From Berkeley to Braggsville, Ga., for a faux lynching: What could go wrong?

The most dazzling, most unsettling, most oh-my-God-listen-up novel you’ll read this year is called “Welcome to Braggsville.” The 44-year-old author, T. Geronimo Johnson’s shockingly funny story pricks every nerve of the American body politic.

“Braggsville” lashes self-satisfied liberals in the academy and self-deluded Confederates in the attic.

The story opens with Johnson’s scat-singing introduction to a polite white teen from Georgia named D’aron Little May Davenport. His whole life, D’aron has been mocked and bullied for his academic skill — a sure sign of wimpiness and questionable sexual orientation in a community that “produced more Special Forces soldiers per capita than any other town in America.”

Desperate to get out of Braggsville, D’aron composes a series of college application essays that would excite any admissions officer’s savior complex.

So he ends up at the postmodern, hypersensitive, nonessentializing, gender-neutral world of the University of California at Berkeley. Satirizing this politically correct world is tantamount to euthanizing fish in a cruelty-free barrel.

Dazzled by the foreign nomenclature, the “designer-sneaker Zapatistas” and the rainbow of races, D’aron arrives like some Southern-fried Candide.

The whole novel turns on a stray comment in a class called “American History, X, Y, and Z: Alternative Perspectives”: D’aron mentions that his hometown stages a Civil War re-enactment during its Pride Week Patriot Days Festival. The class is shocked.

“They’d heard tell of Civil War re-enactments,” Johnson writes, “but they were still occurring? The War Between the States was another time and another country. As was the South. Are barbers still surgeons? Is there still sharecropping?”

Immediately, a potentially disastrous plan is born: D’aron and his friends will travel back to his hometown on spring break and stage a “performative intervention”: a mock lynching.

“You can force States’ Rights to take a look in the mirror,” the professor crows, “and they will not like what they see.”

From that bizarre premise hangs this disturbing story. The trip to Braggsville — population 712 — lets Johnson descend into the fetid pool of Southern pride that still romanticizes the antebellum era.

D’aron’s parents and neighbors are perfectly pleasant people who just happen to have black lawn jockeys in their yards and racist bumper stickers on their trucks. It’s all in fun — Don’t you get it?

Everybody knows that the black people who live way off on the other side of town in the Gully are happy there. And that enormous Confederate flag wrapped around the watchtower? Just a symbol of civic pride.

When the ill-conceived plan goes horribly wrong, the narrative begins to bend and fracture — a virtual reflection of America’s crafty efforts to disguise and obfuscate its history of racial violence.

In light of new research from the Equal Justice Initiative about the prevalence of lynchings and the country’s demonic success at rendering them historically invisible, this extraordinary novel could not be more relevant. With young D’aron, Johnson forces us to consider our determined ignorance and naivete. Part of growing up in America, he knows, is learning how to negotiate that national amnesia.

Welcome to Braggsville. It’s about time.

Ron Charles, The Washington Post

This story was originally published March 13, 2015 at 7:00 AM.