Paul Beatty

A biting satire by the author of The White Boy Shuffle traces a young man's isolated upbringing and a racially charged trial that sends him to the Supreme Court.

A Novel

The Sellout

Nadya

He showed up late to the grand jury indictment, but Hampton's services were worth every dime. I told him I couldn't afford to do jail time. I had crops coming in and one of the mares was scheduled to foal in about two days. With this knowledge in tow, he strolled into the hearing, brushing leaves off his suit jacket and flicking twigs from his perm, carrying a bowl of fruit and talking about "As a farmer, my client is an indispensable member of a minority community well documented for being malnourished and underfed. He's never left the state of California, owns a twenty-year-old pickup truck that runs on fucking ethanol, which is next to impossible to find in this city, and thus he's not a flight risk..."

In the middle of my first Little League game at bat, Mark Torres, a lanky fireballer whose stuff was hard as a teenage erection and, like that first sexual encounter, preternaturally fast, threw me an 0-2 fastball that neither I nor the umpire saw and only presumed to be high and inside because of the windburn across my forehead. My father came storming out of the dugout. Not to impart any batting advice, but to hand me the famous photo of the Americann and Russian soldiers meeting at the Elbe River, shaking hands and celebrating the de facto end of World War II in the European theater. So what happened next? 

"America and the Soviet Union would go on to fight a Cold War lasting nearly fifty years and forcing each country to spend trillions of dollars on self-defense in a pyramid scheme Dwight D. Eisenhower would term the Military Industrial Complex."

Charisma had summoned me to read the business letter that accompanied the mailed edition of Foy Cheshire's latest reimagined multicultural Of Rice and Yen, an all-Chinese adaptation of Steinbeck's classic set in the days of the railroad coolie. The book was a carbon copy of the original text sans articles and with all the Is and rs transposed. Maybe evelybody in whore damn wolrd scaled, aflaid each other. I'll never understand why after over a half century of Charlie Chan's Number One Son, the dude in Smashing Pumpkins, text, dope-ass music producers, skateboarders, and docile Asian wives married to white guys in hardware store commercials, people like Foy Cheshire still think the yen is Chinese currency and that Asian-Americans can't pronounce their fucking ls.

Normally each gang, each hood, uses the park on the day designated to rep their "hood." For instance, the Six-Trey Street Sniper City Killers reserve the park for June 3, because June is the sixth month of the year, and trey means three. 

But since the advent of the variable-rate home loan, most of the VSBs have been priced out of their turf by wine bars, holistic medicine shops, and edgy movie stars who've erected fifteen-foot-high cherrywood walls around quarter-acre bungalows turned into $2 million compounds. Now, whenever the vast majority of the Venice Seaside Boys want to "put in work" and defend their turf, they have to commute from faraway places like Palmdale and Moreno Valley. And it's no fun anymore when your enemy refuses to fight back. Not for lack of bravery or ammunition, but from fatigue. Too tired from fighting three hours of freeway traffic and road closures to pull the trigger.

Not Responsible for Scratches, Dents, and Items Left in the Subconscious

Sometimes in homage to my father, if Hominy was on his lunch break or asleep in the truck, I'd enter wearing Dad's white lab coat and carrying a clipboard. I'd hand the owner my card and explain that I was with the Federal Department of Racial Injustice, and was conducting a monthlong study on the effects of "racial segregation on the normative behaviors of the racially segregated." Id offer them a flat fifty-dollar fee and three signs to choose from: BLACK, ASIAN, AND LATINO ONLY; LATINO, ASIAN, AND BLACK ONLY; and NO WHITES ALLOWED. I was surprised how many small-business people offered to pay me to display the NO WHITES ALLOWED sign. And like most social experiments, I never did the promised follow-up, but after the month was up, it wasn't unusual to get calls from the proprietors asking Dr. Bonbon if they could keep the signs in the windows because they made their clientele feel special. "The customers love it. It's like they belong to a private club that's public!" 

Keep this under your hat, but over the next few months the resegregation of Dickens was kind of fun. Unlike Hominy, I've never had a real job, and even though it didn't pay, driving around town with Hominy as the African-American Igor to my evil social scientist was sort of empowering, even though we were mocking the notion of being powerless. Monday through Friday at exactly one o'clock he'd be out front standing next to the truck.

I don't know what I expected from trying to restore Dickens to a glory that never existed. Even if Dickens were to one day be officially recognized, there'd be no fanfare or fireworks. No one would ever bother to erect a statue of me in the park or name an elementary school after me. There'd be none of the head rush Jean Baptiste Point du Sable and William Overton must've felt when they planted their flags in Chicago and Portland. After all, it wouldn't be like I founded or discovered anything. I was just brushing the dirt off an artifact that had never really been buried, so when I arrived home to Hominy, he excitedly unsaddled my horse. Eager to show me some newly disambiguated entry in an online encyclopedia written by some anonymous scholar:

Dickens is an unincorporated city in southwest Los Angeles County. Used to be all black, now there's hella Mexicans. Once known as the murder capital of the world, shit ain't so bad as it used to be, but don't trip. 

Yes, if Dickens ever became a real place again, in all likelihood Hominy's wide smile would be all the reward I'd ever receive. 

Electrifying, you’d either love this or hate it. But I think it’s worth a shot to find out which it is.  

Xiang

Gavin

[Ta-Nehisi] Coates and [Michelle] Alexander have gained wide audiences; their books are bestsellers, and they are celebrated across liberal media outlets. Their animating idea — that to overcome racism, the United States must discard any pretense to colorblindness — has become accepted across broad swathes of the mainstream Left. For better or worse, however, it marks a stark departure from King’s appeal that skin color should be ignored. The battle between colorblindness and active anti-racism will have enormous consequences for American society. 
  


- Christian Gonzalez


  
In attempting to restore his community through reintroducing precepts, namely segregation and slavery, that, given his cultural history, have come to define his community despite the supposed unconstitutionality and nonexistence of these concepts, he’s pointed out a fundamental flaw in how we as Americans claim we see equality.

‘I don’t care if you’re black, white, brown, yellow, red, green, or purple.’ We’ve all said it... He’s painting everybody over, painting this community purple and green, and seeing who still believes in equality.
  


- a judge in The Sellout


The Sellout is filled with racism and racists - for one thing, the nearly-nameless protagonist, the Sellout, brings back segregated busses and schools, and (reluctantly) owns a volunteer slave - but the book is clearly itself not racist. (I can even quantify how much racism's in it: at one point a pompous character counts the slurs in Huckleberry Finn, arguing for censoring it:

  
This is serious. Brother Mark Twain uses the ‘n-word’ 219 times. That’s .68 ‘n-words’ per page in toto.
  



Well, including 'weren*r' and 'n*rized', etc, Beatty manages 146, or 0.52 a page. It feels like more.)

That isn't the confusing bit; what is, is that none of the presented racists are white; in fact no substantial characters are. (The single named white person is present for all of seven pages, and is merely innocently patronising.) We could stretch and say that this is Beatty exclaiming at internalised racism. Or it could be a unusual claim about where racism (in the established sense of propositional or emotional racism, as opposed to structural racism) is openly expressed now: among nonwhites. (Or he could seriously just be trolling.) 

Further, it isn't just a Modest Proposal, despite the prevalence of this mistake of interpretation. A modest proposal is the deadpan presentation of a policy to make the reader realise that it is disgusting. In The Sellout, separatism and degradation work, they improve Dickens for the segregated: the policies are popular, grades go up, crime goes down, and people are polite within and without race categories. What is this saying?

It's hard to work out Beatty's schtick, partly because the whole of the first 100 pages is a string of horrible and bravura one-liners, from "black literature sucks":

  I’m so fucking tired of black women always being described by their skin tones! Honey-colored this! Dark-chocolate that! My paternal grandmother was mocha-tinged, café-au-lait, graham-fucking-cracker brown!

How come they never describe the white characters in relation to foodstuffs and hot liquids? Why aren’t there any yogurt-colored, egg-shell-toned, string-cheese-skinned, low-fat-milk white protagonists in these racist, no-third-act-having books? That’s why black literature sucks!



to


  Maybe race had nothing to do with it. Maybe Rosa Parks didn’t give up her seat because she knew the guy to be unapologetically gassy or one of those annoying people who insists on asking what you’re reading, then without prompting tells you what he’s reading, what he wants to read, what he regrets having read, what he tells people he’s read but really hasn’t read. So like those high school white girls who have after-school sex with the burly black athlete in the wood shop, and then cry rape when their fathers find out, maybe Rosa Parks, after the arrest, the endless church rallies, and all the press, had to cry racism, because what was she going to say: “I refused to move because the man asked me what I was reading”? Negroes would’ve lynched her.
  



to


  I’d rather be called ‘nigger’ than ‘giantess’ any day of the week.”


“Problematic,” someone muttered - invoking the code word black thinkers use to characterize anything or anybody that makes them feel uncomfortable, impotent, and painfully aware that they don’t have the answers to questions and assholes like me.






Reviewers resolve this, in their neat way, by saying that Beatty is satirising "race in America". But that doesn't mean anything: Beatty is indiscriminate: mocking stereotyped black behaviour and police brutality, and pious diversity pushers, and white arrogance, and classic Civil Rights heroes, and radical black intellectuals, and assimilated Establishment black elites, and colorblind universalists. So, you can say "it satirises [more or less every position you can take on] race in America". But what's the point of doing that? 



I can think of three: 1) to say that there is no sensible position on this seething topic; or 2) to say that we haven't found it yet and must move past the existing positions, or 3) to use the nasty symmetry between the racist and the active anti-racist, to reflect well on Coatesian justice - maybe the thought is: 'colorblind egalitarianism is such a mad idea that even naked nineteenth-century racism is superior to it'.) 

I don't know which (if any) is Beatty's view. I know I don't agree. There's nothing actually wrong with MLK's principle, judge absolutely everyone on their own merits rather than treating them as a representative of their race or sex or anything, though it has usually been poorly realised.

But I respect the chutzpah of pissing everyone off. If nothing else it's original and bullshit-free, two rare predicates around here.


  

  I’m not sure what Unmitigated Blackness is, but whatever it is, it doesn’t sell. Unmitigated Blackness is simply not giving a fuck. Clarence Cooper, Charlie Parker, Richard Pryor, Maya Deren, Sun Ra, Mizoguchi, Frida Kahlo, black-and-white Godard, Céline, Gong Li, David Hammons, Björk, and the Wu-Tang Clan in any of their hooded permutations. Unmitigated Blackness is essays passing for fiction. It’s the realization that there are no absolutes, except when there are. It’s the acceptance of contradiction not being a sin and a crime but a human frailty like split ends and libertarianism. Unmitigated Blackness is the realization that as fucked up as it all is, sometimes it’s nihilism that makes life worth living.
  



or 

  
Daddy never believed in closure. He said it was a false psychological concept. Something invented by therapists to assuage white Western guilt. In all his years of study and practice, he’d never heard a patient of color talk of needing “closure.” They needed revenge. They needed distance. Forgiveness and a good lawyer maybe, but never closure. He said people mistake suicide, murder, lap band surgery, interracial marriage, and overtipping for closure, when in reality what they’ve achieved is erasure.

The problem with closure is that once you have a taste of it, you want it in every little aspect of your life. Especially when you’re bleeding to death, and your slave, who is in full rebellion, is screaming,... you attempt to stanch the bleeding with a waterlogged copy of Vibe magazine someone has left in the gutter. Kanye West has announced, “I am rap!” Jay-Z thinks he’s Picasso. And life is fucking fleeting.
  



Here's what I think is going on: It's hard to get through to people with the usual homilies and pieties, because they are deadened by cliché, bureaucratic muscle, tribalism, and historical ineffectualness. After hundreds of pages of troublingly hilarious japes (including ironic delight in old racist tv shows), Beatty has softened you up, left bare the old wound. That all may be healed, all must be shown.




 (c) Richard Vogel (2016)


So, is the Sellout a charming pervert? A self-hating masochist? Or a nihilist with moral purpose?



Spoiler! It's the first and third. Beatty has no answer and is again brave enough to say so; the book's last page admits no synthesis can win over that particular sceptic: Obama isn't enough, nothing is enough:


  
I remember the day after the black dude was inaugurated, Foy Cheshire, proud as punch, driving around town in his coupe, honking his horn and waving an American flag. He wasn’t the only one celebrating; the neighborhood glee wasn’t O. J. Simpson getting acquitted or the Lakers winning the 2002 championship, but it was close. Foy drove past the crib and I happened to be sitting in the front yard husking corn. “Why are you waving the flag?” I asked him. “Why now? I’ve never seen you wave it before.” He said that he felt like the country, the United States of America, had finally paid off its debts. “And what about the Native Americans? What about the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mexicans, the poor, the forests, the water, the air, the fucking California condor? When do they collect?” I asked him.

He just shook his head at me. Said something to the effect that my father would be ashamed of me and that I’d never understand. And he’s right. I never will.
  



The protagonist segregates, and says things like this:


  
I’m a farmer, and farmers are natural segregationists. We separate the wheat from the chaff. I’m not Rudolf Hess, P. W. Botha, Capitol Records, or present-day U.S. of A. Those motherfuckers segregate because they want to hold on to power. I’m a farmer: we segregate in an effort to give every tree, every plant, every poor Mexican, every poor nigger, a chance for equal access to sunlight and water; we make sure every living organism has room to breathe.
  




And yet he is not a separatist; he knows it's wrong when the minorities are shouted out of the public space:


  
What the fuck you honkies laughing at?” he shouted. More chuckling from the audience. The white couple howling the loudest. Slapping the table. Happy to be noticed. Happy to be accepted. “I ain’t bullshitting! What the fuck are you interloping motherfuckers laughing at? Get the fuck out!”


There’s nothing funny about nervous laughter. The forced way it slogs through a room with the stop-and-start undulations of bad jazz brunch jazz. The black folks and the round table of Latinas out for a night on the town knew when to stop laughing. The couple didn’t. The rest of us silently sipped our canned beer and sodas, determined to stay out of the fray. They were laughing solo because this had to be part of the show, right?

“Do I look like I’m fucking joking with you? This shit ain’t for you. Understand? Now get the fuck out! This is our thing!” 

No more laughter. Only pleading, unanswered looks for assistance, then the soft scrape of two chairs being backed, quietly as possible, away from the table. The blast of cold December air and the sounds of the street. The night manager shutting the doors behind them, leaving little evidence that the white people had ever been there except for an unfulfilled two-drink, three-donut minimum.

When I think about that night, the black comedian chasing the white couple into the night, their tails and assumed histories between their legs, I don’t think about right or wrong. No, when my thoughts go back to that evening, I think about my own silence. Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it’s fear. I guess that’s why I’m so quiet and such a good whisperer, nigger and otherwise. It’s because I’m always afraid. Afraid of what I might say. What promises and threats I might make and have to keep. That’s what I liked about the man, although I didn’t agree with him when he said, “Get out. This is our thing.” I respected that he didn’t give a fuck. But I wish I hadn’t been so scared, that I had had the nerve to stand in protest. Not to castigate him for what he did or to stick up for the aggrieved white people... but I wish I’d stood up to the man and asked him a question: “So what exactly is our thing?
  




Which is my laughter, but not my flight. The Sellout doesn't have an ism: they are all found wanting. I'm just glad it is still possible to explore this godforsaken crater without being screamed down. I'm glad Beatty didn't let it get to him, even if he leaves the Sellout hanging.

Prashanth Srivatsa

"True freedom," Hominy declares, "is having the right to be a slave."
From the first turn, the Sellout is scathing, honest and hilarious to the point of public giggles. Set in the town of Dickens that is literally wiped off the maps, the Sellout, dripping with satire, is about an unnamed black man who sets about restoring the identity of his town by bringing back slavery and racial segregation. Beatty ruthlessly drives nails into the coffin of the American dream and it's as much a joy to watch him take the masks off social facades as it is painful to see the grim reality of white supremacy and the prevailing racism.

Dee B. 

He's stolen all of my words...and now I don't have any to describe what a masterpiece this book was. Bravo.

Arden Kowalski

I love satire and I love books that talk about politics and law, so I thought I would like The Sellout by Paul Beatty. Sadly, this was not the case. I found that the writing quality was not particularly good and quite inconsistent throughout the novel. I also couldn't understand what the repeated descriptions of parent-inflicted brutality meant to illustrate. This had a great conception and a nice prologue, but quickly fell apart in the trappings of its plot and the weakness of its messaging.

Ryan Nylander

Any comedy that takes on the subject of Black pain & racial trauma in America will necessarily be a black comedy. These disturbing and absurd scenarios don't typically lend themselves to humor, but Beatty dives in with enthusiasm. Sellout is a dark satire worthy of golden-age Chappelle (before he got lazy and started punching down at Trans people).

It will be lost on many readers that Sellout is a lot of fun. Like all the best writing happening around racial oppression in our current moment, it isn't designed to hold the hands of white readers, or reassure us that we're the good ones. It's clearly fucked-up for us to laugh at any of this at all. We are left to either move on and gentrify a different book, or simply buckle-up for the ride, accompanying guilt in-tow.

Meet Beatty where he is, then, and the reader is rewarded with a blasphemous thing: a novel, published on the eve of the Trump presidency (a historical event that threatens to render satire obsolete), that has the audacity to engage racial oppression in America with humor. One can be forgiven for wondering why the vast majority of the injustices in the novel seem to be perpetrated by Beatty's Black characters. Read between the lines, and we see the scars of police violence and economic inequality on traumatized people, who long, tragically, for a past when things at least made sense.

Maxime van der Wal

4-4.5 stars
Now, this is a satire! It's been a while since I've chuckled aloud this much while reading, so thank you Paul Beatty. That is not to say this is a lighthearted book - it isn't. Beatty uses humour to provide social commentary on topics such as racism and integration, and does so incredibly well. Somehow he's able to be both blunt and subtle, funny and serious, sad and hopeful at the same time. There were a lot of references I didn't get - as I'm not the audience this was written for - and Beatty's complex writing style gave me a bit of a headache, but I thorougly enjoyed this overall.

Amanda Wells

I feel like I should probably wait a while before giving my review on this book. My first instinct is - wow. I did not really know what to expect going in, but from the first chapter I was intrigued by the narrative voice and the protagonist. 

Scattered throughout the book are truths (harsh and otherwise) that almost struck me dumb, or had me clicking my fingers like I was at reading. 

I don't know how I feel about all the race stuff in the book - I'm a white Australian who has never experienced racially based discrimination - but I know that I loved "Me", and reckon this book should be read in highschools. (Liberal highschools that don't have parents who overreact based on individual words rather than context).

Maytal

This is the funniest book I have ever read!

Laura

Oh my goodness. This is one of the funniest, most thought provocative books I have ever written. It has some amazing quotes. Some are funny like "But when I'd ask him how, he'd just shrug, and like a conservative senator without any ideas, filibuster me with unrelated stories about the good ol' days." There are also serious quotes like "Silence can be either protest or consent, but most of the time it's fear." Its hard for a written to make you think deeply, but also make you laugh as hard as the deepness you think. This is the kind of book that gets assigned in school and it sparks an aha moment that reading actually can be pretty epic. This is a great read, I feel really blessed to have read it within the first three months after it was released.

Frederik Van den Bril

If Dave Chapelle and Kurt Vonnegut made a love-baby, named it D'quan and send the boy to Harvard, this book would be the result. There's a sharp joke and witty observation on every page. Like the real savage LOL stuff. I would love to quote some but I would have to start quoting everything. 
Reading the book, I was reminded of Kendrick Lamar's brilliant album 'To Pimp a Butterfly'. After the album came out in 2015, critics and cultural journalists produced a plethora of long-form pieces writing on "the overwhelming blackness", "racial empowerment", "black humanism", etc. If To Pimp A Butterfly was the blackest album that came out in a long time, The Sellout is the blackest book. For me, the book has the same urgency, nuance, anger and wisdom as that album. Plus it adds a profound layer, using humour to address issues that are very hard to talk off, as all good satire does. Maybe it needs to be stressed what an incredible feat this book is: the author wrote a funny book about slavery and racial relations, in 2016 nonetheless #BlackLivesMatter. And he pulls it off in an incredible humble and dignified way. 
I felt like I needed genius-annotations, there are smart cultural references flying around everywhere so much it sometimes left me feeling missing out on the joke. Its strength is maybe its only weakness; I was wondering: with so many cultural references, will this book stand the test of time? On the same note, the neck-breaking breath-taking tempo of constant jokes and cross-cultural references, there was sometimes too little time to reflect on the fundamental questions the author is really trying to raise. However, put on "Alright", "The Blacker the Berry" or some John Coltrane and just enjoy the ride. You’ll be surprised where it leaves you.

Nathan Griffin

Part of my extremely negative reaction to this lies in the fact that it was on basically every best-of list last year. Sure, it resonates at the same frequency as the current zeitgeist, but seeing so many people use words like "important" and "necessary" is really baffling. 

The thing about satire is that it can quickly become a one trick pony. This book does. Quickly. So instead of things like, oh, I don't know...plot...it's basically filled with a bunch of loud, raunchy jokes with some other stuff happening on the side. Which is fine for something like a standup comedy show, but not "important" and "necessary" books.

Daryl Houston

The mode Beatty adopts here is one that I don't love. There's something very off-hand about it, and that mixed with the absurd (which I'm ok with in general) kept the book from working for me on the whole, though there were certainly passages I liked. I couldn't help thinking back as I read this to the satire and absurdity of Giles Goat Boy, and to Pynchon in tedious absurdity mode. I've read a few books this year about being black in America, and so far I've found the older ones, the ones that dramatized something closer to reality, resonated more for me.

Henry Knollenberg

A kabel 

Charlie Beckerman

Raised in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens, on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles, the narrator of The Sellout resigned 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 the '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. Fuelled 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 further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident--the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins, he initiates the most extreme action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in front of the Supreme Court.

The Sellout A Novel

Reviews

Highlights