by Paul Beatty
First published 2015
The narrator grows up in Dickens, an agricultural pocket on the outskirts of Los Angeles, raised by his single father, a sociologist who uses his son as a test subject in psychological experiments about race. The father claims he's writing a memoir that will make them rich, but when police kill him in a shootout, the narrator discovers no memoir exists. He's left with nothing but funeral bills and a hometown in decline. Then Dickens disappears entirely, literally erased from maps to spare California embarrassment. Determined to restore his community, the narrator teams up with Hominy Jenkins, the last surviving member of the Little Rascals comedy troupe. Together they hatch an outrageous plan to get attention: they will reinstate slavery and segregate the local high school. The scheme works too well, landing the narrator before the Supreme Court to defend his actions. This absurd legal battle forces him to confront what home means when society wants to pretend your neighborhood never existed.
Genres: satire, american-fiction, african-american, 21st-century
Vibes: absurdist, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: social-commentary, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Dickens, Los Angeles
Period: 21st-century
282 pages · ebook · Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Content warnings: racism