This is not to say that Beatty soft soaps the realities of black lives in the ghetto: it is just that, operating at the rhetorical, external level he does they are are a bit too easy to read about without suffering any lacerations at all. It is all essentially good natured, and the set pieces, such as the career day at the local high school, are provocative in what they say politically, without using the action of the comedy to ram home the reader's discomfort, to the point where there is no longer any humour, as a more misanthropic satirist might. Me's actions to reinstate Dickens are ostentatiously shocking but their spirit is more Passport to Pimlico than Ralph Ellison. The Sellout is, despite its bluntness, more comic than satirical. However, the book is not so much about what happens as about what's going on, so it is best to relax and enjoy the comic set pieces as they unfurl. His determination to restore it leads him, among other things, to reinstate slavery and segregate the local high school: this is why the book opens with Me before the Supreme Court, in a blisteringly hallucinatory prologue so energetic it kicks the reader a long way into the book before there is time to draw breath.Īt that point there is a sagging feeling, it has to be said, because there is no narrative drive to speak of – in fact Laurence Sterne might have been a better name than Dickens for the ghetto.

The plot, in so far as there is one, revolves around Me's refusal to accept the removal of his neighbourhood from the map of Los Angeles, and from history.

That should give the flavour of the book, its bleakness woven with humour, provocation, and intellectuality, with absurdity piled on absurdity – but always to a purpose. The most troublesome bequest is his father's station as the neighbourhood's 'nigger whisperer', expected to talk down any suicidal resident 'who'd done lost they motherf-in' mind'. His father, a demented black intellectual/activist, 'to my knowledge, the sole practitioner of the field of Liberation Psychology', abuses him, and uses him as a Skinnerian guinea pig and farm hand, before dying an emblematic death, leaving Me a meagre inheritance. He has grown up in an agrarian ghetto in Los Angeles called Dickens. The narrator has no first name, and his surname is Me. The protagonist and narrator of Paul Beatty's Man Booker Prize-winning The Sellout welcomes your discomfiture: indeed it is an essential element of this rambling, rhetorical reductio ad absurdum of any argument anyone might make about being black in America. Well, there are more niggers in this book than you could shake a stick at.

The sellout book review