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The Sellout: A Novel Hardcover – March 3, 2015
| Paul Beatty (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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Winner of the 2016 Man Booker Prize
Winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction
Named one of the best books of 2015 by The New York Times Book Review and the Wall Street Journal
A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality―the black Chinese restaurant.
Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens―on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles―the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've 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.
Fuelled 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.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
- Publication dateMarch 3, 2015
- Dimensions5.75 x 1.04 x 8.6 inches
- ISBN-100374260508
- ISBN-13978-0374260507
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“The first 100 pages of [Paul Beatty's] new novel, The Sellout, are the most caustic and the most badass first 100 pages of an American novel I've read in at least a decade. I gave up underlining the killer bits because my arm began to hurt . . . [They] read like the most concussive monologues and interviews of Chris Rock, Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle wrapped in a satirical yet surprisingly delicate literary and historical sensibility . . . The jokes come up through your spleen . . . The riffs don't stop coming in this landmark and deeply aware comic novel . . . [It] puts you down in a place that's miles from where it picked you up.” ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“[The Sellout] is among the most important and difficult American novels written in the 21st century . . . It is a bruising novel that readers will likely never forget.” ―Kiese Laymon, Los Angeles Times
“Swiftian satire of the highest order . . . Giddy, scathing and dazzling.” ―Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“The Sellout isn't just one of the most hilarious American novels in years, it also might be the first truly great satirical novel of the century . . . [It] is a comic masterpiece, but it's much more than just that-it's one of the smartest and most honest reflections on race and identity in America in a very long time.” ―Michael Schaub, NPR.org
“Beatty, author of the deservedly highly praised The White Boy Shuffle (1996), here outdoes himself and possibly everybody else in a send-up of race, popular culture, and politics in today's America . . . Beatty hits on all cylinders in a darkly funny, dead-on-target, elegantly written satire . . . [The Sellout] is frequently laugh-out-loud funny and, in the way of the great ones, profoundly thought provoking. A major contribution.” ―Mark Levin, Booklist (starred review)
“The Sellout is brilliant. Amazing. Like demented angels wrote it.” ―Sarah Silverman
“I am glad that I read this insane book alone, with no one watching, because I fell apart with envy, hysterics, and flat-out awe. Is there a more fiercely brilliant and scathingly hilarious American novelist than Paul Beatty?” ―Ben Marcus
“Paul Beatty has always been one of smartest, funniest, gutsiest writers in America, but The Sellout sets a new standard. It's a spectacular explosion of comic daring, cultural provocation, brilliant, hilarious prose, and genuine heart.” ―Sam Lipsyte
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition (March 3, 2015)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0374260508
- ISBN-13 : 978-0374260507
- Item Weight : 15.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.75 x 1.04 x 8.6 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #419,675 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #146 in Black & African American Fantasy Fiction (Books)
- #2,521 in Fiction Satire
- #18,831 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors

Winner of the 2016 Man Booker Prize
Winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction
Named one of the best books of 2015 by The New York Times Book Review and the Wall Street Journal
Paul Beatty is the author of three novels―Slumberland, Tuff, and The White Boy Shuffle―and two books of poetry: Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce. He is the editor of Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor. He lives in New York City.
Author Photo - Beatty, Paul (c) Hannah Assouline

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviewed in the United States on June 11, 2020
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1) It's not a page-turning, finish-in-one-night kind of book. If you try, you'll miss out. I had to read it over several days, each session giving me a hundred things to think about.
2) When you get anxious for the plot to pick up, think of it as satirical standup, and read it like you'd listen to the comics to which Beatty's compared, namely Dave Chapelle. (If you're thinking of it as a novel instead of as satire, you can lose the thread of hilarity) When you're overwhelmed by the satire, think of it as a novel and try to piece together the experiences that make up Bonbon's character. It's hard to get hold of his character at times, and trying to summarize Bonbon Me's character is a (rewarding) reading experience in and of itself.
3) You may want to have google at hand so you don't miss out on the plethora (this word is on my mind after one particularly funny bit near the end), of cultural and historical references. You might know Plessy v. Ferguson and the scopes trial, but it would be hard, I think, to catch every reference, and the satire depends on them.
4) Yes, it's funny, but not in the LOL way as often as 'that so true it's painful' way. Reading the reviews, I expected to be chuckling every few pages. Instead I had a wry grin every few sentences. Don't let this deter you. The verbs come at the end of sentences so often that you really have to read it at a run if you don't want to lose the thread of what's going on, but I can guarantee the thread is worth catching. In the last few pages of the book, Beatty comes as close to speaking to you plainly as the author as he does in the entire novel, and what he had to say tied the its many disparate observations together perfectly.
It's easy to see why this book won all those awards last year, including the first Man Booker for a work by an American author. It is a tour-de-force of writing, a biting social satire that makes its point not with a bludgeon but with a delicate literary sensibility firmly based in historical authenticity.
Beatty has given us a protagonist/narrator who is a young black man from the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens, a neighborhood on the outskirts of southern Los Angeles. He was raised by a single father, a sociologist who used his son as the subject of his weird, often outlandish psychological studies of the roots of fear and of racism.
The son grew up to become a farmer who raised delicious fruit of many kinds, the most delicious of all being satsuma oranges. He also grew watermelons and weed, one of the finest varieties of which he called "Anglophobia."
He lost his father along the way to a policeman's gun. The man was shot essentially for driving while black, a sad and familiar story in our country. At least, the resulting financial settlement with the city of Los Angeles made life a bit easier for the son.
Over time, our narrator watches the decline of his neighborhood, until, finally, Dickens no longer even appears on California maps, at which point our hero decides on a social and psychological experiment of his own, one that will put Dickens back on the map. With the help of the town's most famous resident, the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins, he comes up with an outrageous plan; he will reinstitute slavery and segregation in Dickens. That should get California's - and the world's - attention!
Thus it is that Hominy becomes his willing - even eager - slave and he begins a stealth campaign to reinstitute segregation in the local school. His plan is a roaring success! Soon the students at the all black - well, black and Hispanic and Asian - school are doing better than ever, succeeding as never before.
Sure enough, this does bring him and Dickens attention and he winds up before the Supreme Court in a very funny scene, which I can't even begin to describe.
Along the way, the author pricks the hot air balloons of just about every black American cultural icon and cliche that one could think of - from Mike Tyson to Bill Cosby to George Washington Carver to Tiger Woods to Clarence Thomas and so many more. They are all here. Also lawn jockeys, cotton picking, Saturday morning cartoons, as well as the American liberal agenda all come in for a skewering. The comic writing sometimes made me wince or shrug wryly, but mostly it just made me grin.
This is a zany book that employs racist terms in the service of humor - words that are never spoken in polite society. It's a way to shock the reader and get his/her full attention. Suffice to say if you are one who is offended by the language in Huckleberry Finn, you'll be absolutely appalled by the language in The Sellout.
Top reviews from other countries
Firstly, the law. As the novel opens, the case of Me v The United States of America is about to commence in the Supreme Court. The black narrator (whose surname is Me, his ancestors having dropped the redundant E from Mee) is on trial. He received a letter, signed "The People of the United States of America", telling him his case would be heard, almost as though he'd won a prize. Perhaps this is an early comment on the erratic manner in which so-called justice is meted out almost at random if you're a black American.
Very little of the novel is concerned explicitly with the law. The court case bookends the action: only the Prologue and the penultimate section are set inside the Courtroom. The bulk relates the narrator's upbringing and how he came to commit his alleged crimes. Nevertheless, the text is concerned with justice throughout, in particular racial injustice.
Secondly, the author. It might be naive to read a book by a black, American author and not to expect to be confronted with some black American themes. Beatty's novel was published in 2015 and won the Booker Prize the following year. Asked what he was responding to with this novel, Beatty said, "myself, I guess." This evasion is hard to believe given his focus on racial politics and that he wrote at a time when Black Lives Matter was gaining considerable traction in the form of protests that have only now been eclipsed by the exponential growth of the movement after the death of George Floyd in May this year. In 2014, Eric Garner and teenaged Michael Brown died at the hands of policemen in Staten Island, New York and Ferguson, Missouri respectively. In the wake of that scandal, The Washington Post and ABC News conducted a survey exploring how much faith people had in the US justice system. Half of the white Americans surveyed said people of all races are treated equally in the justice system. Belying this faith in the myth of a post-racial America, only 1 in 10 African Americans said that black people receive equal treatment in the justice system.
The Sellout explicitly tackles police brutality. Inexplicably, the blurb and the plot summary on Goodreads both state "his father is killed in a drive-by shooting". Presumably this was written by someone at the publishing company who hadn't taken the trouble to read the book, because it is incorrect. The narrator's father – hilariously named F K Me – is shot by the police.
Factual errors in the blurb are not the only issue I had with the physical presentation of this book, published by Oneworld. It is rare that I find fault with the book as a product, but I was miffed about this one. I felt patronised by the dozens of quotations from reviews on the front, back and inside covers carefully edited to emphasise the word "satire", so that people get that it's, you know, satirical. Without all that peritextual nudging, would readers be likely to take the characters too seriously? Might they risk following in the footsteps of the narrator by taking up slave ownership, implementing racial segregation in their communities and dropping the "N-word" into every second sentence? I don't think so.
The Black Lives Matter movement has blown apart the fiction that racial equality has been achieved in the USA. So it doesn't need me, a white guy, to emphasise that race is a topic that must not be ignored. However, I wonder whether satire is in any sense a productive medium for the discussion; I'm mindful of one of the thousands of objects of satire in Beatty's book: "Unmitigated Blackness is essays passing for fiction." I can't help feeling this is what The Sellout is doing. Nevertheless, it raises some issues and is, in the most positive sense possible, very much a book – whether that be fiction or an essay – of its time. Regrettably, it is also very much of its place. That is to say, the book is a product of America.
Thirdly, to consider its place within Booker Prize canon. Authors from the USA only became eligible for the Booker Prize in 2014, and Beatty was the first American to win. In 2018, there were calls from publishers to reverse the decision to let Americans in, for fear that literary fiction would become too homogenised. Fast forward to 2020. Now that California-based Crankstart sponsors the prize, an overwhelming 9 out of 13 authors longlisted this year are from or living in the USA. Unlike the Pulitzer Prizes, awarded by the journalism school at Columbia University, the Booker Prize has no explicit or implicit link to social issues. It claims to reward simply the finest fiction of the year, but often there seems to be a social agenda. It is hard to divine any such connection between early winners of the prize (inaugurated in 1969) and the troubles of their immediate era: Something to Answer For by P H Newby retells the Suez Crisis, which occurred two decades earlier; The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens is a domestic tragedy; In A Free State by V S Naipaul is set in a fictional post-colonial African country; etc. (J G Farrell's Troubles, about the roots of the Irish conflict that was very much in the news in the 1970s, was only added to the roster of winners in 2010 as the Lost Booker.) Working backwards, however, the taste for hot topics is a bit clearer: Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo tells the stories of 12 women, most of whom are black, including a rainbow of LGBTQ characters; Milkman by Anna Burns charts a young woman's experiences living in the simmering tensions of a post-Troubles Northern Ireland. That is not to dismiss these books as nothing but trendy; they are complex and erudite manifestations of authorial craft. There may not have been any conscious effort on the part of the judges or administrators of the Booker Prize to reward books that tick a zeitgeist box. It could be the case that authors – including the top quality ones who write the prizewinning books – are desirous to write about their immediate lived experiences and those of their contemporaries.
Unfortunately, many of the allusions in The Sellout are a little too contemporary for my taste and need a lot of unpacking for those of us unlucky enough to be non-American readers. There are scores of pop-cultural references throughout that make very little sense to a white, English reader who has only a passing familiarity with the most widely exported products of American culture. I had no idea, until I'd finished reading and watched a few interviews with Beatty in preparation for this review, that The Little Rascals television show that features heavily was actually a real thing. Much of the humour was hard to appreciate, too. For instance, I had heard of the comic duo Abbott and Costello and also knew from that zenith of high culture The Nutty Professor that "your mama" jokes seem to be popular in black culture, but all that valuable prior knowledge did not save me having to spend nearly 10 minutes on YouTube just to understand this joke told by the narrator at an open mic night:
Why All That Abbott and Costello Vaudeville Mess Doesn't Work in the Black Community
Who's on first?
I don't know, your mama.
Abbott and Costello's "Who's on first" sketch plays with the possibilities of the 'names' Who, What and I-don't-know as members of a baseball team; it is a slow burn. Your mama jokes are punchy. The humour in this joke apparently derives from the contrast between two unbridgeable brands of comedy. Simon Schama, who moved to America in 1980, said this novel was "howl-a-page" funny stuff. It wasn't for me. When a joke needs that much explanation, it loses its effect.
The final words of the novel resonated with me more than anything else in the book, but for the wrong reasons: "He just shook his head at me. Said something to the effect that [...] I'd never understand. And he's right. I never will."
The author photo is likably charming, and the opening sentence is great: “This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything.” Sadly though, after half a chapter I was skimming and at the end of the first chapter I gave up. Far too much clever author and far too little story for me, and I was too ignorant of the cultural references that came thick and fast to keep up, let alone laugh.
I don’t doubt that it’s brilliant, but I couldn’t make myself read on to find out.
Beautifully articulate; this booker raises questions of race, colour identity and history but it’s digestible without making you feel like you’re reading a history text, it’s all there.
We owe it to ourselves to read uncomfortable literature that poses questions and continues to bleed into our daily life.
I look forward to reading more books by this author.
Right from the first page, this book is shocking, controversial, and brutally honest. Some parts I needed to re-read (either because they were so much fun, or because I couldn't quite believe what I'd read). Other parts made me squirm uncomfortably. My enthusiasm for the book waned a little towards the end - maybe because it's almost impossible to carry on the pace and shock-value all the way through the story.
I'd recommend it, but don't say I didn't warn you about the content. (And don't give it to your Gran for Christmas.)
Intoxicating, high speed satire that leaves you thrilled and befuddled. Beautiful prose and fantastical ideas throw a vicious reality into ugly relief.










