Tuff: A Novel

by Paul Beatty

Paperback, 2001

Status

Available

Call number

813.54

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Publication

Anchor (2001), Paperback, 272 pages

Description

Fiction. African American Fiction. Literature. HTML:From the author of the 2016 Man Booker Prize winner The Sellout comes a novel as fast-paced and hard-edged as the Harlem streets it portrays. Age nineteen and weighing in at 320 pounds, Winston �??Tuffy�?� Foshay, is an East Harlem denizen who breaks jaws and shoots dogs and dreams of millions from his idea Cap�??n Crunch: The Movie, starring Danny DeVito. His best friend is a disabled Muslim who wants to rob banks, his guiding light is an ex-hippie Asian woman who worked for Malcolm X, and his wife, Yolanda, he married from jail over the phone. He�??s funny and fierce, frustrated and feared. And when Tuff decides to run for City Council, this dazzling novel goes from profoundly funny to acerbically sublime. Populated with an incisively hilarious supporting case and filled with meaning and irreverent, Tuff is satire at its hard… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member reenum

After reading White Boy Shuffle, I thought that Tuff would have to be better. It didn't appear to have any of the flaws that Beatty's debut had. The characters appeared to be more fleshed out, and the story more realistic. How wrong I was.

The main problem with this book was that it meandered too

much. There is too much in here about the characters' ordinary lives and not enough action. This book never seemed to be have any sense of pacing or direction anywhere, and when the plot did advance, the whole thing seemed kind of forced. As a result, this book reads like a series of vignettes, rather than a unified novel. Also, Beatty's insistence of mixing low and high culture is irritating. One moment, the characters will be talking in ghetto slang, and the next minute, one of them is talking about his love of 1940's French movies. It just kills the mood that Beatty is trying to create.

Beatty obviously has great promise, but he has again failed to live up to it. I cannot recommend this book.

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