The Sellout by Paul Beatty

I believe writing that comes with a trigger warning is being conscientious of its audience and self-reflexive about the controversial, offensive, or traumatic nature of its content. In that same mindset, I think more writing should come with a privilege warning. Specifically, an acknowledgment of the author’s own privilege as to how it will affect his perspective on, and interaction with, the given topic of his writing. With that in mind, this review of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout has a privilege warning as I am a white, upper class, cis, heterosexual, quasi-Christian male with a PhD in English who does not regularly or professionally write about race or about literature in which race is a predominant theme or topic. The warning is for me as much as it is for you. I must tread carefully.

The Sellout is one of those remarkable books that comes to public attention early in its life because it wins multiple prestigious book awards in the same year. I’m a big fan of book awards for this reason. I have been exposed to authors and works I might not otherwise have come across because during a given year a group of people came together and decided it was good enough to honor. I treat award lists (including finalists and long lists) as a kind of formal recommendation. Never impartial (because what, ever, is impartial?), but more removed from a friend or favorite author’s plug. Recommendation by committee has its merits, though I think it gets talked about less than its drawbacks.

I had never heard of Beatty before, and in fact his years of writing and publishing in relative obscurity is part of the Cinderella story that was attached to his nomination and eventual two-time win for this big and complex book about racism in America. I had no idea what I was in for, but I had spoken with a couple of friends and colleagues whose reading taste I respect and admire and they confirmed that The Sellout had earned every accolade received and then some. I am grateful to those who recommended it to me for revealing nothing about it except that I needed to read it. The novel surprised me, disarmed me, and challenged me as much as any book I’ve read in the last five years, maybe longer. It also defeated me, which I think more books should do this. Defeat privileged white guys like me, I mean. If you haven’t read it and want to go into it unknowing as I did, now is the time to close this tab (but please come back!) and check out your copy from the local library to read it.

I congratulated myself early on in The Sellout because I figured out quickly that it’s a satire. A quick note of explanation: I’m pretty dense when it comes to comedy. I’m the living embodiment of the “straight man” from classic comedic duos, who never realizes what he says is funny, nor that anything funny is going on around him. I couldn’t finish The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the first time I read it because I didn’t know it was supposed to be funny. That sentence is a true story, and also a sad one. So, understanding a mere five to ten pages into The Sellout that I was dealing with a sprawling satire that will include all manner of postmodern word play and intertextuality was a moment of pride for me. It would be my last.

Beatty has been writing for a long time, as both a poet and fiction writer, and those years of experience are on full display here. His writing style resonates with the best of postmodernist authors I enjoy, including Pynchon for his word play and Barth for his exhaustive cataloging of subjects and topics that often make his texts as dense as a neutron star. Beatty’s topic is race and racism, particularly the history and culture of African Americans in the United States, and The Sellout catalogs just about every last trope, symbol, stereotype, reference, and theme of its subject. Beyond that, there are exceptional references to racism of all types across all ethnic backgrounds, and even mockingly and brilliantly includes reverse racism. The word play is near constant and also equally brilliant and ostentatious. One character who has elected to become a slave to his self-appointed master, the narrator, longs for a return to antebellum times, saying at one point, “Forget White Flight, what we need is the Ku Klux Influx.” I would say this prose is as funny as it is terrible, but the fact that it’s funny makes it additionally terrible.

The book is narrated by a black man living in the former murder capital of the world inside Los Angeles County, operating his father’s farm, living a small, quiet life, until a former black child star who once understudied Buckwheat on the Little Rascals seems to lose his mind and demands to live and be treated as a slave after a failed suicide attempt. The narrator is an odd duck, existing outside just about every possible community and group he could be, and through a series of surreal yet intricately related events agrees to take on this man as his slave. This event drives the whole of the plot as it gives the narrator ideas about improving the lives of residents in his hometown by bringing back segregation. Eventually all of his actions and projects gain national attention and he is arrested and brought before the Supreme Court on the charge of violating the 13^th and 14^th Amendments to the US Constitution. I present it here as a linear narrative, but reading the novel isn’t like that at all. The narrator shifts among time periods and characters at will, guided more by thematics than any adherence to plot or timeline. We learn the history of Dickens, California, the aforementioned murder capital of the world and now not even an incorporated principality. We are told about the narrator’s father who was a brilliant but marginalized sociologist, whose home-schooling of his son constitutes the most bizarre rendition of child abuse ever put to print. We meet a diverse cast of characters, including intellectuals, celebrities, gang bangers, blue collar workers, historical figures, and even real-life people who have been satirically rendered unidentifiably identifiable. The narrator’s father was obsessed with race, particularly racism represented culturally and psychologically, and through his tyrannical instruction, the narrator cannot help but focus intently on race in all aspects of his narrative. The narrator is not his father, though, and so without agenda or goal in mind he instead observes and interrogates and even counter argues now-dominant progressive viewpoints about race and racism as its understood today.

Because of the novel’s satiric and ostentatious approach to its subject matter, I found it to be humorous and engrossing. Because the book also exhaustively and unapologetically examines race and racism in America (which exists because of the founding and continued systemic oppression of an entire people for the benefit of a ruling class of which I am a part), it made me extremely uncomfortable throughout my reading. Every time I laughed or grinned, I was immediately put to the question, both by myself and the novel, why am I laughing? What does my laughter say about me? I don’t think the question that needs to be answered is ‘Can racism be funny?’ because the answer is that anything can be funny. Dead baby jokes are funny. AIDS jokes are funny. The real question is, who laughs at these jokes and why? Late in the novel, the narrator is reminiscing about black standup comedy and the club he used to go to with an MC who told bluntly offensive racist humor to a black audience. Everyone laughs and all is good fun until one day a white couple comes into the club and when they laugh at these racist jokes the MC confronts them with verbal hostility and asks them what’s so funny. They have no answer for him and he harangues them out of the club. The jokes didn’t change when the white couple came in, they were still just as offensive and racist as before, but the rhetorical situation had changed. Different audience means the reason for laughter was different. I was in awe of this reflexive, meta-fictional moment in The Sellout, because it put the question to me of who I am as a reader of this book, and what are my reasons for my reaction, my response to it. Like the racist jokes, the actual content stays the same no matter how many times its told or who its told to. It’s the relationship between the audience and the content that is mutable and where the meaning comes from. Taking it a step further, I laugh because what I’m reading (I tell myself) is satire, it’s a conventional genre rendered in a way to artificially provoke a response from an engaged reader. That’s my reaction because I’m a literate white guy. But that’s also terrible. Beatty doesn’t identify as a satirist nor does he consider The Sellout to be satire. What is satire to me or to the Man Booker committee or the National Book Critics Circle, is real fucking life to many of the people who read it that find themselves and their lives depicted therein. If they laugh, their reasons for laughing are very different from my own. The white couple in the club, like me with satire, tell themselves that it’s a joke, they should laugh. But what thought is given to the expense at which the joke comes, particularly with us (white people) as audience? This question can and should be rephrased, devastatingly, about all art made about the expense paid by human beings.

So back to my privilege warning at the beginning. I am a particular kind of audience for The Sellout. I found myself laughing and thinking and surrendering to this text, but I also have to acknowledge that many other people will feel differently about the book, informed by who they are and what they’ve experienced. I surrendered to the text, because there were just some points and passages I didn’t understand. Of course there were cultural and historical references I didn’t get just because I haven’t read the right thing yet or listened to the right music, but I’m talking about more than that. I’m talking about ideas and experiences and questions that the novel presents that I just didn’t get. And I realize that my lack of comprehension is directly linked to my privilege. I don’t understand because I haven’t learned. And I haven’t learned yet because I haven’t had to. This novel reflected for me the gaps in my own education and experience of what America is to all Americans and how I am a part of that America of which I haven’t needed to be entirely cognizant. So for me, this book reflected in me what I didn’t know about a subject that affects all of us every day, though not equally. I wasn’t ready to read this book, but then I have often found I’m not ready for the education I always need to be a better person in this life.