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The Sellout by Paul Beatty was thrust into the limelight recently, as the latest recipient of the Man Booker Prize. This razor-sharp, unapologetic satire lays bare every stereotype surrounding race in the US, providing insight into a crucial issue whilst veiling it with a bold sense of humour.
From the very first line – “this may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything” – Beatty sets the provocative tone of the novel. The protagonist, whom we know only by his second name, Me, is on trial at the Supreme court – “Me vs the United States” – for attempting to reinstate slavery and segregation in Dickens, a city so embarrassing that it was removed from all maps. This is a novel that itches to raise eyebrows. Whether or not the reader actually enjoys the novel, it’s undeniably memorable.
The main body of the novel centres around the protagonist as he looks back on his life before he ended up on trial. Now a seller of weed and watermelons, the narrator tells of his isolated and dysfunctional upbringing at the hands of his father, a social scientist who used his son as the subject of his racially-charged experiments. Me’s father is later shot dead by Los Angeles police and this is one of the many indicators that at heart of the book’s foundations are political and racial outcry. Whilst the first half of the book proves exhilarating in its wicked wit, it seems to plateau as jokes laced with subliminal messages lose their novelty and grow tiring. Beatty maintains his bold, abrasive manner of writing but the novel ceases to gain momentum as the plot loses direction. The varying sub-plots, however, are still written with great colour and motivated me to keep going. What the characters lack in engagement, they make up for in the entertainment they provide. Particularly memorable is Hominy Jenkins, the last surviving Little Rascal, who finds purpose as a washed-up child-star in vowing to be Me’s personal slave, supporting him as he seeks to revive Dickens by means of reinstating racial segregation. “If apartheid united black South Africa, why couldn’t it do the same for Dickens?”
This is a novel that will leave you feeling more intelligent than when you first picked it up. The depiction of “post-racial America” is thought-provoking in its intentional subversion of negative cultural assumptions. From the root of each racial riff stems an important message that greater change is needed – and don’t you forget it. With the turn of each page, you realise you’re holding something important in your hands. For all of its hilarity, expect wry smiles as opposed to outright laughter, because for all of Beatty’s unabashed digs at cultural stereotypes and assumptions, the stark reality of The Sellout is hardly a laughing matter at all.
