The cover of Paul Beatty’s Booker-longlisted novel, The Sellout, carries a contemporary pictorial equivalent of Diogenes of Sinope, the Greek philosopher who allegedly carried around a lit lantern in broad daylight, saying he was “looking for an honest man”. Here, rendered in sketched repetition, our modern-day “Diogenes” is black, jauntily clad in pink shirt and white trousers, facing us, holding a lamp at his side. What, we wonder, is he searching for? Will he find it, and where?
From the very first line, Beatty sets a tone, and it is satirically scathing: “This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything.” The African-American protagonist, who remains unnamed except for his surname—the universally embracive and implicating “Me”—has been summoned to the supreme court in Washington, DC, and he walks around the city, taking in the sights (and sites) of power. At the National Mall, a “lone white boy lay on the grass, fucking with the depth perception in such a way that the distant Washington Monument looked like a massive, pointy-tipped, Caucasian hard-on streaming from his unzipped trousers”. This image, hilariously crass though it may be, lies at the heart of Beatty’s novel, and his political assertions. That American governance—white, exclusive, elitist—is self-absorbed, self-serving, smug even. And yes, that it’s also truly f****d up.
I wish it were possible to say there couldn’t have been a more pertinent time for The Sellout to be published but, tragically, given that race in America has been an ongoing, pervasive, pandemic issue, it’s a book that would have been as important “then” as it is now. Yet, perhaps because of the swift, wide proliferation of news (especially on social media)—covering the protests in Baltimore, the shootings of Trayvon Martin, Martin Brown, Charles Kinsey, Philando Castile, and countless other unarmed African-Americans by (white) police officers—Beatty’s novel feels that much more pertinently urgent and immediate. There’s little else I have read recently that strings race and privilege together with such savage synchronicity, and through such wit. And an array of raw, unforgettable characters.
Our narrator from the “agrarian ghetto” of Dickens on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles has an unusual upbringing at the hands of his sociologist father, who conducts racially charged social “studies” on his young son. This pseudo academic, more prolific at sleeping with his students than publishing papers, is killed in a police shoot-out, leaving his son alone to tend livestock and grow fruits of varying deliciousness on the farm.
Around him cluster the love of his life and ex-girlfriend, Marpessa, a bus driver, Foy, a TV show host and corrector of “racist texts” (The Adventures Of Tom Soarer, Measured Expectations), and, most interestingly, Hominy Jenkins, last living member of the cast of the TV serial The Little Rascals, who volunteers himself for slavery. “...true freedom,” he declares, “is having the right to be a slave.”
Dickens, too, serves as character, especially when our protagonist discovers that it has been wiped off the map, swallowed into the sprawl of LA. If the death of his father left him loose, the disappearance of his town unmoors him. He obsessively tries to define, and claim, his space—literally, too, by painting a white line as border for Dickens. And with this also comes the desire to uplift this bedraggled town, complete with gangland hoods, a failing elementary school, and the wretchedly poor and homeless.
And it happens in the oddest of ways—with a sign “For Whites Only” over a seat on Marpessa’s bus—and it spreads. To grocery stores, and schools, to parking lots and other transport. And it works. Grades rise, crime drops, people are nicer, more polite to each other, each sure of their place in the world. The problem then is not that our protagonist has been hauled to the supreme court, indicted for “owning” a slave or reinstating slavery, but that, as the supreme court justice says, “(the legal quandary here is) whether a violation of civil rights law that results in the very same achievement these heretofore mentioned statutes were meant to promote, yet have failed to achieve, is in fact a breach of said civil rights.” Beatty’s satire runs unflinchingly deep. It is explosive not just in the bare brightness of its honesty, but in its ability to relentlessly, bitingly dismantle social façade.
All this at the risk of making The Sellout sound like a dry novelistic political diatribe, which it could have deflated into at a few points. But Beatty’s strength, like all great satirists, is humour. He is ragingly funny. With a wit that is matched by razor-sharp, wickedly contemporary prose.
Take his description of two “suspicious Hispanic males”, for instance: “Both dudes wore khakis whose baggy leggings spilled over two pairs of Nike Cortez sneakers so fucking new that if they had taken one shoe off and placed it to their ear like a conch shell, they’d hear the roar of an ocean of sweatshop labor.” Like the “L.A. Festival of Forbidden Cinema and Unabashedly Racist Animation” hosted within the pages, reading Beatty is seeing all the whitewash rubbed out.
And even though the focus couldn’t be more clearly race in America, our protagonist asks a question halfway through that rings truly universal. “Is integration, forced or otherwise, social entropy or social order?” Is our natural bent to segregate? To be divisive? To relentlessly carve into us and them. At the end, the protagonist stands in court, “trying to figure out if there was a state of being between ‘guilty’ and ‘innocent’. Why were those my only alternatives? Why couldn’t I be ‘neither’ or ‘both’?” He finally faces the bench and says, “Your Honor, I plead human.”
When Beatty turns his searchlight brightness on us all, and we know, in our deepest, darkest, most secret selves, that we have failed, we plead the same.
