This is an appropriate moment to be catching up with Paul Beatty’s Booker prize-winning novel The Sellout: a breathtakingly confrontational American race satire with a big laugh and a gasp on every page.
Its brilliance acquires something new and sulphurous now that an African American president is handing over to someone endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, and progressives are indulging hand-wringing Vichyite self-hate, claiming it is the fault of “liberals”.
The Sellout is about the disillusioned son of a veteran African American activist who engages in a satirical/masochistic experiment in reviving segregation in his Los Angeles neighbourhood – with stunts including a fake “whites only” sign on a certain bus – in an attempt to galvanise his community and to humour his old friend Hominy, a former child actor suffering from a breakdown and has a bizarre delusional nostalgia for slavery.
Hominy gets turfed out of his seat on the bus due to the phoney sign: “If a smile is a frown turned upside down, then the look of contentment on Hominy’s face as he shuffled to the back of the bus was a pout turned inside out.”
There is real horror in that sentence. Since the US election, hesitant hopeful smiles have been inverted into silent sobs of horror, then re-inverted into queasy grimaces of ironic disbelief or self-reproach or Guy Fawkes V for Vendetta grins of cynical despair. It’s a evasive mannerism that the left will have to learn to live with.
Glenda’s glory is on stage
At 80 years old, Glenda Jackson has given us some much-needed good news by making a glorious return to the London stage with her blistering, regendered performance as Shakespeare’s Lear. My colleague Michael Billington has praised her remarkable shifts between “madness and sanity, anger and tenderness”. She is clearly a giant of theatre, which many would consider way more valuable than politics.
So what on earth have the last 25 years been about? Was her Westminster career just a detour? Of course, it could be that Jackson was saving up all her ringside-seat insights into the pettiness of power and pouring them into her portrayal of Lear. Or maybe she was just so frustrated at having landed herself in Westminster’s unrewarding mediocrity and dullness that she could let rip as Lear out of pure personal frustration.
Either way, she’s back with a bang. Now surely she can get back together with 82-year-old George Segal for a bittersweet sequel to their famous 1973 movie about an affair: A Touch of Class 2. She was cast in the original film because director Melvyn Frank saw her in the famous Cleopatra sketch on the Morecambe & Wise Show and realised she could play comedy. When she gained her Oscar, Eric Morecambe sent her a telegram reading: “Stick with us, and we’ll get you another one.” Jackson’s awards cabinet is bound to fill up.
2016: the gap year
This week saw the great Toblerone devaluation. It’s difficult to escape the fear that the western world is having a nervous breakdown much like the one that afflicted Alan Partridge when he ate four Toblerones in the back of his car – with two white ones left, because he didn’t like them as much as the dark ones. The sight of the missing Toblerone triangles is just so apparent: there is at least a kind of brutal honesty in doing this, rather than sneakily reducing the overall size and shape.
The Toblerone crisis is shocking because the missing bits look like the gaps left by teeth that have fallen out of a diseased mouth. Freud said that dreaming about teeth falling out meant profound anxiety – of a sexual nature. The Toblerone malaise is another reason to loathe 2016.
