The Sellout: A Novel Hardcover – March 3, 2015

Beatty is brilliant. This is the best book I've read in a long time (The last one I remember being so affecting was Michael Chabon's THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION--which I suppose shares a kind of ethnic courage with self-referential humor). The sheer density of wit and provocative imagination floored me--yet the writing was so FUNNY, it read easily. I didn't want to stop, and found myself turning page after page . . . Basically, it made for a great vacation read! And left me rather stunned at how clever it was. I went to pick up my next book (a memoir, for a change of pace) and found that I just couldn't stomach it because the caliber of the writing compared so unfavorably to Beatty's! THE SELL-OUT was just so good on so many levels (political, comical, philosophical), that everything else pales in comparison! I wish my dad were still alive to read this, which is saying a lot. And honestly I worry about losing my eyesight in the next decade or so because of a neurological condition, and it struck me after reading this book that I'm glad I still had the vision to read it!! (And yes I know about audio books but it's not the same . . . ) Beatty deserves to be recognized as one of the best American writers of our time. He deserves the MacArthur, the Pulitzer, etc.

A book about racism, segregation, slavery that is laugh-out-loud funny? Yep, that would be The Sellout in a nutshell!It's easy to see why this book won all those awards last year, including the first Man Booker for a work by an American author. It is a tour-de-force of writing, a biting social satire that makes its point not with a bludgeon but with a delicate literary sensibility firmly based in historical authenticity.Beatty has given us a protagonist/narrator who is a young black man from the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens, a neighborhood on the outskirts of southern Los Angeles. He was raised by a single father, a sociologist who used his son as the subject of his weird, often outlandish psychological studies of the roots of fear and of racism.The son grew up to become a farmer who raised delicious fruit of many kinds, the most delicious of all being satsuma oranges. He also grew watermelons and weed, one of the finest varieties of which he called "Anglophobia."He lost his father along the way to a policeman's gun. The man was shot essentially for driving while black, a sad and familiar story in our country. At least, the resulting financial settlement with the city of Los Angeles made life a bit easier for the son.Over time, our narrator watches the decline of his neighborhood, until, finally, Dickens no longer even appears on California maps, at which point our hero decides on a social and psychological experiment of his own, one that will put Dickens back on the map. With the help of the town's most famous resident, the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins, he comes up with an outrageous plan; he will reinstitute slavery and segregation in Dickens. That should get California's - and the world's - attention!Thus it is that Hominy becomes his willing - even eager - slave and he begins a stealth campaign to reinstitute segregation in the local school. His plan is a roaring success! Soon the students at the all black - well, black and Hispanic and Asian - school are doing better than ever, succeeding as never before.Sure enough, this does bring him and Dickens attention and he winds up before the Supreme Court in a very funny scene, which I can't even begin to describe.Along the way, the author pricks the hot air balloons of just about every black American cultural icon and cliche that one could think of - from Mike Tyson to Bill Cosby to George Washington Carver to Tiger Woods to Clarence Thomas and so many more. They are all here. Also lawn jockeys, cotton picking, Saturday morning cartoons, as well as the American liberal agenda all come in for a skewering. The comic writing sometimes made me wince or shrug wryly, but mostly it just made me grin.This is a zany book that employs racist terms in the service of humor - words that are never spoken in polite society. It's a way to shock the reader and get his/her full attention. Suffice to say if you are one who is offended by the language in Huckleberry Finn, you'll be absolutely appalled by the language in The Sellout.

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 PremiumsDeluxe Whiteness: Regular Whiteness Plus Warnings instead of Arrests from the Police Decent Seats at Concerts and Sporting Events World Revolves Around You and Your ConcernsSuper 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 SubconsciousBy "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.

Very entertaining, but deep as well. This is my second attempt at reading it, since my English wasn't that good the first time I did. I wouldn't consider this book an easy read, because it contains many references that not everyone might understand. I guess, it helps being from the US or living there. The author really knows how to show the disparities in US society (race, wealth, etc.) from the perspective of a poor (and de facto segregated) neighborhood and does so with very witty humor and great use of the English language. It's not so common, especially nowadays, to find this kind of critique presented in such an amusing way. Strongly recommend this one.

Outrageously humorous. Absolutely amazing. Superbly unsparing and very scathing. I wonder at Beatty's style of writing and his great presence of mind, knowledge of worldly affairs at macro and micro levels that matter to the theme of his fiction, and his way of using that information as poetic tools for creating great humour. To use his own words from the novel, at times, it feels most of the writing are 'essays masquerading as fiction.'

Very, very funny but like all good satire it will make you think...a lot. Required reading for anybody who thinks black lives matter.

I didn't fully realize this is one of my favourite books of the last few years, until a couple months after finishing it. Beatty redefines modern proses with an almost hip-hop-like pen grounded in such wit and wisdom, an inimitable ability that shines brighter as you read others.One piece of advice here: don't expect this one to land in the first few reads. It takes a bit of getting used to, but once you get in a good groove, it'll flow and you'll be excited to pick it back up.

Quizá yo no soy target de novelas con el tema racial tan en el centro como esta, pero me ha parecido repetitiva.La narrativa está bien, tiene momentos divertidos y curiosos, pero se me ha hecho muy circular y larga.