The Sellout by Paul Beatty review – a galvanizing satire of post-racial America

Every admirer of Paul Beatty’s latest novel, The Sellout, will likely have a different favorite line. There are more than enough surprising and galvanic jokes in this caustic-but-heartfelt work of satire to make that a possibility.

The riff I (currently) admire most comes early on. By then you have already learned that Beatty’s African American protagonist – whose first name is never revealed, and whose last name is Me – is at the supreme court. After sparking up a joint with the help of a sympathetic court officer, Me fantasises about his future legacy as the catalytic agent behind “the latest in the long line of landmark race-related cases”, Me v the United States of America.

Me’s own alleged crimes echo the facts underlying the critical American segregation cases of Dred Scott, and Plessy v Ferguson: the holding of a slave (in Obama’s America!), as well as the formal “re-segregation” of Me’s majority-black-and-Latino suburb of southern Los Angeles. (Me hopes to give the town back its essential identity, rescuing it from gentrification. Also, his gambit winds up helping public-school test scores.) The defendant expects that future constitutional scholars will focus on his case as some “unforeseen hip-hop generation precedent”.

Me then delivers the punchline via a memory of 2 Live Crew’s landmark obscenity case: “Though if I’d been on the other side of the bench, I would’ve snatched the fountain pen from Chief Justice Rehnquist’s hand and written the lone dissenting opinion, stating categorically that ‘any wack rapper whose signature tune is Me So Horny has no rights the white man, or any other B-boy worth his suede Pumas, was bound to respect.” Using the painful language of the majority opinion in Dred Scott as inspiration for a multicultural denunciation of empty-provocation rap: that right there is the Beatty touch.

(It hurts so good, you shouldn’t even bother about the fact that 2 Live Crew’s obscenity case never made it to the high court. Chalk it up to humourist’s license.)

Beatty’s wicked wit is the book’s chief source of momentum. And though he avoids the traps of plotless modernism, Beatty’s constant barrage of asides and routines eventually does take precedence over the supreme court plot, for example. The resolution of the trial does not figure much in the end. That, I think, is by design. Beatty wants to address more subjects than that the form of a legal procedural allows.

Over the course of the novel his characters’ minds canvass Tolstoy, Kafka, Lee Morgan, the enduring mass entertainment appeal of certain forms of racial stereotyping (no matter how many old cartoons and movies are censored) and ill-advised stand-up jokes written in stilted, American Psychiatric Association paper-abstract format.

Meanwhile, Me’s demoted hometown of Dickens, California, is populated with gangland hoods, a struggling public school administrator trying to keep an elementary school out of receivership, the last living member of the Little Rascals (an obscure Buckwheat understudy named Hominy Jenkins, who volunteers himself for slavery) and a flagging order of black intellectuals originally established by Me’s father. (It is that order’s current leader who dubs our protagonist “The Sellout”). Nearby, in a better-off suburb not subject to being purged from America’s official map, lives Marpessa – The Sellout’s ex-girlfriend and one-true-love – who works as a bus driver and is married to a rapper-turned-TV-cop.

Beatty’s characters rarely come under so much fire that they can’t also find time for aesthetic engagement. A black father who wants to school his son in the ways of white sexual insecurity instructs the child to whistle at a Caucasian woman – calling to mind the alleged “wolf whistle” that doomed Emmett Till – but is treated instead to the sputtering sound of his offspring trying to blow Ravel’s Bolero through his lips. Describing how his unrequited love manages the challenges of her job, The Sellout says: “Godard approached filmmaking as criticism, the same way Marpessa approached bus driving.”

Godard’s name comes up again in the novel. He is even included in a roll-call of heroes (alongside Richard Pryor and Sun Ra), each of whom, regardless of race, reflects The Sellout’s definition of “unmitigated blackness”. (Which is: “Simply not giving a fuck.”) Like Godard’s characters, Beatty’s can speak with a pop-philosopher patois – as well as with an intimidating range of references – that is often judged to be improbable by the standards of realism.

But unlike Godard, who can use allusive density to dissuade an audience from identifying with the characters, Beatty’s curation of his references has a more generous effect. First, the longer you stare at Beatty’s pages, the smarter you’ll get. And the more you credit that these characters are perfectly plausible, the more you dismiss the very stereotypes that The Sellout challenges from the opening line of the book: “This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything.”

Linking artistic traditions is an explicit preoccupation for Beatty. In his first novel, The White Boy Shuffle, Beatty had a character ask: “What the hell is a street poet?” (He was showing up America’s need for caste-style distinctions in art, based on its place of performance.) In The Sellout, Beatty revisits the point, with a wild yarn about an 80s-era crack dealer “high on his own supply” who refashions Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade into The Charge of the Light-Skinned Spade. (Which, in The Sellout’s opinion, gives Tennyson partial credit for the birth of gangster rap.)

It’s this deliberate subversion of harmful cultural assumptions that makes this daring and abrasive novel a joy to read – the furthest thing imaginable from a selling out of anyone.