly tender, guileless heart."
New York Times Book Review - Lise Funderburg (07/28/1996)
"This Paul Beatty is crazy. A poet turned loose on prose in a comic-novel debut..., he parodies the reinvented realities of so many recent black nonfiction memoirs. This fabricated autobiography is so audacious that if reading it fails to make you laugh out loud, you're either dead or European....The real joy is watching a verbal mixmaster spin vernacular and literary structures into unexpected beats."
Quarterly Black Review of Books - V. R. Peterson (09/19/1996)
"His fast-paced adventures are relayed in a style that bears all the marks of Beatty's best poetic riffs....Beatty fearlessly lampoons the entire tradition of 'up from adversity' black male memoirs..."
Pinsker
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