Tuff
By Paul Beatty
Alfred A. Knopf
257 pages
$23.00

When Paul Beatty tries to be funny in his second novel, "Tuff," he isn't. When the author switches over to an attempt at insightful social commentary on inner city life, one wishes he had stuck with trying to be funny. Paul Beatty has the potential to be a good novelist, and there are several ways he might have made "Tuff" into a good novel. Unfortunately, he has deftly managed to avoid all of them.

Twenty-something uptown Manhattan drug enforcer Winston "Tuffy" Foshay waddles through a series of competing influences: gang-banging street partners, a wife and child, a poetry-reading father who cannot outgrow his Black Panther past, a left-wing Japanese stepmother with close ties to the late Malcolm X, a bourgeois black rabbi magazine writer who wants to use Tuffy’s life as a stepping-stone to a Pulitzer.

The novel’s major problem is that the author cannot decide on the exact role and purpose for the title character. Is he a buffoon, saving himself from a shooting only by fainting at the site of the gunmen? ("Man, after they sparked up these clowns, I could hear them laughing at your big ass passed out on the floor," a friend tells him.) Or urban legend? ("Spencer now understood why little boys ran to Tuff in the streets, tugging on his shirt... Winston Foshay--a living African-American folk hero whose mythos lay somewhere between the polars of John Henry and Stagger Lee.") Or is he a ghetto boyz version of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, merely passing on thoughtful, witty, and wry comments on the urban condition? Or an Alice or a Gulliver, maybe, giving us the true meaning of life by displaying its absurd reflection? Political reformer running for office on the pot-in-every-chick ticket? Superfly, looking for one big score to get him out of the thug life? Indy film fan who can discuss "Battleship Potemkin" in detail? The reader is never sure where all of this is coming from, and so is left confused as to where it is going.

Beatty is a poet, with two volumes of poetry to his credit, and his images can be striking when he buckles down and gets serious, as in a reminiscence of Tuffy’s revolutionary father:

"Winston’s resolve began to weaken as he recalled how comforting it was having the four men requisition the tiny apartment like Allied liberators. Their cocky banter made him and his mother laugh. Their menthol cigarettes dangled from ashtrays he’d made in school like smoking cannon from castle ramparts. Winston felt protected. ... After dinner, the men would sit down on the couch and clean their weapons. Carefully, they’d place dabs of brown oil on the guns’ mechanisms, smearing the droplets with their fingertips."

Unfortunately, Beatty also suffers from the classic poet-novelist’s disease of the need to have every line of dialogue be pure poetry, rather than letting the language find its own rhythm. And so we have Tuffy periodically shouting out such things as, "You four draft-dodging dashiki-wearing brown-car-driving leather-trenchcoat-in-the-summer-sportin’ stuck-on-stupid-played-out-1970s reject [mf’s] need to raise. You all ain’t none of my social support network." Dreadful.

Admittedly, social satire is a tough world to conquer, but it seems to be within Beatty’s grasp. Maybe he should back off, sit down with a tape of "Car Wash" and "I’m Gonna Get You, Sucka," and then try it again. "Tuff" is not a good effort.