Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour

 

Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour.

Published 27th May 2021 by John Murray.

From the cover of the book:

My goal is to teach you how to sell. And if I'm half the salesman every newspaper, blog, and hustler in New York City says I am, then you are in luck. With my story, I will give you the tools to go out and create the life you want. Sound fair?

Meet Buck. But before Buck was the Muhammad Ali of sales, floating like a butterfly and selling like a demon, he was Darren: an unambitious twenty-two-year-old living with his mother and working at Starbucks. All that changes when a chance encounter with Rhett Daniels, the silver-tongued CEO of NYC's hottest tech startup, results in Darren joining Rhett's elite sales team.

On his first day Darren realizes he is the only Black person in the company, and when things start to get strange, he reimagines himself as 'Buck', a ruthless salesman, unrecognizable to his friends and family. Money, partying, and fame soon follow Buck, and wherever he goes more is never enough.

But when tragedy strikes at home, Buck begins to hatch a plan to help young people of colour infiltrate America's sales force, setting off a chain of events that forever changes the game.

An earnest work of satire, Black Buck is a hilarious, razor-sharp skewering of office culture; a propulsive, crackling debut that explores ambition and race, and makes way for a necessary new vision of the American dream.

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Black Buck is a sucker punch of a novel that offers a satirical glimpse at what lies under the glossy surface of the American Dream.

Meet Darren Vender, all round nice guy and friend to all, living at home with his mother in Bud-Stuy, New York, comfortable in his relationship with long-term girlfriend Soraya, and happy to aim no higher than his job running a city Starbucks, where he is a big fish in a small pond - despite the pushing from his nearest and dearest to make the best of his abilities.

Darren's life takes an unexpected direction when Rhett Daniels, CEO of the startup company SumWun, recognises a rare gift for sales in our coffee seller and offers him a chance to join his team and make some big money. Darren decides to give it a go, but realises immediately he sets foot on the office floor that as the only black man in the company this is going to be far from an easy ride. The racism and discrimination hit him with full force from the word go, and he is close to quitting almost every day that the grinding torture of training under sales manager Clyde continues, but the faith Rhett has invested him somehow keeps him going, and he makes it through by recreating himself as 'Buck' - his new persona as a ruthless salesman, channelling the insulting nickname Clyde has christened him with.

Darren soon gets a taste for the life of a salesman, gradually morphing into the ruthless go-getter he imagined himself to be and alienating the people he used to hold dear. His life changes beyond imagination and as success follows success, it seems Darren has sold his soul to the devil that is the US dollar. Can Darren ever find his way back?

Part morality tale and part exploration of the deep seated racism that underlies the American Dream, this book will make you laugh, cry and scream with frustration and anger, as Mateo Askaripour takes you down into the absurd hell of Darren's own making, when he is manipulated into falling for his own spin. The pace never lets up, keeping you on your toes as the story jumps forward in time and you have to play catch-up with each new mess that Darren gets himself into - even when he is trying to do the right thing.

This is razor sharp, raw and uncompromising stuff, that will have you asking some pretty big questions about the state of the world and the capacity of a person to lose sight of who they are when they fall under the spell of false prophets. Much of this is pretty hard to read, as we are not just talking casual racism here, this is whopping big, in your face bigotry and discrimination that is breath taking in its scale, but what makes this book so brilliant is the way Askaripour subtly threads humour through the piece - in particular, the abbreviated team names are a delight, and the constant theme of people comparing Darren to black celebrities is utter scathing genius.

If ever a book was a 'must read', this is it!

Black Buck is available to buy now in hardback, ebook and audio formats from your favourite book retailer.

Thank you to John Murray for sending me a hardback copy of this book in return for an honest review, and to the Tandem Collective for inviting me to be part of the Instagram readalong.

About the author:

Mateo Askaripour was a 2018 Rhode Island Writers Colony writer-in-residence, and his writing has appeared in Entrepreneur, Lit Hub, Catapult, The Rumpus, Medium, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, and his favourite pastimes include bingeing music videos and movie trailers, drinking yerba mate, and dancing in his apartment. Black Buck is his debut novel.