Black Buck

by: Mateo Askaripour
published: January 5, 2021
genre: contemporary
389 Pages, E-Book
GoodReads | Amazon

Synopsis

Darren Vender is a bright, unambitious 22-year-old working at Starbucks in Brooklyn when a chance encounter with a tech CEO catapults him into the cutthroat world of startup sales. As the only Black employee at SUMWUN—a company offering virtual mental health “assistance”—Darren quickly rises through the ranks, earning the nickname “Buck.” But as he gains power, he loses parts of himself, getting tangled in a high-stakes game of exploitation, ambition, and identity. A sharp, satirical debut, Black Buck explores race, capitalism, and the costs of “making it” in America.

My Final Thoughts

I don’t think I was the target audience for this book, but I still enjoyed it.

We meet Darren Vender—a smart, 22-year-old valedictorian—who’s found comfort in the familiar: working as a shift supervisor at Starbucks and living in a Brooklyn brownstone with his mom and an older tenant downstairs. He doesn’t see himself as destined for much more, and honestly? He’s okay with that.

Then comes Rhett, a charismatic tech CEO who happens to stop in for a coffee. Darren convinces him to try a nitro cold brew instead of his regular, and apparently that’s all it takes—Rhett sees “sales potential” in him and offers him a job at his startup, SUMWUN. What exactly does the company do? It takes several chapters and a lot of over-the-top dialogue to figure that out—but essentially, it connects companies with virtual “therapists” (though that term is used loosely).

Darren takes the leap. He enters a new world filled with high energy, tech bro chaos, microaggressions, and straight-up racism—and yes, he’s the only Black person there. Over the next year, Darren transforms from coffee slinger to sales superstar to something… way more complicated. Let’s just say by the end, folks are calling him a terrorist.

The book starts out as a biting satire of corporate America and tech culture, especially in how it handles race, tokenism, and capitalism. I appreciated that. But the last 20%? It goes completely off the rails into something I can only describe as “satirical fever dream.” Like… why are these sales bootcamps suddenly operating like street gangs? And why is the general public so wrapped up in the drama of what is basically a recruiting firm? I got the metaphor, I just didn’t buy the escalation.

Pacing-wise, it moved way too fast. One minute Darren’s drinking Mountain Dew, the next he’s snorting coke in an Uber. It was a lot. I definitely saw the Sorry to Bother You vibes—smart, surreal, and a little too real. I didn’t hate it, actually liked it more than I probably sound like I did.

Oh, and the similes? They were everywhere. Every character drops them like they’re on a quota. Some were clever, but it got a bit heavy-handed after a while. Here are a few of my favorite:

because we’re scrappy, resourceful, and more tenacious than fucking HIV in Africa.

Jason, still saltier than a sailor,

Morning traffic in Manhattan was slower than loading porn with dial-up in the nineties.

I was harder than a diamond.

…but my throat was drier than a nun’s vagina.

Bottom line: not a perfect book, but an ambitious and original one. If you like satire, wild plot twists, and social commentary, give it a shot.

From Mateo Askaripour himself,

Black Buck is a cautionary tale, somewhat in the same way that Get Out is. If Black people enter unfamiliar scenarios and don’t pay close attention to the intentions-especially if malicious-of those around them, they’re more likely to find themselves in ‘the sunken place,’ or, as my brothers and I like to say, they’ll eventually ‘get got.’