Mateo Askaripour’s bookshelves are a mess of plants and cameras with dangling straps and books crammed in tightly. Prominently placed, parallel to the 29-year-old author’s left ear within clear view of the camera, is his debut novel, Black Buck. “At first I didn’t have it so prominently,” Askaripour says via a Zoom call from his Brooklyn apartment, “and my publicist in the US messaged me and said: ‘Can you start displaying your book?’”
His publicist needn’t have worried: Askaripour is everywhere at the moment. Having been plucked from the slush pile, Black Buck is a New York Times bestseller that has received rave reviews in the US. A crackling satire of corporate America, it has been compared to classics of the genre such as the film Sorry to Bother You by Boots Riley and Jordan Belfort’s memoir-turned-film The Wolf of Wall Street. The rights were optioned last year – Askaripour will write a TV adaptation – and a UK launch this month will be followed by France and Spain in 2022. “The journey has just been incredible,” Askaripour says; he is a sincere, ebullient presence. “I’m grateful every day. I don’t take any of it for granted. Because I still remember being by myself, in my childhood bedroom, writing this book.”
Black Buck tells the story of Darren Vender, a smart but unmotivated high-school valedictorian who works as a barista in midtown Manhattan. (Hence the nickname Black Buck – because Darren is black, and works at Starbucks.) One day, bored at work, Darren challenges himself to persuade a high-flying corporate executive type to change his drink order, just for kicks. The executive takes a shine to him, offers him an internship at a startup called Sumwun – and just like that, Darren is thrust into the world of corporate America. The novel hits all the satirical tropes – Darren becomes an obnoxious, pompous, cocaine-snorting fool, before a third act redemption and an unlikely plot twist – but what makes Black Buck fresh is Askaripour’s sharp observation of what it is like to be a black person in a predominantly white space.
Black Buck documents the experiences of people of colour in white-dominated companies, and the daily microaggressions and small humiliations that minorities have to endure in order to fit in at work. One recurring gag is Darren’s white colleagues’ habit of comparing him to other black men he looks nothing like. This detail is autobiographical. “Oh man,” he laughs. “I’ve gotten Malcolm X. Kid Cudi. Bruno Mars.”
The novel is written principally with a black audience in mind, meaning that Askaripour does not have to explain why it is so crass and offensive to be continually compared to people you in no way resemble. His readers will already know, from lived experience. “I had black people in mind when I was writing,” he says, “but I’m happy when anyone reads it. And for me, what’s been one of the biggest joys is having people who aren’t like Darren. They aren’t this young black guy from Brooklyn, they’re a 65-year-old white woman, and the book resonates with them because they’ve been the only woman on an executive team.”
For Black Buck, Askaripour drew on his own experience of working in sales for a startup in his early 20s. By the age of 24, he was managing a team of 30 people and earning a six-figure salary. Inevitably, he became a bit unbearable. “I was in the sunken place [the trance-like state black victims are trapped in in the film Get Out] ...I do cringe,” he says candidly. “Like Darren, I pushed away those who are closest to me, who loved me unconditionally – my family, my close friends. I was screening my mother’s calls.” Friends would tell Askaripour that he was changing. “I would say,” he recalls with a wince, “‘you don’t understand. You don’t get it! We’re pioneers. We’re doing all these things’... Fortunately, when I left, my friends and family were still there for me, and helped me find my way back to myself.”
I ask Askaripour what his former startup colleagues make of Black Buck. For a moment, this charismatic speaker is at a loss for words. “There are people who are very proud and very supportive … and anyone else who probably isn’t feeling it, or doesn’t like it, I haven’t really interacted with them,” he finally volunteers, a glint in his eye.
Askaripour left his corporate job in August 2016, and wrote and shelved two novels before eventually starting Black Buck in January 2018. “When I was writing the first manuscript I was still working at that startup, and I had that typical sales male bravado … Oh, I can write this novel. Back then, I was oblivious to the fact that writing a novel is hard, and that many people try and fail.” The first two novels didn’t work out because, Askaripour says, “I don’t think I had a clear idea of my audience ... I had to ask myself, who am I as a writer, who do I want to be as a writer, and who do I want my writing to resonate with?”
Born to a Jamaican mother and an Iranian father, Askaripour grew up in Long Island, before moving to New York City for college, and subsequently settling down in his early 20s in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn neighbourhood where Black Buck is set. He is more closely connected to his Jamaican heritage, having grown up with his maternal grandmother in the house, and spent holidays in Jamaica with his family. (Askaripour has four brothers, all older than he is.) “Growing up,” he says, “my dad didn’t really tell us anything about Iran. So we were raised as five black men in America with Caribbean heritage … [but] I always knew there was another part, and I longed to learn more about it.” In college, Askaripour studied Farsi, and he hopes one day to visit Iran, to better connect with his Iranian roots.
Darren is a natural salesman, and the novel frames this ability as a sort of superpower. Black Buck is part-sales manual, giving readers advice such as ending a pitch with “Sounds fair?” “Most people don’t want to be seen as unfair or unreasonable,” Askaripour writes, “so they’re more likely to give in.” He believes in the ability of sales to change lives: “Everything is sales, whether we call it that or not, [it] doesn’t take away from the fact that feeling empowered, and knowing how to articulate yourself in a compelling way will help you advocate for yourself better, help you advocate for those that you love, right? All civil rights movements, these people were selling a vision.”
As a manual for how minorities can survive and thrive in corporate America, Black Buck could be seen to reinforce the idea that the best way for people of colour to achieve equality is to pursue individual riches, rather than collective empowerment or the redistribution of wealth. Askaripour robustly rejects the notion that he simply wants to see more people of colour earning six figure salaries in executive suites.
“The goal isn’t just to have a load of black and brown people and people who are marginalised work for white dudes and make them more money,” he says, “that’s not the goal. That could be one way though, right? Where you go in and learn and create your own [business], or you stay and get some money and help your own community, or you just live a good life. Like, I can’t judge people in terms of what they want to do.” He sees Black Buck instead as a cautionary tale. “We see Darren all of a sudden chasing this western, white, patriarchal form of success and capitalism,” he says, “and we see how it destroyed the thing that made him different, and which made him special.”
After the whirlwind success of Black Buck, Askaripour now has the world at his feet. “The way I define success today,” he insists, “it’s not about being a New York Times bestseller, even though I wanted to hit that milestone, and it’s not about having the book potentially adapted for the screen, although of course I definitely wanted that when I was, you know, dreaming ... the way I define success today is when someone reads my book and says, ‘You don’t know me, but it feels as though you wrote my life into the pages of this book. And I feel more empowered. I feel less alone. I don’t feel crazy, paranoid, or overly sensitive when I perceive something to be amiss in these spaces.’”
In addition to developing Black Buck for TV, a second novel is in the works. It’s a lot, but the energetic Askaripour won’t have any issues juggling the competing demands of literary follow-up, international book tours and screenwriting. He’s practically bouncing out of his seat. “This is the preamble,” Askaripour promises. “This is the appetiser.” I don’t doubt him for a second.