Paul Beatty (1) (1962–)

I was first introduced to Beatty when noticing "The Sellout" on the library staff picks shelf. Blown away by his wit, character development and poignant tongue-in-cheek, over the top humor, I was sold. Beatty is one of a kind in many respects and he demonstrates more of his uniqueness with Slumberland. To wit, "Race, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the mother ship Free Enterprise. It's five-hundred-year mission: to explore strange, new, previously segregated worlds, to seek out show more new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no niggers had gone before" A black author who rarely pulls punches, this story demonstrates his remarkable knowledge of music, the main character being a 'jukebox sommelier' in search of Charles Stone, aka The Schwa. As with The Sellout, there are many passages that are laugh out loud. A PhD level vocabulary and sappier wit, Beatty is a true gem. show less

The Sellout opens with Me, a black man who has inherited an urban farm in a southeastern suburb of Los Angeles, sitting before the Supreme Court. He has been prosecuted for being a slave owner and trying to segregate the community schools in an attempt to literally put his hometown of Dickens back on the map. While he waits for his case—Me v. the United States of America, sort of a modern-day contrast to Plessy v. Ferguson—to be called, he passes the time by smoking some of the artisanal show more marijuana that he and Hominy Jenkins, his self-anointed slave and former Little Rascals sidekick, grow alongside their watermelons. The rest of the novel then provides the backfill story of how Me came to find himself in such a position, beginning with his upbringing by a psychologist father with some unusual parenting techniques to his emergence as a reluctant social activist for a largely apathetic population.

Does this sound like the outline of some kind of bizarre update of To Kill a Mockingbird? Well, it is hardly that. Instead, The Sellout is a wildly comical satire on the fractured state of race relations today, one of the most deadly serious topics I can imagine. Paul Beatty does a remarkable job of filling the tale with a dizzying number of historical and cultural references while taking absolutely no prisoners when examining the stereotypes and hypocrisies that exist on all sides of the issue. Along the way, the reader is treated to many laugh-out-loud scenes while being exposed to more creative uses of the n-word (and, trust me, there are a lot of them) than you would think possible. Although its underlying plot is a little thin, this is a book that delivers a powerful message. It is also a novel that really could only have been written by an author who is (1) black, (2) deeply insightful, and (3) hysterically funny. Fortunately, Beatty is all of those things. show less

Not for the faint of heart. First time reading Paul Beatty and what got me into this novel was the insane premise and the fact that for an interview about the book Beatty said something like: This is not a work of fiction it is all true.

Anyway Paul Beatty has written here a scathing satire of America and race relations between blacks and all other colors. The Sellout is totally twisted and irreverent and funny. The book is written so damn well too: it is funny and reads really quick and show more just does not hold back anywhere at all. The message is very clear: America is broken lets make fun of it its not funny. The book is also not easy to read. The sellout is scathing but also heavy. The things that Beatty writes about seems effortless but if you are a nonwhite person in america you will know you will just know that this book is all at once all the things: satire, funny, scathing - but it is also like Beatty said it is non-fiction.

The main character is an urban farmer in Los Angeles and after his father is killed by the police during a traffic stop, the protagonist embarks on a controversial social experiment of his own, and ends up before the Supreme Court. He becomes a slave owner to a willing volunteer, an elderly man named Hominy Jenkins who once played understudy to Buckwheat on “The Little Rascals,” and seeks to reinstate segregation in a local school.

This is the only devastatingly sad and funny satire I have ever read. All parts Twain-Chappelle-Rock-Pryor-and of course Beatty. show less

The Sellout, by Paul Beatty, is an African-American novel of satire on race relations in the United States. The story is told by an unnamed, black narrator who is coming before the Supreme Court on charges of slave holding and re-instituting segregation. The narrator recounts to the Supreme Court the events that brought him to the present time.

Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens - on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles - the narrator resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class show more Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that have been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.

Fueled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident - the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins - he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.

After a while the novel began, for this reader, to become extremely tiresome to the point of utter splenetic prose. What plot there was lacked sufficient direction and a sense of purpose. This resulted from repetition of a few basic themes established very early on. At times it even felt like it had degenerated into a series of loosely connected rants and personal grievances in the form of chapters. It became a very trying read.

The writing began with a certain authority; it was compelling and convincing, however as the narrative progressed it did not pick up any momentum but lingered on similar ideas and stayed very stationary. Some of the comic moments seemed forced as the narrator repeated themes over and again. The Sellout won The Man Booker Prize in 2016 and despite my acherontic experience reading the book I can see why. It is a very timely piece, addressing many of the problems blacks face in a country that has supposedly moved on from its original sin of slavery. Segregation has ended, racism is officially at an all-time low, but the issues remain.

That’s more-or-less the story, but for this reader the best aspect of The Sellout is Beatty’s language, sentence-by-sentence, even word-by-word, instead of the plot. There are literally hundreds of puns, non-sequiturs, and squeaky analogies, sometimes literally piled up on top of one another: “These are the times that fry one’s souls.” “Forty acres and a fool.” In spite of that, the satirical style in which it was told offset much of what the book attempted to do. The satire in this novel is savage and the black idiom is difficult to follow for someone unfamiliar with it. I can only recommend this novel to those readers who are ready for a difficult reading experience that may or may not be worth the trip. It was not for me. show less