Caught it a bit late in the day but Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, that won the 2016 Man
Booker Prize is a wickedly funny satire on race in America.
The narrator called Me starts his strange story with, "This may be hard to believe, coming from a black
man, but I've never stolen anything."
Me, also called Bonbon by his
bus-driver girlfriend Marpessa, is a farmer in the small town of Dickens in Los Angeles, dominated by Blacks and
Hispanics. For reasons of his own, that involve an old Black actor called
Hominy Jenkins who suddenly proclaims himself to be Me’s slave, called him
“Massa” and begging to be whipped, Me decides to surreptitiously reintroduce racial
segregation into the town, and finds that it actually raises the standards of
living of the townsfolk.
Eventually, he has to stand trial at the Supreme Court and
the journey to that point is profanity-laden, rambunctious and laugh-out-loud readable.
Coming in for particularly sharp lampooning are Black
intellectuals, personified by For Cheshire who rewrites great novels into
politically correct versions that read like, "Real
talk. When I was young... my omnipresent, good to my mother, non-stereotypical
African American daddy dropped some knowledge on me that I been tripping off of
ever since."
The
book was reportedly turned down eighteen times before being picked up by a
publisher and went on to become the first novel by an American author to win
the Booker.
The Sellout
By Paul Beatty
Publisher: One World
Publications,
Pages:
304
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