He didn't embellish or rationalise his exploits, talking in pipe-dream slang about him and the crew 'coming up'.' His wife Yolanda muses on what makes him attractive: 'He was comfortable with who he was and who he wasn't. It is Winston's honesty, his lack of self-pity or braggadocio ('no shame in my game'), that wins votes. While voters first assume his posters are for a rap group called City Council, his growing 'grassroots campaign in a community with no grass' earns him press acclaim as 'the hip-hop populist'. Although his habitual expression is so full of 'East Harlem inscrutable cool' that 'even he doesn't know what he's thinking', Winston runs for local office. But having escaped death in a Brooklyn drug den by fainting, he leaves with a gun, a pet goldfish and the resolve to 'turn his life around' - to 'break the cycle'. Winston is a 24-stone 'player-king' to a hapless gang in Spanish Harlem, a new father and the 'neighbourhood superpower' in a barrio where, on warm weekend nights, 'bodies turned up in the streets like worms on sidewalks after an afternoon shower'.

Where the hell is the opera community? The heavy-metal community? How the hell you define people by the kind of music they listen to?' Even more telling is another character's definition: 'Young urban African-Americans - preferably bald-headed.' The neat, ironic swipe at facile reductionism reveals the subversive skill of Beatty's punch. His new novel's hero, Winston 'Tuffy' Foshay, explodes: ''Hip-hop community'? What the fuck is that?. Yet there is no label Beatty would wear without chafing against it.

Tuff by Paul Beatty