A young and happy, though stressed, black man working at a Starbucks has an encounter with a start-up bro who seduces him with promises of affluences and money if he joins the company he founded. Starting at the sales floor, from the ground up, we see the ways in which the cult of sales literally breaks Darren, literally breaking him like a buck, co-opting his identity and forcing him into a constant performance, rather than passing when needed as a way of navigating white culture.

Narrated from Darren’s perspective and framed as a kind of self-help manual for success in life we, the readers, learn from Darren himself just how much he has to sacrifice and alter himself to conform and “thrive” under capitalism.

This is when the book is at its best. Confident in its direction and it’s critique of white, corporate culture, cult of personality, parasocial relationships, and gender performance. The framing is very effective. Horrific from our perspective, narrator swept up in the come up.

But…then it takes a turn. As Buck now finds his prior identity inaccessible and the fall out ensues. It slowly turns into a much less interesting story that involves Bucks ostensibly using his learned knowledge and skills to uplift other people of colour, which rapidly devolves and undermines the themes in the first half of the book.

It lays everything previous aside, for the most part, and begins illustrating how the intersections of racism and pop culture and technology make it hard to impossible to organize and perform direct action. Not as interesting as the first half, but it does start to get interesting again. And then it is, again, stymied, just like the first half.

Not only is any real critique removed from the plot and character arcs, the reader has to connect circuitously with concepts that were, at one time, becoming salient in the respective parts of the novel.

In the end, Buck himself wonders at the point of it all. And while it is (arguably) fitting Buck wonders this in a satire retrospective perhaps, the reader must live with no real reckoning, only a punishment that is shoe horned in for satirical value, but feels contrived and convoluted. Why make any kind of reckoning, at times gestured at, especially when an entire identity is coopted and inexorably, it seems, altered, the real joke?

Punishment being synonymous with growth in a satire feels poignant—until, like all the other themes touched on and discarded, it too proves to be vapid.