THE SELLOUT
Paul Beatty
Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 288 pages.
★★★★★
African-American writer Paul Beatty’s The Sellout was controversial in Britain as the first American
novel to win the Man Booker Prize. That news didn't yield a yawn in the United
States, where most wouldn’t know the Man Booker from Booker T. and the MGs. But
its content makes it a hot potato. Beatty’s novel is deliciously wicked and
ambiguous. Is it satire, or a rant? Does it praise black culture, or lampoon
it? It is musing upon black power, or surrender to emasculation? Only two
things are clear: Beatty thinks discussion of a post-racial society is risible
bullshit, and if you’re a person who can’t read, say, or stomach the word
“nigger,” you shouldn’t go within a country mile of this novel.
Beatty's style is summed by his main character's personal
motto: "Cognito, ergo Boogieum–I
think, therefore I jam.” Beatty excels at jams, gibes, and riffs. He's also a
published poet, and the first third of this book is essentially a prolonged
attitude-heavy, profanity-laced, chip-on-the-shoulder prose rap about the state
of Black America. It is incisive, barbed, distressingly real, yet funny. Beatty
also takes aim at the ways in which black humor is homogenized (by black and
white scholars alike). He's from the school that doesn’t shy from snaps,
vulgarity, and verbal jousting. Take, for example, his rant on how he's tired
of seeing black characters being described by hues such as
"honey-colored," "chocolate," or "mocha:"
"How come they never describe the white characters in relation to
foodstuffs and hot liquids? Why aren't there any yogurt-colored, eggshell tone,
string cheese-canned, low-fat milk white protagonists in these racist
no-third-act-having books?" Or this one on how "hard" it is to
talk about race: "…I actually think the country does a decent job of
addressing race, and when folks say, "Why can't we talk about race more
reasonably?" what they really mean is, "Why can't you niggers be
reasonable? … And by race we mean niggers, because no one … seems to have any
difficulty talking out-of-pocket shit about Native Americans, Latinos, Asians,
or America's newest race, the Celebrity."
The novel is also about the anonymity of black men in white
America, a point he makes by veiling the narrator’s very name. His surname
might be “Me,” though his on-again/off-again bus driver girlfriend calls him
“Bonbon.” His Los Angeles–"the city that's always passed out on the
couch"–looks nothing like La La Land,
he’s nobody’s idea of a kid from the ‘hood, nor does the ‘hood' resemble
expectations. Bonbon was raised by a single father who was brilliant, yet crazy
as a March hare—a social scientist at a local community college whose son was
his favorite lab rat for lessons on racism and self-reliance. Call it childhood
in an absurdist African- American Skinner box. Among his father’s other projects:
he's a co-founder of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals—a combination black
Chautauqua, social center, and liar’s bench—the community “Nigger Whisperer”
who calms agitated locals in potentially violent confrontations, and a farmer.
Did I say farmer? Yes. The local neighborhood is a section of Los Angeles
called “Dickens,” one of the novel’s numerous literary wordplays. Dickens was
designed as an agricultural enclave, thus he and Bonbon also keep livestock,
tend fruit orchards, and line their urban fields with manure. (Dickens is
imagined, but farming actually does take place in parts of Compton.) Bonbon’s
father also made sure his son was well-educated, well-spoken, and neatly attired,
which meant spending a lot of time in white society. As Bonbon caustically
remarks, “I was the diversity” seen in dozens of brochures. Within the 'hood, this
also makes him the "sellout."
Bonbon’s life takes a dramatic turn when his father is
gunned down by the LAPD and local developers unincorporate Dickens in hopes of
gentrifying it. The latter plan distresses Hominy Jenkins, who hitherto enjoyed
the attention of (often white) visitors seeking him as the “Last Little Rascal.”*
Hominy had so internalized his subordination that Dickens' disappearance
renders him a non-entity. He's so down that he asks Bonbon to enslave and whip him
and begins calling him “Massa.” Bonbon, in turn, decides to reestablish Dickens
by putting up signs, painting lines in the road, and declaring Dickens a re-segregated
all-black community.
What ensues is a reverse-race riff on amendments thirteen
through fifteen. Needless to say, Massa and Hominy throw numerous
constituencies into an uproar. Is theirs the ultimate self-loathing, or perverse
brilliance? Don’t look to Beatty to resolve that question. His alter ego
character remarks that his father taught him that black people don’t think
alike but, in fact, they do: every black person thinks he or she is superior to
every other black person! Beatty uses the character of Foy Cheshire as his
foil. You name the conceit or scam, and Cheshire has it. Among his schemes is
the rewriting of classic novels from a black POV—usually the originals with a
few words strategically changed—and he wants “his” novels in the school
curriculum. Foy Cheshire: black nationalist, or Jim Dandy minstrel huckster?
And what do we make of the very master/slave relationship between Bonbon and
Hominy? The implication, I think, is that being white requires domination of at
least one black person.
Yep–a controversial book. It’s also brilliant: a joy to
read, laugh-out-loud funny, disturbing, and thought-provoking. It’s what you’d
get if you mashed James Baldwin with Chris Rock. Is it racist for a white guy
to laugh at any of this? I’m guessing that Paul Beatty’s answer would be,
“Who’s to say?” Just don’t tell him that race no longer matters.
Rob Weir
* The "Little Rascals" is the name of the pack of
poor street kids from the Hal Roach comedy shorts Our Gang, which played in theaters between 1922 and 1944, and was
syndicated for television during the 1950s and early 1960s. It was the first to
show white and black kids as peers on a semi-equal basis, though it also traded
in cringe-worthy stereotypes. There was never a black character named
"Hominy," but there was "Buckwheat" and "Farina."
The other two black characters were named "Sunshine Sammy" and
"Stymie."
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