Book Review: The Sellout by Paul Beatty (Picador, 2015)

I wasn’t familiar with Paul Beatty’s work before this past year when he became the first American to win the Man Booker Prize. Once I heard a little more about his style, I was eager to read The Sellout and it happily did not disappoint. The Sellout is satirical, uncomfortable, entertaining, eye-opening, and sometimes confusing. I want to say it’s timely, given the recent and ongoing racial tensions in the USA, but unfortunately those tensions are not exactly new. As Beatty demonstrates.

Our narrator, known by his neighbourhood nickname of Bonbon, of called The Sellout by others, or his last name Me (as in Me vs. The United States of America) is a lifelong resident of Dickens, an agrarian ghetto of Los Angeles with a largely minority population. So crime-ridden an embarrassment is Dickens that the powers that be decide to literally remove it from the map and pretend it no longer exists. In his efforts to bring Dickens back, our narrator gets his own slave and decides to reintroduce segregation. This has both its supporters and detractors.

The Sellout is deeply rooted in a particular black community and culture and is full of references to such. Some I’m familiar with and many were new to me. As I read, I found myself feeling very far from the target audience, as if Beatty’s narrator was speaking to a black reader and I happened to be listening in. And maybe that’s part of the point. This book isn’t for me and it doesn’t need to be. Which isn’t to say that I couldn’t enjoy it or even that I shouldn’t read it. It’s important to read literature that is entirely outside of our personal experience.

Beatty’s is one view and he offers this glimpse through both satire and truth so ridiculous it feels like it should be satire. The characters are larger than life, both hilarious and tragic. Beatty uses the n-word a lot, something I definitely found jarring though believable and effective within the context of Dickens and its residents. The last book I read that used the n-word frequently was William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun and although Beatty uses the word more frequently his usage felt more honest and less hateful.

The Sellout is the perfect first American pick for the Man Booker prize as a book that shines an uncomfortable but necessary spotlight on one of the major issues in North America right now.