The Sellout: A Novel

I loved this book. It’s a stream of consciousness with weird dream-logic that coheres and pushes right the way through the story. I though at times it - or I - would lose the thread, but we never did. I will be thinking about this book for a long time to come and look forward to reading the rest of Paul Beatty’s work. This is obviously a masterpiece. Intoxicating, high speed satire that leaves you thrilled and befuddled. Beautiful prose and fantastical ideas throw a vicious reality into ugly relief.

I wasn’t sure about this book and it did take me a few chapters to get stuck in to what became the craziest rollercoaster ride of absolute highs and lows. Beautifully articulate; this booker raises questions of race, colour identity and history but it’s digestible without making you feel like you’re reading a history text, it’s all there. We owe it to ourselves to read uncomfortable literature that poses questions and continues to bleed into our daily life. I look forward to reading more books by this author.

I resolved to read three types of books this summer: books touching on law, Booker Prize winners and – having attended a #blacklivesmatter seminar in the spirit of educating myself – more books by black authors. So upon retrieving The Sellout by Paul Beatty (a black author, check) from my Booker Prize shelf (check) and discovering from the blurb that the narrator winds up in the US Supreme Court (touching on law, check), which sits smack bang in the Reuleaux triangle at the heart of my three order Venn diagram, I thought I'd found my ideal summer read. Firstly, the law. As the novel opens, the case of Me v The United States of America is about to commence in the Supreme Court. The black narrator (whose surname is Me, his ancestors having dropped the redundant E from Mee) is on trial. He received a letter, signed "The People of the United States of America", telling him his case would be heard, almost as though he'd won a prize. Perhaps this is an early comment on the erratic manner in which so-called justice is meted out almost at random if you're a black American. Very little of the novel is concerned explicitly with the law. The court case bookends the action: only the Prologue and the penultimate section are set inside the Courtroom. The bulk relates the narrator's upbringing and how he came to commit his alleged crimes. Nevertheless, the text is concerned with justice throughout, in particular racial injustice. Secondly, the author. It might be naive to read a book by a black, American author and not to expect to be confronted with some black American themes. Beatty's novel was published in 2015 and won the Booker Prize the following year. Asked what he was responding to with this novel, Beatty said, "myself, I guess." This evasion is hard to believe given his focus on racial politics and that he wrote at a time when Black Lives Matter was gaining considerable traction in the form of protests that have only now been eclipsed by the exponential growth of the movement after the death of George Floyd in May this year. In 2014, Eric Garner and teenaged Michael Brown died at the hands of policemen in Staten Island, New York and Ferguson, Missouri respectively. In the wake of that scandal, The Washington Post and ABC News conducted a survey exploring how much faith people had in the US justice system. Half of the white Americans surveyed said people of all races are treated equally in the justice system. Belying this faith in the myth of a post-racial America, only 1 in 10 African Americans said that black people receive equal treatment in the justice system. The Sellout explicitly tackles police brutality. Inexplicably, the blurb and the plot summary on Goodreads both state "his father is killed in a drive-by shooting". Presumably this was written by someone at the publishing company who hadn't taken the trouble to rea...

Bonbon Me grew up on a farm in Dickens, California, a city adjoining Los Angeles. He is raised by his sociology professor father, his mother long gone. His father is consumed with theories about racial discrimination and spends his time writing about the subject and conducting experiments on Bonbon when not spending time in the Dum Dum Intellectual Society, which he founded. Bonbon grows up unsure what to do. He raises the best produce around, surfs, and tries to decide how a man should live. When Dickens is subsumed by L.A., completely wiped off the map, Bonbon has had enough. He makes it his mission to return Dickens to its former status, as lowly as that had been. But how to get attention to a poor, inner-city area that no one is particularly interested in? Almost by accident, Bonbon hits on a plan. As a birthday present for his best friend, Hominy Jenkins, he turns his on-again, off-again girlfriend's city bus into a replica of the old time buses Hominy would have ridden as a child when he was a minor character on the TV show, The Little Rascals. Hominy is consumed by the past and the racial humiliations he and other black men have endured. He declares that he is Bonbon's slave and shows up every day to do whatever work he decides needs doing. When the bus incident turns out to have a surprising result, Bonbon realizes he has hit on a plan. The threat of overt segregation causes the bus's riders to up their behavior and pull together to rail against the threat. Spurred on, Bonbon, with the help of the local principal, creates a totally false 'exclusive' school which is across the street from the local school where students are mired in failure. Once again, it unites the students and spurs them to improved academic performance. The ploys land Bonbon in front of the Supreme Court as he is arrested on various charges and the case is sent ever higher. This work of satire has garnered much praise. It was the 2016 winner of the Man Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and one of the 10 Best Books of 2015 of the New York Times Book Review. Beatty has written extensively about the black experience and how differently white and black society experiences it. The novel's biting satire and depiction of how prejudice seeps into every institution and encounter spotlights it into a blinding light. This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction and those interested in a diverse society.

Stuff that was supposed to be funny was just absurd. Stream-of-consciousness, run-on sentences made it hard to find the point. Off-puttingly vulgar. Were the f-word and n-word used so much to desensitize us? In place of emotional engagement and fully-formed characters? I considered stopping after the first act, but plodded through to the end, hoping for a payoff that never came. Some thought-provoking ideas, but delivered with a sledge hammer rather than wit and insight. I guess it's a critic's book. I picked it because I saw it on 2 "best of the decade" lists and someone called it the next Great American Novel. So I guess I am supposed to like it, and tried to like it, but ultimately saw that the emperor had no clothes.