The award-winning author on race, satire and watching samurai films with his mother
Paul Beatty is breakfasting in a Dunkin’ Donuts on New York’s Lower East Side and mulling over his upbringing in Los Angeles, where he was born in 1962. “My mother grew up in Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. She wasn’t the happiest kid in the world and found some eastern religion bookstore. From then on she spent every day there or in the library. She’s got insane knowledge about all that stuff.” After she moved to Los Angeles she found a cinema “that had been showing old Japanese movies forever,” he says. “She would take us all to the Kurosawa and samurai films from when we were really little – six or seven. She was really immersed. She went to karate club for a long time. Breaking bricks. Industrial bricks!” Beatty later travelled with his mother to Tokyo to watch sumo wrestling. “She was in her mid-to-late 40s and very small. We’d spar in the living room. She was into everything eastern – every religion, Thai kickboxing. We had to bow before entering and leaving the house. It was a little too much.”
It’s tempting to speculate that Beatty’s idiosyncratic home life informed his ambivalent, leave-me-out relationship to some of the pieties of modern American literature. Especially modern black American literature. (He prefers the descriptor “black” to “African American”.)
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