Review by
Reni Eddo-Lodge
The Sellout is a whirlwind of a satire with a contradictory plot. The devices are real enough to be believable, yet surreal enough to raise your eyebrows. Our protagonist is never fully named, but we are told that his surname is Me. Me is a black man who owns a farm in a poor black urban neighbourhood. Me surfs for fun, and smokes weed in the supreme court, where he ends up facing retribution for breaking some of the country's most hallowed laws about race.
The plot is set in motion when Dickens, the city Me lives in, is surreptitiously wiped off the map, triggering an identity crisis in its residents. It just sort of disappears, and nobody is told why.
Dickens's slow merge with its surrounding cities hits local celebrity Hominy Jenkins particularly hard. A lovable, downtrodden Uncle Tom character, Hominy yearns for his halcyon days as the black butt of a thousand racist jokes in the 1950s kids' TV show The Little Rascals. With Dickens gone, Hominy is nobody. Devastated, he swears that he will be Me's slave until Dickens is back on the map. Me thinks that the way to reinstate Dickens is to segregate the city's schools. So, a slave-owning black man working hard to bring back racial segregation. Eyebrows raised yet?
If Dickens represents blackness, then our protagonists' unrelenting quest to re-establish its existence is about setting some clear boundaries. Following the recent public outing of Rachel Dolezal as a white American woman masquerading as black, there are understandable anxieties about blackness and authenticity. Thanks to artists such as Beyonc� and Kendrick Lamar, the African American experience has gone viral.
Beatty throws in dozens of jokes: every stereotype, rivalry and anxiety about race in the US is laid bare. No one is above criticism. The comforting social blanket of whiteness is satirised mercilessly. Black intellectuals on the left and right are exposed as fakes grasping for social power.
But there is a problem when in-jokes become jokes for everyone, which left me not knowing what to make of the book. With Beatty's satire punching not just up, but all over the place, I'm not sure who the book is for.
I didn't laugh out loud while reading The Sellout. It did, however, tease out a few wry smiles. In his quest to reinstate his city, the protagonist joins a dating service for cities looking for their perfect partner, and settles on twinning Dickens with the lost city of White Male Privilege, "a controversial municipality whose very existence is often denied by many (mostly privileged white males)".
If The Sellout does anything, it successfully points not only to the problem, but all the complexities and nuances of the problem, proving that it's not as simple as black and white. (For full review, see www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/11/the-sellout-by-paul-beatty-review)
