Review of "The Sellout: A Novel" by Paul Beatty

In 2016, "The Sellout" won the 'National Book Critics Circle Award' and the 'Man Booker Prize.' The satiric novel gives us a peek at what it's like to be black in America - a serious topic, but told with a humorous spin.

The narrator, nicknamed Bonbon, lives in 'Dickens', a black town adjacent to Los Angeles, California. Bonbon's neighborhood, called The Farms, permits crops and livestock - so Bonbon grows pot, raises sheep and goats.....



.....and rides a horse around the community. 



Bonbon also grows exquisitely delicious fruit, especially watermelons and satsumas.





The scrumptious produce can be used to defuse tricky situations, or even serve as currency. When Bonbon has to pay bail, for example, a judge accepts two satsumas and a kiwi.

Beatty liberally sprinkles the n-word through the book, but I'll just say black person. Interestingly, Beatty addresses that topic in the novel: A journalist asks a gangbanger (I'm paraphrasing), "Why can black people say n__ga but I can't." And the hoodlum responds, "We know we mean n__ga. We don't know if you mean n__ga or n__ger." So that's a pretty good explanation.



As the story opens Bonbon is a farmer and 'black person whisperer' - a job he inherited from his deceased father. Bonbon's dad was a social psychologist who - among other things - eased difficult situations in the black community. The psychologist also home-schooled Bonbon, and used his son for innumerable (weird) psychological experiments. In one classic study, Bonbon had to answer senseless questions, and got an electric shock for responding incorrectly. 



The twist: Bonbon had to shock himself! 



Bonbon studied agriculture in college and wasn't prepared to be the neighborhood fixer. However, after Bonbon's father was 'accidently' killed by cops, the farmer tried to fill his dad's whispering shoes. This inadvertently resulted in Bonbon acquiring a slave (more about that later).

At some point, political honchos in California decide to quietly wipe Dickens off the map - so surrounding property values will improve. Thus, city limits signs disappear; highway exit signs are taken down; maps no longer show Dickens; GPS devices can't find Dickens; and so on.



As it happens, elderly Hominy Jenkins - who had small parts in the old television series 'The Little Rascals' - lives in Dickens.....and is a minor celebrity.



Tourists sometimes stop in Dickens just to see Hominy, and he likes the attention. After Dickens disappears, however, visitors can no longer find Hominy. The old gent - who's a little nuts anyway - tries to hang himself, but Bonbon saves his life.

Afterwards, Hominy declares that he's Bonbon's slave. Not only does Hominy do odd jobs around the farm, dress up as a butler, pose as a lawn jockey, and so on.....he insists on being whipped once a week. So Bonbon takes him to a dominatrix. Having a slave is awkward for Bonbon, but he can't convince Hominy to give up the charade.



Angry about Dickens being vanished, Bonbon decides to resurrect the municipality. He paints a thick white line around the old Dickens boundary line and erects a new Dickens exit sign on the highway.



Afterwards, to coalesce the black community, Bonbon segregates Dickens - the buses, stores, schools, etc. Bonbon takes it upon himself to put up signs saying 'Whites Only' or 'Blacks Only.' This leads to discussions about 'who is white?' Are Hispanics white? Mexicans?





All this rigmarole about segregation leads to lawsuits, and the case eventually ends up in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court scenes are the funniest parts of the book (to me).



The race issue underlies the entire novel, and is addressed in various ways, such as: racism in 'The Little Rascals'; Bonbon's father being killed for parking in the wrong place; white patrons being chased out of a black comedy club; affirmative action helping black students attend 'white schools'; and more. One character, a black intellectual named Foy Cheshire, re-writes classic books. He 'fixes' Huckleberry Finn, for instance, by replacing the n-word with 'warrior' and 'slave' with 'dark-skinned volunteer.'



Readers intimately familiar with black culture will probably understand a lot of references and in-jokes that I missed, but I liked the book - which is original, informative, and entertaining.

I'd recommend the book to fans of literary fiction.

Rating: 3.5 stars