The Sellout, by Paul Beatty

TITLE: The Sellout
AUTHOR: Paul Beatty

COPYRIGHT: 2015
PAGES: 304
PUBLISHER: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

SETTING: Contemporary US
TYPE: Fiction
SERIES: None

A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality—the black Chinese restaurant.

Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens—on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles—the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.

Fuelled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident—the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins—he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.

Another of my Man Booker reads.

The Sellout is satirical exploration of race in a supposedly post-racial USA. The plot, such as it is, involves the narrator's efforts to bring back the city of Dickens, a poor suburb of LA wiped off the maps by city planners too embarrassed by it to acknowledge its existence. So how will he do it? Why, by bringing back segregation and slavery!

The plot doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's not really meant to. Because the plot is not the point here. It's simply a backdrop for what's basically (and I'm totally stealing this from several amazon reviewers) an extended standup routine.

And it's great standup. The humour is ceaseless, with devastating one-liners and images coming fast and keeping coming. It's not the kind of humour that makes you laugh-out-loud, but the kind that makes you wince, because it's a bit too true. Beatty creates a fully-realised world, populated by characters who feel real even when they accept the absurdist occurrences Beatty throws at them with complete naturalness.

My only "issue" is that this is very much a book about the US experience of race, so at certain times I felt that I was missing some of the references (this book is so dense with meaning that I could very well believe that every single word and image choice is chosen for a very particular reason). But I got enough that the book worked perfectly well for me, anyway.

I should also mention that I listened to this one on audio, which might well be the best way to read it. The narrator, Prentice Onayemi, is fantastic, and the audio emphasises the "standup" element.

MY GRADE: A strong B+.