A review by seeceeread
Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett
3.25
💭 "We are all constructed narratives."
Plot: Furo Wariboko, an unemployed Nigerian seeking a job among thousands of applicants, wakes up to discover he is now white.
The back cover blurbs call this "a devastating social parable," "hallucinatory brilliance," and "the best kind of serious." I am less smitten. The casual asides strewn every few pages about Nigerian dysfunction and capitol city chaos were not funny, to me, though I think they were meant to be. Furo takes them at face value, hearing biting commentary as permission to ruthlessly take — money, advantage, opportunity: "Life in Lagos was locked in a constant struggle against empathy. Compassion was a fatal fracturing in hearts bunkered against the city's hardness." I don't believe main characters must be likable, yet this one is especially heinous.
An extended introduction to Furo's sister through Twitter posts needed better integration. I wished for more absurdity, more high drama, in a scene filled with moneyed Nigerian women who all married white Westerners. Furo's failed romance with a co-worker unnecessarily shows his callousness, which is brutally demonstrated in the next plot point:
Barrett started with short stories and I'm curious as to whether their more concise design yielded tighter, punchier versions of his ideas.
Plot: Furo Wariboko, an unemployed Nigerian seeking a job among thousands of applicants, wakes up to discover he is now white.
Spoiler
Abandoning his family, he rushes to the interview and is offered a job for which he didn't apply. Realizing he needs to find a way to pass two weeks before he begins work, he finnagles housing and a kept lifestyle with Syreeta, herself a mistress. Their avid lovemaking reveals he has a blackass, and he begins to fully inhabit a 𝘫𝘢𝘤𝘬𝘢𝘴𝘴 persona. Once he begins work as a salesperson with a new company (where the books for business people are real bangers, like Covey's 𝟳 𝗛𝗮𝗯𝗶𝘁𝘀), he is quickly offered several other gigs to be the white-man-in-front. And two weeks in, accepts one because it allows him to more deliberately actualize his new alter ego, Frank Whyte. Along the way, we also meet Igoni, a writer whose gender changes halfway through the story. She's the only person who understands what Furo is experiencing, and the only person who maintains a tenuous tie to his previous life. When she outs him to his family who has been frantically searching for him, via a phone call, he dutifully waits at the door to greet them.The back cover blurbs call this "a devastating social parable," "hallucinatory brilliance," and "the best kind of serious." I am less smitten. The casual asides strewn every few pages about Nigerian dysfunction and capitol city chaos were not funny, to me, though I think they were meant to be. Furo takes them at face value, hearing biting commentary as permission to ruthlessly take — money, advantage, opportunity: "Life in Lagos was locked in a constant struggle against empathy. Compassion was a fatal fracturing in hearts bunkered against the city's hardness." I don't believe main characters must be likable, yet this one is especially heinous.
An extended introduction to Furo's sister through Twitter posts needed better integration. I wished for more absurdity, more high drama, in a scene filled with moneyed Nigerian women who all married white Westerners. Furo's failed romance with a co-worker unnecessarily shows his callousness, which is brutally demonstrated in the next plot point:
Spoiler
He coerces his lover to end a pregnancy she desires with a manipulative lie.Barrett started with short stories and I'm curious as to whether their more concise design yielded tighter, punchier versions of his ideas.