When I told a friend that I would be writing about Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and showed him a synopsis of it, he said: “You should get on Twitter just so the Internet will have something to yell at.” What he meant was not that I was guaranteed to write something offensive about The Sellout but that there was probably nothing one could write about it that wouldn’t offend someone. This is doubtless as Beatty intended. He has written a book to shock all of us into reexamining what we think we know about race in America.
The Sellout is narrated by a young black man who owns a slave, albeit entirely against his will; who reestablishes segregation in his Los Angeles ’hood; and who uses the word nigger, both in his exposition and in his own speech, with a frequency that must match or exceed Twain’s in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. (I didn’t keep count, but my money is on “exceed.”) Its repertoire of racial stereotypes is so exhaustive that some readers may not even recognize or understand all of them, and others may not want to admit they do.
So, graduates of Sensitivity Training are forewarned: This is an offensive book. It is also a timely, phantasmagoric, and deliriously funny look at American race relations in the twenty-first century. As a starting point for that “national conversation on race” Americans keep meaning to have, The Sellout is perhaps an unlikely candidate, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an ideal one.
The book opens at the Supreme Court, where our narrator’s case, Me vs. the United States, is about to be heard. He is a “not-so-proud descendant of the Kentucky Mees, one of the first black families to settle in southwest Los Angeles”; his radical sociologist father dropped the second e, he tells us, not to “Anglicize or Africanize” the name but to actualize it. This is a cunning way to underscore Beatty’s animating theme, the search not only for an authentically black identity but also for an authentically individual one.
Who is Me and what is he doing before the Court? Beatty draws us in by being vague about both questions. His first twenty-odd pages consist of Me’s galloping, verbally acrobatic internal monologue about everything from Washington, D.C., to the importance of mottos, to civil rights history, to cops, to a woman’s “‘Don’t You See How Insanely Long, Soft, Shiny, and Expensive This Is? Motherfucker, YOU WILL Treat Me Like a Queen!’ Toni Morrison signature model pashmina.” This section functions as something of a boot camp for the reader, who must adjust to a forward momentum that rarely lets up in 300 pages and is constantly challenging him with tangents, free association, allusions, and wicked wordplay. (A reference to the Hottentot Venus, e.g., is hidden in the “broad, gravity-defying, Venus hot-to-trot roundness of Marilyn Monroe’s ass.”) Me’s voice is utterly singular, pure energy.
It is only on the penultimate page of that prologue that we learn Me has violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. Later we discover his improbable background: He is a farmer—one who specializes in high-octane marijuana, watermelon, and citrus fruits but also keeps animals—in inner-city Los Angeles. He lives in Dickens, an agrarian-zoned ghetto — more or less happily, until disaster strikes. Gentrification erases Dickens from the map. Its resident quasi-celebrity, Hominy Jenkins, a former Little Rascal, is so distraught that he tries to commit suicide by hanging; luckily, this “self-lynching” fails. Worst of all, Me’s father is “accidentally” shot to death by the police while fleeing a traffic stop.
From there, things only get weirder. Hominy demands to be taken as Me’s slave, to which Me grudgingly and bemusedly acquiesces. Me paints unauthorized boundaries and puts up counterfeit road signs in order to reestablish Dickens. As a birthday present for old Hominy, whose only wish is for “some racism,” Me segregates the bus his girlfriend drives by putting up a PRIORITY SEATING FOR WHITES sign. Pleased by the effect this has on passengers—“people were treating each other with respect”—Me decides to attempt the same with a local school. I’m not sure I grasp Beatty’s reasoning here, but I suspect it’s akin to what Reagan said about an alien invasion uniting mankind against a common foe.
That, until Me runs afoul of the Constitution, is The Sellout in very broad strokes, but to summarize is to miss the point. It’s all about Beatty’s language, caricatures, and brilliantly drawn vignettes. He sketches, frame-by-frame, some preposterously racist and all-too-authentic-sounding Our Gang episodes for Hominy to have starred in. He spoofs subtler racism—as well as sanctimony and condescension—as well. A white woman, sounding less like a human being than a pull-string doll, tells a black one, “[Y]ou’re a beautiful woman who just happens to be black, and you’re far too smart not to know that it isn’t race that’s the problem but class.”
Nor are black characters immune from this treatment. Foy Cheshire, friend and rival of our narrator’s late father—and the man who dubs our narrator a sellout—is an increasingly irrelevant black intellectual; one of his projects is bowdlerizing the Western Canon, and it isn’t difficult to guess from this passage what Beatty the author thinks of such impulses:
I also improved Jim’s diction, rejiggered the plotline a bit, and retitled the book The Pejorative-Free Adventures and Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of African-American Jim and His Young Protegé, White Brother Huckleberry Finn, as They Go in Search of the Lost Black Family Unit.
Foy sanitizes a number of other books (The Point Guard in the Rye, The Great Blacksby), but I cite the Huckleberry Finn example both because it was inspired by true events and because Twain is so clearly a lodestar for Beatty. Like Twain, Beatty has produced a book that is slippery, protean, and endlessly open to interpretation. Consider the black intellectual klatch at which Foy uses the black slideshow software EmpowerPoint. Is Beatty poking fun at the rhetoric of black academics or at a racist’s reductive and sneering view of that rhetoric? Or both? The same ambiguity obtains for the shooting of Me’s father, which does double duty as a critique both of police brutality and of anti-police paranoia. (I doubt Beatty intended the latter possibility, but it’s there all the same.)
If there is a major complaint to be made about The Sellout, it is that its situations are too outlandish, and its characters too cartoonish, for the reader to experience quite the level of emotional engagement he does with, say, Huck and Jim. The “evasion” sequence in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn may be a foray into the absurd, but it is an exception; The Sellout is, from a plot perspective, all foray into the absurd. And while it may be a small matter for minor characters in The Sellout to be caricatures, it is too bad that its narrator is frequently defined in terms of black stereotypes: He is bad at sex; he surfs; he has no street name apart from the far-from-intimidating sobriquet “Bonbon.” But the book is too smart and funny to ask it for realism as well. It provokes plenty of thought, if little emotion.
Wikipedia classifies Paul Beatty as an African-American writer, but I would bet he thinks of himself first and foremost as a comic writer, if an unusually serious one. In a 2006 New York Timespiece, Beatty described the “traumatic experience” of sampling Maya Angelou’s “maudlin” autobiography as a child, and wrote: “It’s always struck me as odd that there hasn’t been a colored Calvin Trillin, Bennett Cerf or Mark Twain. . . . The defining characteristic of the African-American writer is sobriety—unless it’s the black literature you buy from the book peddler standing on the corner next to the black-velvet-painting dealer, next to the burrito truck: then the prevailing theme is the ménage à trois.”
There you have it. Beatty’s is not the kind of “black—excuse me, Black—literature” (his words) that gets mined for SAT reading comprehension passages. The Sellout is blurbed not by Black Writers but by the decidedly unsober likes of Sam Lipsyte and Sarah Silverman. In that Times piece, Beatty admits to “masochistically [relishing] being offended while thinking about why I feel offended and if I should feel offended.” The Sellout includes a riff on the nature of offense: “It’s not even an emotion. What does being offended say about how you feel? No great theater director ever said to an actor, ‘Okay, this scene calls for some real emotion, now go out there and give me lots of offendedness!’ ”
What does being offended say about how you feel? That is a question the best comic writers and comedians, from Twain to Chappelle, have always forced us to consider. Beatty, who belongs to that tradition, violates every taboo he can think of—but not to point his readers toward a set of rules about what it really means to be black, or racist, or racially enlightened. Despite its palpable sense of anger at and impatience with the status quo, The Sellout never becomes a lecture or a manifesto. It is a challenge to think and talk about race and a not-even-remotely-gentle reminder that if we are to do so profitably, offendedness will be part of the cost of doing business.