What actually is a crime story?

You could try dictionary definitions, feel well informed, then come across an author like Paul Beatty - and the checklist you read is already invalid.

His book "Tuff", which was originally published in 2000, is also crime literature.

In essence, however, this is a narrative general store that appeals to an audience that does not cling to genres but is primarily interested in linguistic finesse.

Kai Spanke

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The protagonist Winston "Tuff" Foshay once says: "'Hip-hop scene.'

Where is the opera scene then please?

The heavy metal scene?

Shit, how are you supposed to define people according to their musical preferences?” One may also ask how people are supposed to be defined according to their literary preferences.

Best not at all, so genre rules overboard and go.

The plot goes through several metamorphoses

At the beginning everything is thriller as usual: Brooklyn, New York.

Shoot-out.

Winston - twenty-two years, one hundred and fifty kilos, new father, petty criminal, likeable and at the same time unlikeable - wakes up in an apartment that has been converted into a drug kitchen.

Three corpses on the ground, creamy blood here, brain matter there.

He meets a friend and leaves the crime scene with him.

The images of the slaughterhouse "flared in his mind like slides in biology class."

He closes his eyes and counts all the dead he has seen so far: sixteen.

Too many.

In order to give his life some direction, he decides to run for city council.

The plot goes through several metamorphoses.

Beatty tells the love story of Winston and his wife Yolanda in a touching, slowly unfolding flashback to jump-start it with a classic conflict scene: the drunken man comes home late when his wife (angry) and child (cute) have been waiting for him for a long time wait.

Then again, fast, funny dialogues carry the action, which is at times reduced to a chamber play.

That sounds wild, that's wild

Winston's entourage includes his anti-Semitic friend Fariq, who spends most of his time worrying about how to get rich.

His mentor Spencer, a black rabbi who converted to Judaism out of love for a woman who is long gone.

His maternal friend Inez, a left-wing revolutionary with a turbulent past.

And his father, former Black Panther, who dabbles in poetry and starts readings by firing salvos in the air: “Bam!

'This is for raping my great-grandmother.'

boom!

'And that should grow on us.'

It rained ceiling plaster and chipboard parts.

The audience sat on the edge of their chairs.”

That sounds wild, that's wild.

And if "Krimi" isn't the right label for this book, then at least "Satire" would be a good choice.

The young, black, neglected man in America's metropolises is the subject of two things: on the one hand as a caricature, on the other hand as a character who can only be caricatured because of the social and political conditions in the United States.

Beatty, born in 1962 and one of the most important African-American poetry slammers of the 1990s, is able to smuggle moral comments into the plot without appearing as a prankster.

The book only unfolds its full potential in the English-language original.

The translator Robin Detje gives everything, but doesn't get Beatty's special mixture of hip-hop jargon and reflected parlando: All in all, there's swearing and exaggeration as much as possible.

However, the characters can also say very clever things in a very eloquent way.

On the one hand, the author avoids the cliché trap, on the other hand, the novel keeps its distance from the reader.

The characters don't breathe, they fill roles.

In this respect, the question is what is gained if the decal of the African American is avoided, but instead Winston shoots a police officer's dog in a grotesquely slapstick scene?

The answer, after all: comedy.

Paul Beatty: "Tuff".

Novel.

Translated from the English by Robin Detje.

Btb Verlag, Munich 2022. 448 p., br., €12.