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The Sellout A Novel Paul Beatty Books

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The Sellout A Novel Paul Beatty Books

This is a true 21st century masterpiece.

Mr. Beatty is clearly the literary and spiritual heir of Mark Twain and Richard Pryor. Potential readers should be aware of the heavy use of racial epithets and curse words. The language is appropriate for the subject and the characters. This book will be banned in some schools and libraries by people who either (a) haven't read it or (b) don't understand that Mr. Beatty has told this story in order to critique our society.

It's extraordinarily funny. There are many many laugh out loud moments and scenes that you'll want to read over again. There is a scene in the first third of the book where the protagonist's father advises him about dealing with hard tasks as a young man. His father told him to not focus on the pain of the task, but rather the pay off later. The protagonist says, "So slaves would have been better off if they just thought of it as 'gardening?'" And his father responded by giving him a beating. (It reads better then how I've rewritten it)

Underneath the humor are moments of biting commentary - (I'll paraphrase here): "The best man for the job is actually a woman, a black woman, who works on the second floor. She'll be passed over."

Mr. Beatty won the Man Booker Prize for this in October in 2016. He deserves every award, accolade and 5-star review thrown his way.


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The Sellout A Novel Paul Beatty Books Reviews

Who writes like this? I asked myself, having been overwhelmed with satiric jabs after about 25 densely written pages. Ishmael Reed? And then why compare Beatty only to another black writer? Was that racist? Woody Allen wrote this densely, stories full of caricatures and outrageous situations, but New-York-Jewish in subject, and then only a few pages long, not an entire novel. Surely Beatty couldn't keep it up.

But by page 227 his comic inventions were still going strong. Here the protagonist converts the "long out-of-business brushless car wash" in his L.A. ghetto into a "tunnel of whiteness" for the local children, with "several race wash options"

Regular Whiteness
Benefit of the Doubt
Higher Life Expectancy
Lower Insurance Premiums

Deluxe Whiteness
Regular Whiteness Plus
Warnings instead of Arrests from the Police
Decent Seats at Concerts and Sporting Events
World Revolves Around You and Your Concerns

Super Deluxe Whiteness
Deluxe Whiteness Plus Jobs with Annual Bonuses
Military Service Is for Suckers
Legacy Admission to College of Your Choice
Therapists That Listen
Boats That You Never Use
All Vices and Bad Habits Referred to as "Phases"
Not Responsible for Scratches, Dents, and Items Left in the Subconscious

By "dense," I mean that almost every sentence contains a comic explosion, a twist, something that leaves you breathless or laughing out loud. Who does that? I thought of Barry Hannah, a Southern writer now gone. I think Hannah would have admired Beatty and recognized a literary kinsman. Also, something about Beatty's writing seemed to come from African-American oratory, its ornateness maybe, like Stanley Crouch's writing about jazz, but it wasn't self-conscious. Certainly the point of view was uniquely African-American, and I'm sure as a white reader I missed some of the inside humor. But plenty hit home with me, and would with almost any other half-alert citizen of this great land.

Speaking of which this is a horrible time in our culture—with everyone's cell phones recording the underbelly of brutal racist policing, with political reactionaries running amok—to be attempting satire. It damn well better be funny. Beatty succeeds with a scenario that's not only side-splitting but right up to the minute. (I'm tempted to give more examples but will forbear) He's brilliant. (He's also profane and vulgar, as how could he not be? The n-word alone is used probably 1000 times)

Chris Rock can be devastatingly funny sometimes. Key & Peele can be outrageously funny sometimes. Making a barb leap off the written page is harder. As one critic said Beatty can reduce a sacred cow to hamburger with one sentence.
Rather than copy the other very astute reviews, let me just tell you how to read this book. It's challenging, and it doesn't always follow the standard dictates of plot, but you may enjoy it more if you know what to expect.

1) It's not a page-turning, finish-in-one-night kind of book. If you try, you'll miss out. I had to read it over several days, each session giving me a hundred things to think about.

2) When you get anxious for the plot to pick up, think of it as satirical standup, and read it like you'd listen to the comics to which Beatty's compared, namely Dave Chapelle. (If you're thinking of it as a novel instead of as satire, you can lose the thread of hilarity) When you're overwhelmed by the satire, think of it as a novel and try to piece together the experiences that make up Bonbon's character. It's hard to get hold of his character at times, and trying to summarize Bonbon Me's character is a (rewarding) reading experience in and of itself.

3) You may want to have google at hand so you don't miss out on the plethora (this word is on my mind after one particularly funny bit near the end), of cultural and historical references. You might know Plessy v. Ferguson and the scopes trial, but it would be hard, I think, to catch every reference, and the satire depends on them.

4) Yes, it's funny, but not in the LOL way as often as 'that so true it's painful' way. Reading the reviews, I expected to be chuckling every few pages. Instead I had a wry grin every few sentences. Don't let this deter you. The verbs come at the end of sentences so often that you really have to read it at a run if you don't want to lose the thread of what's going on, but I can guarantee the thread is worth catching. In the last few pages of the book, Beatty comes as close to speaking to you plainly as the author as he does in the entire novel, and what he had to say tied the its many disparate observations together perfectly.
This is a true 21st century masterpiece.

Mr. Beatty is clearly the literary and spiritual heir of Mark Twain and Richard Pryor. Potential readers should be aware of the heavy use of racial epithets and curse words. The language is appropriate for the subject and the characters. This book will be banned in some schools and libraries by people who either (a) haven't read it or (b) don't understand that Mr. Beatty has told this story in order to critique our society.

It's extraordinarily funny. There are many many laugh out loud moments and scenes that you'll want to read over again. There is a scene in the first third of the book where the protagonist's father advises him about dealing with hard tasks as a young man. His father told him to not focus on the pain of the task, but rather the pay off later. The protagonist says, "So slaves would have been better off if they just thought of it as 'gardening?'" And his father responded by giving him a beating. (It reads better then how I've rewritten it)

Underneath the humor are moments of biting commentary - (I'll paraphrase here) "The best man for the job is actually a woman, a black woman, who works on the second floor. She'll be passed over."

Mr. Beatty won the Man Booker Prize for this in October in 2016. He deserves every award, accolade and 5-star review thrown his way.