The Sellout

I hated this book. So much so that I wasn't able to bring myself to read anything else for a month after I finally powered through this (in retrospect, I shouldn't have been so stubborn about finishing it). Absolutely nothing about this book was funny to me - it made me sick to my stomach. I only realized while reading other reviews after I finished that all the horrible, mean, and offensive bits were supposed to be “satire” (maybe I missed this in part because of all of the pop culture references that I didn't get? Or maybe I just don't find horrific child abuse, mental illness, and sexism funny?). Clearly there's something here that's resonating with others but the humor just didn't connect for me.

I'm not sure if it was that this was the second satire I read in a row, or that I didn't connect with the subject at hand, or if it was just not my thing, but The Sellout just never quite clicked for me. This story opens up with our unnamed narrator (we get the last name, Me, but unless I missed something we never got a first name) watching his case go through oral argument at the Supreme Court. His case? He owns a slave and has re-segregated the school in his outlying Los Angeles community of Dickens, which has recently literally been taken off the map. Did I mention our protagonist is black?

We go back in time to get Me's whole story, from being homeschooled by his father, who uses him as a subject in various psychological/sociological experiments in the oddball agricultural community of Dickens, to his childhood friendship with Hominy, a cast member of the Little Rascals (who later pledges himself to Me as a slave after Me saves his life, much to Me's chagrin), to his long-running crush on his beautiful neighbor Marpessa, who drives a city bus, to his eventual decision to pretend there's an all-white charter magnet school going in across the street from the local school that's overwhelmingly attended by students of color, which winds up with him in front of the Supreme Court.

This was a book I read for my book club, and I was surprised to find I was one of the few for whom it didn't especially resonate. But as I listened to the others talk about how they found the satire refreshing for its bluntness and outrageous honesty about the state of race relations in America, I think maybe one of the reasons it fell a little flatter for me is that I'm on the younger side in that group and being more immersed in an internet culture where these issues are more on the forefront maybe made the punches land less hard, since they were more expected. In a world where Get Out was an enormously popular, Oscar-winning movie (and a good, interesting one that I personally really enjoyed), The Sellout's transgressive satire seems almost tame even though it's only a few years old.

To be sure, there are some brilliantly inspired moments (that opening Supreme Court scene, the Dum-Dum Intellectuals, the “sanitized” versions of racially-problematic novels), and if you're looking for a book that will be very up-front and sometimes uncomfortable (so many n-bombs!) about race in America, this is a very good book. Chattel slavery, and the institutionalized racism that persists to this day, is something that we're still struggling with. This book was written during the Obama era, when everyone was busily congratulating each other on living in a post-racial society, and the way it refuses to play along and pretend that was true feels eerily prescient given the election of Donald Trump. This book is smart, funny, and pulls zero punches (though those punches might not land quite as hard as they did even a few years ago, depending on what the dialogue you engage in looks like). It didn't quite ensnare me, but it's definitely worth reading.

Very funny satire about a black man, Bonbon, whose hometown Dickens, CA gets taken off the map because it is an embarrassment to the city of Los Angeles. Bonbon embarks on a project to put Dickens back on the map and in the process becomes a slaveowner and a segregationist. The book begins with Bonbon waiting to have his case heard by the Supreme Court, so the story of how all this came to be is told in a long, hilarious flashback.

Much of the humor in this book feels taboo, at least for white people, at least to share in public. So, part of the book's charm is having permission to laugh at things that it wouldn't be right to laugh at if your white colleague said them in the break room at work. These are touchy subjects, and rightly so. One of the things that makes it feel good to laugh is that the characters in this book are fully human. No one is a caricature. While the town of Dickens and some of its inhabitants may be something of an embarrassment, they are treated with love even while they are being laughed at.

There's a genius description of riding public transportation in LA that I would like to copy down and enjoy long after I return this book to the library.

I thought the story was longer than necessary, but it was a lot of fun to read. I think Paul Beatty is a genius.

This book was somewhat of a disappointing read for me. While Beatty writes intuitively and intellectually, many of the references littered throughout this novel were simple inaccessible for me. The satire was heavily bitter as well in this novel. As a reader I also finished the novel completely confused and unsure about what the main point of it's inception really was. The novel is hugely topical and as a intellectual human being I am aware of the current state of America and how race is presented and dealt with within that country. However I only felt a vulnerability and a clarity from the author in the very last pages of the novel which I found such a shame . The novel overall was unfortunately a struggle and chore to get through as every sentence and chapter is time consuming to fathom through and make narrative sense of. This author makes you work for his plot.This novel had some real promise but I felt it tried to hard to shock and be funny and as a consequence the real raw storytelling and soul searching elements of the narrative which I would have loved were lost. I really wanted to dissect the character of bonbon and homity and marpessa but their character development and inner motivations were stifled for elements of the story to thrive that for me were either dry or ostentatious. An unfortunate 2.5, at a push a 3 out of 5 stars. I couldn't connect with the content that made this novel an award winning piece unfortunately. However it's a very current and topical novel that is very interesting and unique.

When the book opens we're introduced to “The Sellout” getting incredibly high, awaiting trial at the Supreme Court for the crime of owning a slave and trying to re-segregate his tiny town of Dickens. And in the first chapter we're given a clear view about what to expect. Beatty is an author and a poet with a background in slam poetry and it shows in the prose. It's breakneck beats and syncopated syntax and hella fun.

Beatty doesn't skewer stereotypes but rather plays with all their permutations. When he gets on a roll his riffs are razor sharp. As with comedy, individual results may vary but he's got a bigger idea at play here than just making you laugh. So good.

The book consists of a torrent of wise cracks and jokes about post racial US society. As a novel, it doesn't have a strong structure or plot. The whole book gives you a feeling of watching a very long stand-up act about racism. Several of the jokes and observations are ingenious. The author deliberately avoids any meaningful characterisation and keeps them all two dimensional caricatures. Instead of weakening the novel, it makes you not to care for them and concentrate on the rants of the protagonist, which is actually the strong point of the book.

I feel the intention of the book is to criticise the attitude of modern society to avoid discussing of racial difference altogether. The author tries to put forward a view that it is better to go back to the old ways of segregation if there is no atmosphere to openly discuss and agree on racial differences. It is more difficult for the minor ethnicities to live in a society that obliterate it's identity and makes it conform, rather than giving it space to develop its culture. In the novel we can see that segregation leads to better performance of students and general uplifting of the quality of living. 

Read the full story here :

http://diaryofaragingbull.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-sellout-by-paul-beatty-loose.html

There was a moment during my time living in Washington DC that I will remember for the rest of my days; it was, perhaps, the most discomforting moment of my life.

My old knee injury, when it flares up quite badly, often requires me to walk with a cane. At the time of the discomforting incident, I was young, in my late 20s, and relatively healthy; the sight of me hobbling with a cane was definitely odd.

I had decided to take the metro home that fall afternoon, instead of walking to and from work as was my usual custom, and found myself returning to Northern Virginia on a very full train. A protest in front of the White House had just wrapped up, and many of the protestors were riding the metro back to their homes outside the city.

The nature of the protest, I don't quite remember, but I noticed very quickly that none of the protestors looked like me—my darker skin stood out, obviously, among many hostile glares—and I was glad that I was only traveling a few stops before alighting. As I got on the metro, a young boy who was seated next to his father right near the door noticed my hobbling and my cane and offered me his seat. Before I had the chance to thank him and gratefully decline, his father grabbed him by the arm, pulled him back into his seat, and loudly proclaimed so that everyone on the metro car could hear:

“We don't offer our seats or do nice things to people who look like that, okay? He's different than we are.”

The boy, who couldn't have been more than eight years old, frowned and returned to his seat. The rest of the train stared at me, and I spent the next few minutes in extreme discomfort until I limped off the train at my stop.

I'm reminded of that train ride, of that exchange, often. Being a minority in many of the places where I live, I'm often reminded that others may feel like I don't belong. It is an alienating feeling, a discomforting one.

I was reminded of that discomfort in the early pages of Paul Beatty's The Sellout, when he describes his journey into the District of Columbia for his Supreme Court hearing. I think of my discomfort traveling through DC that day, and I realize that in the end, Mr. Beatty's novel is inherently about discomfort as well.

There is discomfort in being from a place that no longer exists on a map. A discomfort from being seen as not-enough, or not-anything-at all. The reader is discomforted with the ease and with used when speaking about uncomfortable issues like slavery and segregation. Nobody and nothing in The Sellout is comfortable, and that is its greatest triumph.

“That's the problem with history, we like to think it's a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn't the paper it's printed on. It's memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.”

(The preceding was an overview of the notes I took while reading Paul Beatty's The Sellout in January 2017. Originally published on inthemargins.ca.)