The Sellout (2016)
Who wrote it?
Paul Beatty (1962- ;active 1991- ), born Los Angeles, USA. His father left early in his childhood, and he and his sisters were raised by his mother. He holds a Master of Arts in psychology from Boston University and an MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College.
He began writing and performing poetry, and was crowned the first ever Grand Poetry Slam Champion at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. As part of his prize, he was given a book deal for his first volume of poetry Big Bank Take Little Bank (1991). Another collection followed in 1994, along with appearances on MTV and PBS performing his poetry.
His first novel The White Boy Shuffle (1996) was widely acclaimed, and followed by Tuff (2000) and Slumberland (2008), as well as an anthology of African-American humour called Hokum (2006). The Sellout took the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2015 and the Booker the following year, making Beatty the first American to win the Prize following the 2014 rule change.
What's it about?
The Sellout takes place in the fictional town of Dickens, California, an agrarian town around LA. It begins with its narrator, an African-American farmer whose father has recently been unjustly killed by police, known only as "Me", or "Bonbon" - a nickname, standing trial before the Supreme Court for crimes related to his attempt to restore slavery and segregation in Dickens. What follows is an examination of the alternately painfully real and highly surreal events that led to this seemingly absurd scenario.
He looks back to his childhood, in which his politicised sociologist father performed harrowing social experiments on him, and held high expectations for him to follow him into a role as a community leader in Dickens. When his father is murdered, Bonbon initially retreats from community involvement to grow (apparently excellent) fruit and marijuana on the farm.
When Dickens is suddenly "removed from the map" and becomes unincorporated, apparently due to its undesirable social and racial composition, Bonbon is motivated into action to restore its existence through whatever means possible. His endeavours include painting boundary lines and road signs that draw attention to the town with Hominy Jenkins, an elderly former child actor who enthusiastically requests to be kept by Bonbon as a slave. The pair then attempt to reintroduce segregation to Dickens, initially on a bus driven by Bonbon's ex-girlfriend and then in a local high school.
What I liked
The Booker judges seem to have stepped up a gear in the mid 2010s - this is yet another winner that’s absolutely unlike anything that has come before it in the history of Booker-winners
It’s an incredibly complex, multi-layered thing. Beatty has said that he views descriptions of the novel as satirical or especially “comic” are reductive and lazy, and I can sort of see his point. While it’s certainly (darkly) funny in places, and Swiftian satirical conventions feel very much present and correct, the whole thing rubs so perilously (and terrifyingly) close to potential reality (particularly in LA-la Land and the general madness of the world in 2016) that it’s hard to draw a neat boundary between absurd satirical inventions and depressing possibilities.
It’s hard to imagine that any other Booker winner has been so capable of leaving the reader open-mouthed with astonishment so frequently. The shocks are many and varied, but all serve to brilliantly highlight (whether through bluntly related reality or those satirical-seeming “absurdities”) the horrific, endemic, and enduring realities of racism.
Despite all of this, it’s incredibly readable. There’s a ridiculously enjoyable momentum to the writing, and the first half or so especially is so densely packed with brilliant nuggets that you can hardly pause for breath. Beatty’s background as a performance poet, drawing on strategies from the density/intensity of rap lyrics, is absolutely evident.
The “life lessons” dealt out by Bonbon’s father are obvious highlights - and another example of the multifaceted storytelling on display here, at once instructive parables on race and wildly over-the-top examinations of a (let’s say) unusual father/son dynamic.
The crux of things here, I think, is the absurdity of wanting to revert back to a “better time” in Dickens’ (/black?) history (bringing back what has been “erased” or the “glory days” Hominy oddly yearns for) while feeling like any meaningful step forward is equally impossible. There’s so much to think about here, and the novel’s point I guess is that any search for easy answers is futile.
What I didn’t like
While shocked and frequently dazzled by the genius on display here, I did find it a hard novel to entirely enjoy in some senses. Perhaps that’s the point - this is a brutal book, albeit one somewhat sugar-coated with stylistic and humorous flourishes.
But at the same time I was left a little cold by the relentless game-playing. There didn’t seem to be much time given to character and emotion. Perhaps understandable in a book dealing with such weighty and important issues, but something that left me feeling like an emotional core was missing.
The extreme resistance to straightforward interpretation in here I guess can be a little frustrating. Of course, I understand the dangers of comforting narratives and over-simplification… but, for me, this succeeds more as a provocation to thought (and action?) than it does as an enjoyable read. No mean achievement in any case, but there we are.
Food & drink pairings
Interestingly shaped watermelons, and other apparently nectar-like fruits
Fun facts
Beatty is, of course, the first American winner in the Prize’s history. For any newcomers reading, this is because prior to 2014, the Booker only admitted entries from writers of British, Irish or Commonwealth heritage. When the change was made, commenters feared an influx of US authors and a diminishment of the uniqueness of the Prize. On evidence so far, this does not seem to have been the case, with Beatty’s win highlighting something of what we may have been missing by those previous arbitrary exclusions.
This was another unanimous choice from the judges - remarkably for the second year in a row.
I quite liked the quote from head judge Amanda Foreman, who expresses the difficult brilliance of the novel better than I could:
"The truth is rarely pretty, and this is a book that nails the reader to the cross with cheerful abandon. But while you are being nailed you are being tickled."
The novel was turned downed by 18 publishers in the UK before finding its eventually home at small family enterprise Oneworld (who also published Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings which won the previous year).
Beatty himself acknowledged the book's difficulty on the occasion of his Booker victory:
"This is a hard book. It was a hard for me to write, I know it's hard to read. Everyone's coming at it from different angles."
I've only just noticed a slight oddity of the recent rule changes, which is that since the shift to inclusion of American and other not previously eligible authors, we now often have winners (like Beatty) with books first published in their home market a year earlier, since the criteria is now year of publication in the UK. A small nuance, but interesting nontheless.
Vanquished Foes
Deborah Levy (Hot Milk)
Graeme Macrae Burnet (His Bloody Project)
Otessa Moshfegh (Eileen)
David Szalay (All That Man Is)
Madeleine Thien (Do Not Say We Have Nothing)
Another year that passed me by, it seems. Any tips from this list? The longlist featured Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton, the first in a series which would later find its way onto the shortlist via a sequel in 2022…
The Women's Prize went to Lisa McInerney's The Glorious Heresies. The shortlist included former Booker winner Anne Enright, but there was once again no direct Booker crossover (though Thien's novel would appear in the 2017 list).
Context
In 2016:
Donald Trump is elected 45th President of the US, defeating Hillary Clinton in a turbulent campaign beset by controversy
United Kingdom narrowly votes to leave the European Union in an advisory referendum called by Conservative PM David Cameron
Theresa May succeeds David Cameron as British PM following his resignation post Brexit referendum
Murder of British Labour MP Jo Cox in leadup to Brexit referendum
Zika virus outbreak in Brazil
Seemingly neverending series of major celebrity deaths in 2016 includes David Bowie, Prince, Alan Rickman, Mohammed Ali and Harper Lee
Terrorist truck attack in Nice, France during Bastille Day celebrations kills 86
Terrorist attacks in Brussels kill 35 people in March
Shootings at Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida kill 49.
Barack Obama is first sitting US president to visit Cuba since Calvin Coolidge in 1928
Panama Papers release of millions of documents detailing offshore holdings of the rich and powerful
Faction of Turkish Armed Forces stages an unsuccessful coup, following by a series of purges by the government
Impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff
Russian ambassador to Turkey assassinated by an off-duty Turkish police officer at an art exhibition in Ankara
Summer Olympics in Rio, Brazil
Release of AR mobile game Pokémon Go breaks numerous records
Naomi Alderman, The Power
Ali Smith, Autumn
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
La La Land
Moonlight
David Bowie, Blackstar
Kanye West, The Life of Pablo
Drake, Views
Frank Ocean, Blonde
Solange, A Seat at the Table
Life Lessons
I’ll leave those to Bonbon’s father, here, maybe…
Score
8
Thought-provoking, provocative and linguistically virtuosic, it’s 100% worth your time, but there are other books I’ve enjoyed more.
Ranking to date:
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (1989) - 9.5
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (1981) - 9.5
Disgrace - J. M. Coetzee (1999) - 9.5
The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan (2014) - 9.5
The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst (2004) - 9
Moon Tiger - Penelope Lively (1987) - 9
A Brief History of Seven Killings - Marlon James (2015) - 9
The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga (2008) - 9
Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth (1992) - 9
Oscar & Lucinda - Peter Carey (1988) - 9
The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch (1978) - 9
Life & Times of Michael K. - J. M. Coetzee (1983) - 9
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy (1997) - 9
Schindler’s Ark - Thomas Keneally (1982) - 9
The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai (2006) - 9
Life of Pi - Yann Martel (2002) - 8.5
Bring Up The Bodies - Hilary Mantel (2012) - 8.5
The Bone People - Keri Hulme (1985) - 8.5
How Late it Was, How Late - James Kelman (1994) - 8.5
Troubles - J.G. Farrell (1970, "Lost Booker") - 8.5
The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes (2011) - 8
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood (2000) - 8
Possession - A. S. Byatt (1990) - 8
Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel (2009) - 8
The Sellout - Paul Beatty (2016) - 8
Saville - David Storey (1976) - 8
The Luminaries - Eleanor Catton (2013) - 8
The Sea - John Banville (2005) - 8
The Siege of Krishnapur - J.G. Farrell (1973) - 8
Vernon God Little - DBC Pierre (2003) - 7.5
The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje (1992) - 7.5
The Finkler Question - Howard Jacobson (2010) - 7.5
Rites of Passage - William Golding (1980) - 7.5
The Gathering - Anne Enright (2007) - 7.5
True History of the Kelly Gang - Peter Carey (2001) - 7.5
Offshore - Penelope Fitzgerald (1979) - 7.5
Last Orders - Graham Swift (1996) - 7
The Elected Member - Bernice Rubens (1970) - 7
The Conservationist - Nadine Gordimer (1974) - 7
Holiday - Stanley Middleton (1974) - 7
Heat & Dust - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1975) - 6.5
In a Free State* - V.S. Naipaul (1971) - 6.5
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha - Roddy Doyle (1993) - 6
G. - John Berger (1972) - 6
The Famished Road - Ben Okri (1991) - 6
Something to Answer For - P. H. Newby (1969) - 5.5
The Ghost Road** - Pat Barker (1995) - 5.5
Staying On - Paul Scott (1977) - 5
Amsterdam - Ian McEwan (1998) - 5
Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner (1984) - 4.5
The Old Devils - Kingsley Amis (1986) - 4
*Read in later condensed edition.
**Third part of a trilogy of which I hadn’t read pts 1&2
Next up
George Saunders takes things in an interesting direction with Lincoln in the Bardo, a second US winner in a row.
