peteg's blog - noise - books - 2018 12 25 JoeIde IQ

Joe Ide: IQ.

Tue, Dec 25, 2018./noise/books | Link

Kindle. South-Central L.A., the setting of Paul Beatty's The Sellout, finds Isaiah Quintabe ("IQ", geddit?) in the thick of an angling-for-a-TV-series hybridization of The Godfather and Sherlock Holmes. This Michael Corleone finds himself railroaded into the dark arts by two-track workmanlike prose that tries to keep us guessing within the genre constraints of crime/mystery/thriller. There are mercifully few characters, and doubtlessly more sapient readers than I figured it all out by halfway. I lost interest in what the author was doing with all those drugs. Gangsta rap is tired, as is the violence. Cheap guilty fun, not cinematic. The misogyny is unreconstructed. I don't think anything comes under substantial scrutiny. There are two more since this came out in 2016.

Janet Maslin.