A DJ seeks the beat in Berlin

PAUL BEATTY (GERALD ZONER)

Slumberland
By Paul Beatty
Bloomsbury, 243 pp., $24.99

Two of the liveliest strains of contemporary fiction find their roots in different strands of popular culture: hip white guys like Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, and Jonathan Lethem take inspiration from the comic books of their youth, and the concomitant fascination with genre and role-playing, while writers like Colson Whitehead, Junot Díaz, and Paul Beatty - mostly African-American, Hispanic, and Asian-American - find poetry between the lines of their favorite hip-hop albums and have developed a slangy, riff-heavy authorial voice that owes more to Rakim and Jay-Z than Richard Wright. Way back in 1996, Beatty practically invented the latter with his brilliantly inventive debut, "The White Boy Shuffle," a dazzling coming-of-age novel for post-racial Los Angeles. "Tuff" demonstrated that Beatty was no one-hit wonder, moving the action to New York's Spanish Harlem, and "Slumberland" makes it three cities for three novels, jetting across the pond to pre- and post-wall Berlin.

Hip-hop is not only the inspiration for "Slumberland"; it is its subject matter, its urge toward creative destruction the source material for both Beatty and his protagonist, DJ Darky. Darky (christened Ferguson W. Sowell) is a Los Angeles DJ intellectual, prone to sitting around with his friends and untangling the maelstrom of his latest magnum opus: "Brando's creaking leather jacket in 'The Wild One,' a shopping cart tumbling down the concrete banks of the L.A. River, Mothers of Invention, a stone skimming across Diamond Lake, the flutter of Paul Newman's eyelashes amplified ten thousand times, some smelly kid named Beck who was playing guitar in front of the Church of Scientology, early, early, early Ray Charles, Etta James, Sonic Youth, the Millennium Falcon going into hyperdrive, Foghorn Leghorn, Foghat, Melvin Tormé, aka 'The Velvet Fog,' Issa Bagayogo, the sizzle of an A1's Sandwich Shop cheesesteak at the exact moment Ms. Tseng adds the onions . . ."

Bored by his job writing background music for porn films, Darky picks up and heads to Berlin on a lark, in hot pursuit of a legendary jazz musician named Charles Stone, who he is convinced is just the man to provide the appropriate finish to his burgeoning masterpiece.

Like an MC commandeering the microphone, and unwilling to let go until he has unspooled every last tricky rhyme and zinger, Beatty dedicates the first half of "Slumberland" to a freestyle driven by the writer's relentless desire to top himself. A poet as well as a novelist, with two volumes of verse to his name, Beatty crams his book full of asides, marginal noodling, and comic set-pieces - a charming barrage of linguistic playfulness that is some of his best work to date. It is only when the asides make way for the plot that Beatty runs into trouble.

At some level, Beatty knows his story is not entirely worthy of his prose; after all, he takes 120 pages of a 243-page novel to settle down and tell it. Darky, newly hired as the jukebox sommelier at a Berlin hangout called Slumberland, goes in search of Stone while slowly adjusting to life as a Berliner. And that is the heart of the matter. Los Angeles in "White Boy Shuffle," and New York in "Tuff," are given the breath of life by Beatty; we can picture them continuing on, in Beatty's charming, heartbreaking fashion, long after we close the books that birthed them. The Berlin of "Slumberland" never breathes in the same fashion.

In part, this is a product of Darky's own lack of interest in his adopted city. When a German friend breathlessly informs him that the wall has fallen, he asks, "What wall?" The editor of "Hokum," a terrific anthology of African-American humor, Beatty is never short of comic inspiration, but parts of "Slumberland" suffer in comparison. The figure of Stone, in particular, is a role just waiting for Morgan Freeman - the "magical Negro" of countless movies and TV shows, drastically out of place in Beatty's race-savvy universe.

Darky ultimately finds Stone, and the two collaborate on a musical project, but "Slumberland" has run out of fresh material long before the end of the novel. In striving for a metaphysical link between the African-American and German experiences, Beatty only creates a muddle that undercuts his own strongest suits. Even in "Slumberland" itself, Beatty prefers being home to traveling abroad, and his book shows it. If it's OK with him, I'll just stick with the first half of "Slumberland," and pretend the rest of it was demolished along with the Berlin Wall.

Saul Austerlitz is a regular contributor to the Globe.