Beatty’s fiction, which includes Tuff and The White Boy Shuffle, has earned acclaim for its bold and comical take on social issues. In his fourth novel, Beatty, who is also a poet and the editor of Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor, deploys deft satire as he follows an anonymous young man grappling with the recent shooting death of his father, a sociologist who in fact was not writing the magnum opus he had claimed, and the state’s threat to wipe his town, Dickens, off the California map.
