Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson (2015)

Welcome to Braggsville is the story of a quartet of earnestly self righteous UC Berkeley students who decide to teach a Southern town a lesson about racism by staging a "performance intervention" during the community's annual reenactment of a Civil War battle, with unforeseen tragic results. The tone is satirical and ironic and often very humorous; the language is hip and trendy and often very inventive; the social criticism is far-reaching -- academic elitism, liberal self-righteousness, and covert racism are the principle, but not the only, targets. This is a provocative and creative endeavor, which only errs by being a just s shade TOO MUCH.

The first part of the novel features the trendy, ultra-hip slang of the Berkeley students and the academic jargon of their professors, exaggerated for satirical effect, of course. But sometimes it is exaggerated too much (surely), so that some passages become unintelligible to the average reader. The latter sections of the book, set in Georgia, feature a South too exaggerated in its overt racism to be believable at all. In today's political climate, every racist with any pretensions of gentility knows that it must be hidden, certainly not displayed in lawn ornaments. The inventive language is carried just a little too far, with a profusion of similes and metaphors, not all of which make much sense.

I recommend this novel, with reservations. It was long listed for the National Book Award and is considered a possible Pulitzer contender, but I believe it to be too tied to this specific time and too hipster-tinged to win that prize.