The Sellout MP3 CD – MP3 Audio, May 24, 2016

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don't miss out on the plethora (this word is on my mind after one particularly funny bit near the end), of cultural and historical references.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.

Stuff that was supposed to be funny was just absurd. Stream-of-consciousness, run-on sentences made it hard to find the point. Off-puttingly vulgar. Were the f-word and n-word used so much to desensitize us? In place of emotional engagement and fully-formed characters? I considered stopping after the first act, but plodded through to the end, hoping for a payoff that never came. Some thought-provoking ideas, but delivered with a sledge hammer rather than wit and insight. I guess it's a critic's book. I picked it because I saw it on 2 "best of the decade" lists and someone called it the next Great American Novel. So I guess I am supposed to like it, and tried to like it, but ultimately saw that the emperor had no clothes.

With phrases such as "When I was young I had a reputation for being extremely lucky... The cops somehow never got around to putting my name on a scare card or my neck in a choke hold", this book has never been so relevant nor so powerful. It is the story of a black man whose father is killed by the police. And somehow Paul Beatty makes everything seem funny. The protagonist's father is the funniest with the way he tried to teach the protagonist.I've read a lot of reviews saying this book is hard to read. It is not. The prologue is a stream of consciousness passage, and may be hard to read, but once you are through it, every chapter is straight first-person narrative with a couple of flashbacks.This book deserves all the credit it's been given.

Bonbon Me grew up on a farm in Dickens, California, a city adjoining Los Angeles. He is raised by his sociology professor father, his mother long gone. His father is consumed with theories about racial discrimination and spends his time writing about the subject and conducting experiments on Bonbon when not spending time in the Dum Dum Intellectual Society, which he founded. Bonbon grows up unsure what to do. He raises the best produce around, surfs, and tries to decide how a man should live.When Dickens is subsumed by L.A., completely wiped off the map, Bonbon has had enough. He makes it his mission to return Dickens to its former status, as lowly as that had been. But how to get attention to a poor, inner-city area that no one is particularly interested in?Almost by accident, Bonbon hits on a plan. As a birthday present for his best friend, Hominy Jenkins, he turns his on-again, off-again girlfriend's city bus into a replica of the old time buses Hominy would have ridden as a child when he was a minor character on the TV show, The Little Rascals. Hominy is consumed by the past and the racial humiliations he and other black men have endured. He declares that he is Bonbon's slave and shows up every day to do whatever work he decides needs doing.When the bus incident turns out to have a surprising result, Bonbon realizes he has hit on a plan. The threat of overt segregation causes the bus's riders to up their behavior and pull together to rail against the threat. Spurred on, Bonbon, with the help of the local principal, creates a totally false 'exclusive' school which is across the street from the local school where students are mired in failure. Once again, it unites the students and spurs them to improved academic performance. The ploys land Bonbon in front of the Supreme Court as he is arrested on various charges and the case is sent ever higher.This work of satire has garnered much praise. It was the 2016 winner of the Man Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and one of the 10 Best Books of 2015 of the New York Times Book Review. Beatty has written extensively about the black experience and how differently white and black society experiences it. The novel's biting satire and depiction of how prejudice seeps into every institution and encounter spotlights it into a blinding light. This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction and those interested in a diverse society.

I resolved to read three types of books this summer: books touching on law, Booker Prize winners and – having attended a #blacklivesmatter seminar in the spirit of educating myself – more books by black authors. So upon retrieving The Sellout by Paul Beatty (a black author, check) from my Booker Prize shelf (check) and discovering from the blurb that the narrator winds up in the US Supreme Court (touching on law, check), which sits smack bang in the Reuleaux triangle at the heart of my three order Venn diagram, I thought I'd found my ideal summer read.Firstly, the law. As the novel opens, the case of Me v The United States of America is about to commence in the Supreme Court. The black narrator (whose surname is Me, his ancestors having dropped the redundant E from Mee) is on trial. He received a letter, signed "The People of the United States of America", telling him his case would be heard, almost as though he'd won a prize. Perhaps this is an early comment on the erratic manner in which so-called justice is meted out almost at random if you're a black American.Very little of the novel is concerned explicitly with the law. The court case bookends the action: only the Prologue and the penultimate section are set inside the Courtroom. The bulk relates the narrator's upbringing and how he came to commit his alleged crimes. Nevertheless, the text is concerned with justice throughout, in particular racial injustice.Secondly, the author. It might be naive to read a book by a black, American author and not to expect to be confronted with some black American themes. Beatty's novel was published in 2015 and won the Booker Prize the following year. Asked what he was responding to with this novel, Beatty said, "myself, I guess." This evasion is hard to believe given his focus on racial politics and that he wrote at a time when Black Lives Matter was gaining considerable traction in the form of protests that have only now been eclipsed by the exponential growth of the movement after the death of George Floyd in May this year. In 2014, Eric Garner and teenaged Michael Brown died at the hands of policemen in Staten Island, New York and Ferguson, Missouri respectively. In the wake of that scandal, The Washington Post and ABC News conducted a survey exploring how much faith people had in the US justice system. Half of the white Americans surveyed said people of all races are treated equally in the justice system. Belying this faith in the myth of a post-racial America, only 1 in 10 African Americans said that black people receive equal treatment in the justice system.The Sellout explicitly tackles police brutality. Inexplicably, the blurb and the plot summary on Goodreads both state "his father is killed in a drive-by shooting". Presumably this was written by someone at the publishing company who hadn't taken the trouble to read the book, because it is incorrect. The narrator's father – hilariously named F K Me – is shot by the police.Factual errors in the blurb are not the only issue I had with the physical presentation of this book, published by Oneworld. It is rare that I find fault with the book as a product, but I was miffed about this one. I felt patronised by the dozens of quotations from reviews on the front, back and inside covers carefully edited to emphasise the word "satire", so that people get that it's, you know, satirical. Without all that peritextual nudging, would readers be likely to take the characters too seriously? Might they risk following in the footsteps of the narrator by taking up slave ownership, implementing racial segregation in their communities and dropping the "N-word" into every second sentence? I don't think so.The Black Lives Matter movement has blown apart the fiction that racial equality has been achieved in the USA. So it doesn't need me, a white guy, to emphasise that race is a topic that must not be ignored. However, I wonder whether satire is in any sense a productive medium for the discussion; I'm mindful of one of the thousands of objects of satire in Beatty's book: "Unmitigated Blackness is essays passing for fiction." I can't help feeling this is what The Sellout is doing. Nevertheless, it raises some issues and is, in the most positive sense possible, very much a book – whether that be fiction or an essay – of its time. Regrettably, it is also very much of its place. That is to say, the book is a product of America.Thirdly, to consider its place within Booker Prize canon. Authors from the USA only became eligible for the Booker Prize in 2014, and Beatty was the first American to win. In 2018, there were calls from publishers to reverse the decision to let Americans in, for fear that literary fiction would become too homogenised. Fast forward to 2020. Now that California-based Crankstart sponsors the prize, an overwhelming 9 out of 13 authors longlisted this year are from or living in the USA. Unlike the Pulitzer Prizes, awarded by the journalism school at Columbia University, the Booker Prize has no explicit or implicit link to social issues. It claims to reward simply the finest fiction of the year, but often there seems to be a social agenda. It is hard to divine any such connection between early winners of the prize (inaugurated in 1969) and the troubles of their immediate era: Something to Answer For by P H Newby retells the Suez Crisis, which occurred two decades earlier; The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens is a domestic tragedy; In A Free State by V S Naipaul is set in a fictional post-colonial African country; etc. (J G Farrell's Troubles, about the roots of the Irish conflict that was very much in the news in the 1970s, was only added to the roster of winners in 2010 as the Lost Booker.) Working backwards, however, the taste for hot topics is a bit clearer: Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo tells the stories of 12 women, most of whom are black, including a rainbow of LGBTQ characters; Milkman by Anna Burns charts a young woman's experiences living in the simmering tensions of a post-Troubles Northern Ireland. That is not to dismiss these books as nothing but trendy; they are complex and erudite manifestations of authorial craft. There may not have been any conscious effort on the part of the judges or administrators of the Booker Prize to reward books that tick a zeitgeist box. It could be the case that authors – including the top quality ones who write the prizewinning books – are desirous to write about their immediate lived experiences and those of their contemporaries.Unfortunately, many of the allusions in The Sellout are a little too contemporary for my taste and need a lot of unpacking for those of us unlucky enough to be non-American readers. There are scores of pop-cultural references throughout that make very little sense to a white, English reader who has only a passing familiarity with the most widely exported products of American culture. I had no idea, until I'd finished reading and watched a few interviews with Beatty in preparation for this review, that The Little Rascals television show that features heavily was actually a real thing. Much of the humour was hard to appreciate, too. For instance, I had heard of the comic duo Abbott and Costello and also knew from that zenith of high culture The Nutty Professor that "your mama" jokes seem to be popular in black culture, but all that valuable prior knowledge did not save me having to spend nearly 10 minutes on YouTube just to understand this joke told by the narrator at an open mic night:Why All That Abbott and Costello Vaudeville Mess Doesn't Work in the Black Community Who's on first? I don't know, your mama.Abbott and Costello's "Who's on first" sketch plays with the possibilities of the 'names' Who, What and I-don't-know as members of a baseball team; it is a slow burn. Your mama jokes are punchy. The humour in this joke apparently derives from the contrast between two unbridgeable brands of comedy. Simon Schama, who moved to America in 1980, said this novel was "howl-a-page" funny stuff. It wasn't for me. When a joke needs that much explanation, it loses its effect.The final words of the novel resonated with me more than anything else in the book, but for the wrong reasons: "He just shook his head at me. Said something to the effect that [...] I'd never understand. And he's right. I never will."

Such dense writing. No sentence escapes without a host of adverbs. Rhythmically plodding. Didn't get passed the first ten pages. Recommended to me by good friends!

Man, this is a tough one.Right from the first page, this book is shocking, controversial, and brutally honest. Some parts I needed to re-read (either because they were so much fun, or because I couldn't quite believe what I'd read). Other parts made me squirm uncomfortably. My enthusiasm for the book waned a little towards the end - maybe because it's almost impossible to carry on the pace and shock-value all the way through the story.I'd recommend it, but don't say I didn't warn you about the content. (And don't give it to your Gran for Christmas.)

It is funny at the beginning but then it is the same thing over and over again. No character development or much of a plot.It reminded me of DBC Pierre's style. Not sure if I'd read anything by Paul Beatty ever again. Bit of a waste of time.

I loved this book. It’s a stream of consciousness with weird dream-logic that coheres and pushes right the way through the story. I though at times it - or I - would lose the thread, but we never did. I will be thinking about this book for a long time to come and look forward to reading the rest of Paul Beatty’s work. This is obviously a masterpiece.Intoxicating, high speed satire that leaves you thrilled and befuddled. Beautiful prose and fantastical ideas throw a vicious reality into ugly relief.