REVIEW: BLACK BUCK, MATEO ASKARIPOUR

In his debut novel Black Buck, former sales executive Mateo Askaripour has his narrator set out his stall incredibly early on -  two pages in, to be exact:

Understand that I want all people to be successful, but in the same way that Starbucks can’t just give out Mocha Frappuccinos to anyone who doesn’t have $14, I can’t help everyone. So, I am starting with Black people. If you’re not Black but have this book in your hands, I want you to think of yourself as an honorary Black person. Go on, do it. Don’t go don blackface and an afro, but picture yourself as Black. And if you want, you can even give yourself a fancy Black name, like Jamal, Imani, or Asia.

Tongue pressed firmly in cheek, it's the first of a number of mid-story interruptions from narrator-protagonist Darren Vender, former high school valedictorian and current shift lead at a New York Starbucks, whose life is transformed by an impromptu sales pitch to the CEO of Sumwun, therapy start-up and Silicon Alley’s hottest new unicorn. Narrated by Vender from his “penthouse overlooking Central Park,” the story oscillates between earnest self-help and vociferous satire, and Mr Askaripour is at his strongest and most incendiary when blurring the distinction between the two, a style which has drawn Black Buck much comparison to Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2014) and Boots Riley’s 2018 black comedy Sorry to Bother You.

More cult than company, the salespeople at Sumwun zoom around the office on electric scooters, rearing livestock and mercilessly hazing new recruits, all under the watchful eye of frat-bro/Winklevoss wannabe Clyde Moore III, who reeks of “privilege, Rohypnol, and tax breaks.” Mr Askaripour knows all too well the uglier aspects of startup culture, having spent four years managing the sales team at a company he has declined to name in interviews, but his insight nonetheless lends colour to a series of vivid, horrifying experiences for our protagonist. Recently transformed into the story’s titular “Black Buck” on account of his race and former employer, Darren endures a hazing ritual endures a hazing ritual somewhere between the Two Minutes Hate and Matthew McConaughey’s iconic war chant in The Wolf of Wall Street, before freestyling for a room full of expectant “pigment-deficient” colleagues as penance for being late on his first day. Perhaps the Sorry to Bother You comparisons aren’t unfair after all.

Following a PR disaster which threatens to sink the company, Darren pulls off an audacious Hail Mary pass of a sales pitch, rescuing the firm from financial perdition at the cost of his own soul. Convinced of the lie that “I truly believed in this company, so I had to give myself to it, to do whatever it took to save it”, Black Buck is as forceful a send-up of workplaces which describe themselves as “one big family” as it is of Black white-collar workers who enjoy just a little too much how the master’s tools feel in their hands. Needless to say, it does not end well. I won’t ruin it for you, so all I’ll say is this — he’s not called “Buck” just because he worked at America’s largest coffee chain. You’ll scream when you see it.

After the first three of the novel’s five parts, however, the pacing of Black Buck does accelerate rather self-consciously beyond belief, at the cost of its verisimilitude. Buck’s would-be tragic downfall begins after he wakes up one morning to find a white woman lying next to him in bed, the words of mentor-cum-father-figure Wally Cat ringing loud in his ears. (“Never, under any circumstances, fuck a snow bunny. Never! You’ll have bad luck for seven years!”). Coupled with occasionally clunky metaphors — “She crossed her arms, cradling her breasts as if they were ripe melons” might win a nod from the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award — it can prove tough to discern exactly where Buck’s braggadocio ends and Mr Askaripour’s biting satire begins. Such equivocation is what separates Black Buck from The Wolf of Wall Street and Sorry to Bother You, each of which offers firm moral condemnation of its protagonist’s misdeeds. Even as the denouement of Black Buck offers a judgement of sorts, offered by Mr Askaripour as a cautionary tale, the novel flirts insistently with a strain of Black liberalism that many might argue has lost its political cachet, especially in the wake of the events of 2020.