ENTERTAINMENT

Like the mercurial jazz beats that function as its background, Paul Beatty's third novel, Slumberland, is full of wild riffs and madcap solos. Told from the point of view of Ferguson W. Sowell, a black American expatriate disc jockey in Berlin who goes by the name of DJ Darky, what passes for story here is funky, raucous and screwball literate.

Mr. Beatty harnesses the multireferential style of The Village Voice or Rolling Stone, linking Duke Ellington and King Lear with hip-hop aplomb. The language blurts and shimmers like a drunken genius at a poetry slam.

In a nutshell, the plot concerns Darky's quest to locate the elusive musician Charles Stone, otherwise known as the Schwa. But the quest is mainly an improv framework: Mr. Beatty infuses Darky with extreme intelligence, smart-alecky humor and the ability to transcend the limits of the African-American expat experience in Berlin to achieve a greater metaphor of ethnic identity in a post-racial world.

Darky argues that being black is not what it once was, for good and bad: "You would think they'd be used to me by now ... The Negro is now officially human. Everyone, even the British, says so."

The "they" in that sentence refers to Germans, and pointedly a tanning salon clerk who is nonplussed at Darky's need for its services. (Darky is from Los Angeles, and the pallid Berlin atmosphere drives him nostalgic for sun and some good ole Vitamin D.)

Darky succeeds in his quest, with misadventures. He lands a job as DJ at the Slumberland bar just in time to witness the fall of the Berlin Wall: "I took out my minirecorder and taped the sounds of freedom. Car horns blared. A woman slammed a pickax into the Wall, grew tired, and then began to spit at the bricks. Chanting. Clapping ... All in all, freedom sounded a lot like a Kiss concert."

As time goes on, however, both ordinary Germans and the black American expats come to miss the wall: "The personification of black American frustration in post-Wall Berlin was an eccentric black man ... He never spoke, preferring to the let the cardboard sign dangling from his neck do his talking for him. A placard said, How can we read the writing on the wall, if there is no wall."

The wheelbarrow-pusher is Stone; the aphorism on the placard sums up the novel's über-idea. Stone conceives a plan to recreate the Berlin Wall with sound, and DJ Darky helps make it happen. It becomes a stunning, spiritual moment, legendary in itself, suggesting that powerful music can, like this novel, transcend the limits of cultural mishmash to achieve that elusive ring of honor, greatness.

William J. Cobb's latest novel, Goodnight, Texas, is now in paperback.

Paul Beatty

(Bloomsbury, $24.99)