Winner of the Man Booker PrizeWinner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in FictionWinner of the John Dos Passos Prize for LiteratureNew York Times BestsellerLos Angeles Times Bestseller Named One of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book ReviewNamed a Best Book of the Year by Newsweek, The Denver Post, BuzzFeed, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers WeeklyNamed a “Must-Read” by … the Year by Newsweek, The Denver Post, BuzzFeed, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly
Named a “Must-Read” by Flavorwire and New York Magazine’s “Vulture” Blog
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.
Fueled 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.
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There is nothing understated about this wonderful satire that outlandishly skewers racism through a black protagonist who reluctantly agrees, among other things, to be the master of a slave in a black populated rural community near Los Angeles. It deservedly won the Booker Prize. I rarely laugh out loud. However, I did while reading Paul Beatty’s brilliant novel.
Man Booker Prize winner gives satire a modernized urban lens. Um, slavery is back? And the book rides along the back seat of a bus in a long social experiment. If you like intelligent biting satirical humor written by an excellent writer, saddle up.
Very funny, bitter, and comic. Biting satire of the best kind, this rollicking tale set in Los Angeles, sort of, takes aim at so many confusing racial elements of American experience, it’s hard at times to know where he’s aiming. It is very funny if you like black humor, which I do. But it takes a powerful ironic sensibility to keep seeing fiction as fiction, when fact seems to overwhelm fiction on a regular basis. This is sort of a must-read for anyone wanting to know America’s confused racial horizon, or rather racial verticalities.
There are moments in life that make you believe one day everyone will hear you shouting. As a writer, I tend to think about it every time someone purchases one of my books. But in the process of writing, I guess most of us don’t even consider it. We shout to the page everything that bothers us. Some of us write gloomily, and others project the story on a different group of people so that readers will not immediately guess where the scream is coming off. Some writers write sad while others use a romantic style. And there’s Paul Beatty who writes precisely the way I like to read. Without fear nor restraint, he builds an imaginary world that is so similar to the world we live in today. And into his whole story, he brings in sarcasm and humor and unforgettable scenes. Do not be mistaken for a moment. No, it’s a book that requires concentration and sometimes skipping over certain parts to get back to them later. Sometimes this book should be treated as adults refer to adolescent youth; To know that it is growing up, to ignore the nonsense and to filter them out, to be angry with him when necessary, and mainly to contain and accept him. Understand that this is its way of describing and living the world. And once you realize that you are now the guest in the imaginary life of this book, you will enjoy it in the first reading and even more in second.
I won’t tell details from the plot so as not to spoil your enjoyment of reading; besides you got the back cover to say all that is necessary to begin with. I will only recommend this excellent read; that is – If I heard the scream through the layer of the text itself, this book is worth every cent!
Little Rascals reimagined
I’ve been telling everyone I meet to listen to this audiobook for at least three years now. It’s perfect. It’s like a word-magician combined the crass hilarity of Dave Chappelle with the literary ramblings of Murakami. If you’ve ever wanted those two things combined, this is it.
The great mystery surrounding this book is why there haven’t been dozens more like it in the years since Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Ellison’s novel and this one belong together and can almost be said to riff off of each other. It’s as though Beatty is as aware of this as anyone, so he tries to cram every event and issue related to Black and White conflicts over the past 70 years or so into the story.
The basic plot is, one day, a man living in a tiny abandoned African-American community called Dickens in South Los Angeles decides to paint a white line around the entire perimeter of the town. He seems to do it, in part, to help with his grieving as he attempts to process his father’s murder by police during a routine traffic stop. Again, there should be more books like this one if only for the fact that these incidents keep happening. There are too many people like the narrator whose lives have been derailed by bad policing. But where are all the books? In Invisible Man, Ellison showed us 1940s America through African-American eyes and what we saw looked like a fever dream or paranoid drug trip in which the surroundings are shape-shifty and hostile. We sense we are being conned by the white race and much of our own too, but everyone else insists that we are the actual problem. It isn’t possible to write such books using modernist craft techniques, so Ellison and Beatty don’t bother. These are post-modern stories in which it isn’t possible to portray reality as it is because it’s a special reality accessible only to people of color. So Beatty simply shows us America as it seems to the hero. It’s a world in which he can recall the numerous times his father seemed to use him as a human guinea pig in impromptu social experiments. He remembers, from infancy, his dad tying one hand behind his back to see if he could still learn to crawl. Another time his dad dropped him in front of an all-white store and ordered him to whistle at a white woman. The hero has an obsession with the 1930s Our Gang comedies featuring Buckwheat aka William Thomas Jr and dissects the brand of racism they represent as though they are just as relevant now as they were back then. And apparently they are. He admits a series of emotional problems and one of the worst is his struggle to connect with other black people. He is haunted by phantom guilt for something he hasn’t done, but is worried that he has. But if you only read this book and not Invisible Man, this is only unsettling. It’s when you pair them — and the heroes of both books are suffering the same alienation 70 years apart — that our failure to progress becomes truly obvious.
Simply brilliant!
This book covers so many current and relevant topics it is hard to list here. Some lightly and some in serious depth, all with a wonderful eye for irony and contradiction. Suffice to say that the book starts out with a black man in contemporary times who is facing charges as a slaveowner and whose case has gone all the way to the Supreme Court. Things get whacky after that.
brilliant!! again: brilliant.
Crazy but great!
Some funny bits but it wears thin after a while. Hard to believe it won the Booker prize.
Different kind of read. OK book
Took me awhile to get past reading words I find offensive, then the wit and cynicism shines through. I had to look up quite a few words.