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Reflections on Gen Z and ‘Sellout Culture’

Book Reviews

'the sellout' is a scorchingly funny satire on 'post-racial' america.

Michael Schaub

The Sellout

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It's difficult to pin down the exact day when post-racial America was born. Maybe it was when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law, or when Thurgood Marshall was appointed the first African American member of the Supreme Court. Maybe it was when Barack Obama was elected president, or the first time a white person claimed to be "colorblind." It's honestly hard to tell, because as we keep seeing proved again and again, "post-racial America" is completely indistinguishable from what came before.

Enter the narrator of Paul Beatty's new novel The Sellout . When we're first introduced to him, he's sitting in front of the Supreme Court, openly smoking marijuana and being berated by a furious associate justice. His crime, as he explains it to a police officer: "I've whispered 'Racism' in a post-racial world." Specifically, he owned a slave and resegregated public transportation and education in his hometown, making the charges a little more complicated. "I'm the Scopes monkey," he reflects, "the missing link in the evolution of African-American jurisprudence come to life."

Post-racial America or not, it's hard to see how anything funny could come out of slavery, police violence, gangs and racial discrimination, all subjects Beatty tackles in his fourth novel. It's the equivalent to an improv comedy troupe dedicating an entire performance to abortion. But somehow, 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.

Too many writers shy away from any discussions of race, especially when those discussions involve humor. Beatty is not one of them. The very first sentence of the book sets the tone: "This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I've never stolen anything." That's the narrator, whose last name is Me, though he's called "Bonbon" by his ex-girlfriend, "Massa" by his slave, and "Sellout" by his archrival, a frustrated intellectual named Foy Cheshire.

Paul Beatty has written three other novels: Slumberland , Tuff , and The White Boy Shuffle. Hannah Assouline hide caption

Paul Beatty has written three other novels: Slumberland , Tuff , and The White Boy Shuffle.

Our hero lives in Dickens, Calif., a city whose original charter mandated it "remain free of Chinamen, Spanish of all shades, dialects, and hats, Frenchmen, redheads, city slickers, and unskilled Jews." The town is now mostly African American and Latino, and the site of urban farms, many of which have gone to pot. (In the narrator's case, that's literally true — though he's famous for his citrus, he makes money from selling marijuana and watermelons on horseback.) After the narrator's father, a psychologist, is killed by police officers, he inherits the older man's land — and not too long after, the town of Dickens is removed from the map.

The move to pretend Dickens no longer exists breaks the heart of the narrator's friend Hominy Jenkins, an actor known for taking stereotypical African American roles in his youth – Hominy himself is fictional, but he was once one of TV's real Little Rascals. And he's a hero to some, but an embarrassment to those who see him as a "mark of shame on the African-American legacy, something to be eradicated, stricken from the racial record, like the hambone, Amos 'n' Andy, Dave Chappelle's meltdown, and people who say 'Valentime's Day.'"

'Slumberland' Offers High Ambitions, Low Comedy

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About the Book

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.

Fueled 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.

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

Publication Date: March 1, 2016
Genres: Fiction
Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Picador
ISBN-10: 1250083257
ISBN-13: 9781250083258

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THE SELLOUT

by Paul Beatty ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2015

Another daring, razor-sharp novel from a writer with talent to burn.

The provocative author of The White Boy Shuffle (1996) and Slumberland (2008) is back with his most penetratingly satirical novel yet.

Beatty has never been afraid to stir the pot when it comes to racial and socioeconomic issues, and his latest is no different. In fact, this novel is his most incendiary, and readers unprepared for streams of racial slurs (and hilarious vignettes about nearly every black stereotype imaginable) in the service of satire should take a pass. The protagonist lives in Dickens, “a ghetto community” in Los Angeles, and works the land in an area called “The Farms,” where he grows vegetables, raises small livestock and smokes a ton of “good weed.” After being raised by a controversial sociologist father who subjected him to all manner of psychological and social experiments, the narrator is both intellectually gifted and extremely street-wise. When Dickens is removed from the map of California, he goes on a quest to have it reinstated with the help of Hominy Jenkins, the last surviving Little Rascal, who hangs around the neighborhood regaling everyone with tales of the ridiculously racist skits he used to perform with the rest of the gang. It’s clear that Hominy has more than a few screws loose, and he volunteers to serve as the narrator’s slave—yes, slave—on his journey. Another part of the narrator’s plan involves segregating the local school so that it allows only black, Latino and other nonwhite students. Eventually, he faces criminal charges and appears in front of the Supreme Court in what becomes “the latest in a long line of landmark race-related cases.” Readers turned off by excessive use of the N-word or those who are easily offended by stereotypes may find the book tough going, but fans of satire and blatantly honest—and often laugh-out-loud funny—discussions of race and class will be rewarded on each page. Beatty never backs down, and readers are the beneficiaries.

Pub Date: March 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-374-26050-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

LITERARY FICTION

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by Paul Beatty

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PERSPECTIVES

SEEN & HEARD

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

More by Mark Z. Danielewski

by Mark Z. Danielewski

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

More by Donna Tartt

by Donna Tartt

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Book details

The Sellout

Author: Paul Beatty

Award Winner

National Book Critics Circle Award - Winner
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Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction
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Hurston/Wright LEGACY Award - Finalist
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One I suppose that’s exactly the problem—I wasn’t raised to know any better. My father was (Carl Jung, rest his soul) a social scientist of some renown. As the founder and, to my knowledge, sole practitioner of the field of Liberation Psychology, he liked to walk around the house, aka “the Skinner box,” in a laboratory coat. Where I, his gangly, absentminded black lab rat was homeschooled in strict accordance with Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. I wasn’t fed; I was presented with lukewarm appetitive stimuli. I wasn’t punished, but broken of my unconditioned reflexes. I wasn’t loved, but brought up in an atmosphere of calculated intimacy and intense levels of commitment. We lived in Dickens, a ghetto community on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles, and as odd as it might sound, I grew up on a farm in the inner city. Founded in 1868, Dickens, like most California towns except for Irvine, which was established as a breeding ground for stupid, fat, ugly, white Republicans and the chihuahuas and East Asian refugees who love them, started out as an agrarian community. The city’s original charter stipulated that “Dickens shall remain free of Chinamen, Spanish of all shades, dialects, and hats, Frenchmen, redheads, city slickers, and unskilled Jews.” However, the founders, in their somewhat limited wisdom, also provided that the five hundred acres bordering the canal be forever zoned for something referred to as “residential agriculture,” and thus my neighborhood, a ten-square-block section of Dickens unofficially known as the Farms was born. You know when you’ve entered the Farms, because the city sidewalks, along with your rims, car stereo, nerve, and progressive voting record, will have vanished into air thick with the smell of cow manure and, if the wind is blowing the right direction—good weed. Grown men slowly pedal dirt bikes and fixies through streets clogged with gaggles and coveys of every type of farm bird from chickens to peacocks. They ride by with no hands, counting small stacks of bills, looking up just long enough to raise an inquisitive eyebrow and mouth: “Wassup? Q’vo?” Wagon wheels nailed to front-yard trees and fences lend the ranch-style houses a touch of pioneer authenticity that belies the fact that every window, entryway, and doggie door has more bars on it and padlocks than a prison commissary. Front porch senior citizens and eight-year-olds who’ve already seen it all sit on rickety lawn chairs whittling with switchblades, waiting for something to happen, as it always did. For the twenty years I knew him, Dad had been the interim dean of the department of psychology at West Riverside Community College. For him, having grown up as a stable manager’s son on a small horse ranch in Lexington, Kentucky, farming was nostalgic. And when he came out west with a teaching position, the opportunity to live in a black community and breed horses was too good to pass up, even if he’d never really been able to afford the mortgage and the upkeep. Maybe if he’d been a comparative psychologist, some of the horses and cows would’ve lived past the age of three and the tomatoes would’ve had fewer worms, but in his heart he was more interested in black liberty than in pest management and the well-being of the animal kingdom. And in his quest to unlock the keys to mental freedom, I was his Anna Freud, his little case study, and when he wasn’t teaching me how to ride, he was replicating famous social science experiments with me as both the control and the experimental group. Like any “primitive” Negro child lucky enough to reach the formal operational stage, I’ve come to realize that I had a shitty upbringing that I’ll never be able to live down. I suppose if one takes into account the lack of an ethics committee to oversee my dad’s childrearing methodologies, the experiments started innocently enough. In the early part of the twentieth century, the behaviorists Watson and Rayner, in an attempt to prove that fear was a learned behavior, exposed nine-month-old “Little Albert” to neutral stimuli like white rats, monkeys, and sheaves of burned newsprint. Initially, the baby test subject was unperturbed by the series of simians, rodents, and flames, but after Watson repeatedly paired the rats with unconscionably loud noises, over time “Little Albert” developed a fear not only of white rats but of all things furry. When I was seven months, Pops placed objects like toy police cars, cold cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, Richard Nixon campaign buttons, and a copy of The Economist in my bassinet, but instead of conditioning me with a deafening clang, I learned to be afraid of the presented stimuli because they were accompanied by him taking out the family .38 Special and firing several window-rattling rounds into the ceiling, while shouting, “Nigger, go back to Africa!” loud enough to make himself heard over the quadraphonic console stereo blasting “Sweet Home Alabama” in the living room. To this day I’ve never been able to sit through even the most mundane TV crime drama, I have a strange affinity for Neil Young, and whenever I have trouble sleeping, I don’t listen to recorded rainstorms or crashing waves but to the Watergate tapes. Family lore has it that from ages one to four, he’d tied my right hand behind my back so I’d grow up to be left-handed, right-brained, and well-centered. I was eight when my father wanted to test the “bystander effect” as it applies to the “black community.” He replicated the infamous Kitty Genovese case with a prepubescent me standing in for the ill-fated Ms. Genovese, who, in 1964, was robbed, raped, and stabbed to death in the apathetic streets of New York, her plaintive Psychology 101 textbook cries for help ignored by dozens of onlookers and neighborhood residents. Hence, the “bystander effect”: the more people around to provide help, the less likely one is to receive help. Dad hypothesized that this didn’t apply to black people, a loving race whose very survival has been dependent on helping one another in times of need. So he made me stand on the busiest intersection in the neighborhood, dollar bills bursting from my pockets, the latest and shiniest electronic gadgetry jammed into my ear canals, a hip-hop heavy gold chain hanging from my neck, and, inexplicably, a set of custom-made carpeted Honda Civic floor mats draped over my forearm like a waiter’s towel, and as tears streamed from my eyes, my own father mugged me. He beat me down in front of a throng of bystanders, who didn’t stand by for long. The mugging wasn’t two punches to the face old when the people came, not to my aid, but to my father’s. Assisting him in my ass kicking, they happily joined in with flying elbows and television wrestling throws. One woman put me in a well-executed and, in retrospect, merciful, rear-naked chokehold. When I regained consciousness to see my father surveying her and the rest of my attackers, their faces still sweaty and chests still heaving from the efforts of their altruism, I imagined that, like mine, their ears were still ringing with my high-pitched screams and their frenzied laughter. “How satisfied were you with your act of selflessness?” Not at all Somewhat satisfied Very satisfied 1 2 3 4 5 On the way home, Pops put a consoling arm around my aching shoulders and delivered an apologetic lecture about his failure to take into account the “bandwagon effect.” Then there was the time he wanted to test “Servility and Obedience in the Hip-hop Generation.” I must’ve been about ten when my father sat me down in front of a mirror, pulled a Ronald Reagan Halloween mask over his head, pinned a defunct pair of Trans World Airlines captain wings to his lab coat, and proclaimed himself a “white authority figure.” “The nigger in the mirror is a stupid nigger,” he explained to me in that screechy, cloying “white voice” comedians of color use, while attaching a set of electrodes to my temples. The wires led to a sinister-looking console filled with buttons, dials, and old-fashioned voltage gauges. “You will ask the boy in the mirror a series of questions about his supposed nigger history from the sheet on the table. If he gets the question wrong or fails to answer in ten seconds, you will press the red button, delivering an electric shock that will increase in intensity with each wrong answer.” I knew better than to beg for mercy, for mercy would be a rant about getting what I deserved for reading the one comic book I ever owned. Batman #203, Spectacular Secrets of the Batcave Revealed , a moldy, dog-eared back issue someone had thrown into the farmyard and I brought inside and nursed back to readability like a wounded piece of literature. It was the first thing I had ever read from the outside world, and when I whipped it out during a break in my homeschooling, my father confiscated it. From then on, whenever I didn’t know something or had a bad day in the neighborhood, he’d wave the comic’s half-torn cover in my face. “See, if you weren’t wasting your life reading this bullshit, you’d realize Batman ain’t coming to save your ass or your people!” I read the first question. “Prior to declaring independence in 1957, the West African nation of Ghana was comprised of what two colonies?” I didn’t know the answer. I cocked my ears for the roar of the rocket-propelled Batmobile screeching around the corner, but could only hear my father’s stopwatch ticking down the seconds. I gritted my teeth, placed my finger over the red button, and waited for the time limit to expire. “The answer is Togoland and the Gold Coast.” Obediently, as my father predicted, I pressed the button. The needles on the dial and my spine both straightened, while I watched myself in the mirror jitterbug violently for a second or two. Jesus. “How many volts was that?” I asked, my hands shaking uncontrollably. “The subject will ask only the questions that are listed on the sheet,” my dad said coldly, reaching past me to turn a black dial a few clicks to the right, so that the indicator now rested on XXX. “Now, please read the next question.” I began to suffer from a blurring of vision I suspected was psychosomatic, but nonetheless everything was as out of focus as a five-dollar bootleg video on a swap-meet flat screen, and to read the next question I had to hold the quivering paper to my nose. “Of the 23,000 eighth-grade students who took the entrance exam for admission into Stuyvesant High, New York’s most elite public high school, how many African-Americans scored high enough to qualify for admission?” When I finished reading, my nose began to bleed, red droplets of blood trickling from my left nostril and plopping onto the table in perfect one-second intervals. Eschewing his stopwatch, my father started the countdown. I glanced suspiciously at him. The question was too topical. Obviously he’d been reading The New York Times at breakfast. Prepping for the day’s experiment by looking for racial fodder over a bowl of Rice Krispies. Flipping from page to page with a speed and rage that caused the paper’s sharp corners to snap, crackle, and pop in the morning air. What would Batman do if he rushed into the kitchen right then and saw a father electrocuting his son for the good of science? Why, he’d open up his utility belt and bust out some of those tear-gas pellets, and while my dad was choking on the fumes, he’d finish asphyxiating him, assuming there was enough bat rope to tie around his fat-ass hot-dog neck; then he’d burn out his eyeballs with the laser torch, use the miniature camera to take some pictures for bat-posterity, then steal Pop’s classic, only-driven-on-trips-to-white-neighborhoods sky-blue Karmann Ghia convertible with the skeleton keys, and we’d bone the fuck out. That’s what Batman would’ve done. But me, cowardly batfag that I was and still am, I could only think to question the question’s shoddy methodology. For instance, how many black students had taken the admissions test? What was the average class size at this Stuyvesant High? But this time, before the tenth drop of blood had landed on the table, and before my father could blurt out the answer (seven), I pressed the red button, self-administering a nerve-shattering, growth-stunting electric shock of a voltage that would’ve frightened Thor and lobotomized an already sedated educated class, because now I, too, was curious. I wanted to see what happens when you bequeath a ten-year-old black boy to science. What I discovered was that the phrase “evacuate one’s bowels” is a misnomer, because the opposite was true, my bowels evacuated me. It was a feces retreat comparable to the great evacuations of history. Dunkirk. Saigon. New Orleans. But unlike the Brits, the Vietnamese capitalists, and flooded-out residents of the Ninth Ward, the occupants of my intestinal tract had nowhere to go. What runny parts of that fetid tidal wave of shit and urine that didn’t encamp itself about my buttocks and balls ran down my legs and pooled in and around my sneakers. Not wanting to hinder the integrity of his experiment, my father simply pinched his nose shut and motioned for me to proceed. Thank goodness, I knew the answer to the third question, “How many Chambers are in the Wu-Tang?” because if I hadn’t, my brain would be the ash-gray color and consistency of a barbecue briquette on the Fifth of July. My crash course in childhood development ended two years later, when Dad tried to replicate Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s study of color consciousness in black children using white and black dolls. My father’s version, of course, was a little more revolutionary. A tad more modern. While the Clarks sat two cherubic, life-sized, saddle-shoe-shod dolls, one white and one colored, in front of schoolchildren and asked them to choose the one they preferred, my father placed two elaborate dollscapes in front of me and asked me, “With whom, with what social-cultural subtext are you down with, son?” Dollscape I featured Ken and Malibu Barbie dressed in matching bathing suits, appropriately snorkeled and goggled, cooling by the Dream House pool. In Dollscape II, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman, and a brown-skinned, egg-shaped Weeble toy were running (and wobbling) through a swampy thicket from a pack of plastic German shepherds leading an armed lynch party comprised of my G.I. Joes hooded in Ku Klux Klan sheets. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a small white Christmas ornament that spun slowly over the bog, glittering and sparkling like a disco ball in the afternoon sun. “That’s the North Star. They’re running toward the North Star. Toward freedom.” I picked up Martin, Malcolm, and Harriet, teasing my dad by asking, “What are these, inaction figures?” Martin Luther King, Jr., looked okay. Stylishly dressed in a glossy black tight-fitting suit, a copy of Gandhi’s autobiography glued to one hand and a microphone in the other. Malcolm was similarly outfitted, but was bespectacled and holding a burning Molotov cocktail that was slowly melting his hand. The smiling, racially ambiguous Weeble, which looked suspiciously like a boyhood version of my father, stayed true to its advertising slogan by wobbling and never falling down, whether balanced precariously in the palm of my hand or chased by the knights of white supremacy. There was something wrong with Ms. Tubman, though. She was outfitted in a form-fitting burlap sack, and I don’t remember any of my history primers describing the woman known as Moses as being statuesque with a 36–24–36 hourglass figure, long silky hair, plucked eyebrows, blue eyes, dick-sucking lips, and pointy titties. “Dad, you painted Barbie black.” “I wanted to maintain the beauty threshold. Establish a baseline of cuteness so that you couldn’t say one doll was prettier than the other.” Plantation Barbie had a string coming out of her back. I pulled it. “Math is hard, let’s go shopping,” she said in a squeaky singsong voice. I set the black heroes back down in the kitchen table swamp, moving their limbs so that they resumed their runaway poses. “I’m down with Ken and Barbie.” My father lost his scientific objectivity and grabbed me by the shirt. “What? Why?” he yelled. “Because the white people got better accessories. I mean, look. Harriet Tubman has a gas lantern, a walking stick, and a compass. Ken and Barbie have a dune buggy and speedboat! It’s really no contest.” The next day my father burned his “findings” in the fireplace. Even at the junior college level it’s publish or perish. But more than the fact he’d never get a parking space with his name on it or a reduced course load, I was a failed social experiment. A statistically insignificant son who’d shattered his hopes for both me and the black race. He made me turn in my dream book. Stopped calling my allowance “positive reinforcement” and began referring to it as “restitution.” While he never stopped pushing the “book learning,” it wasn’t long after this that he bought my first spade, pitchfork, and sheep-shearing razor. Sending me into the fields with a pat on the tush and Booker T. Washington’s famous quote pinned to my denim overalls for encouragement, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” * * * If there is a heaven worth the effort that people make to get there, then I hope for my father’s sake there’s a celestial psychology journal. One that publishes the results of failed experiments, because acknowledging unsubstantiated theories and negative results is just as important as publishing studies proving red wine is the cure-all we’d always pretended it was. My memories of my father aren’t all bad. Though technically I was an only child, Daddy, like many black men, had lots of kids. The citizens of Dickens were his progeny. While he wasn’t very good with horses, he was known around town as the Nigger Whisperer. Whenever some nigger who’d “done lost they motherfucking mind” needed to be talked down from a tree or freeway overpass precipice, the call would go out. My father would grab his social psychology bible, The Planning of Change , by Bennis, Benne, and Robert Chin, a woefully underappreciated Chinese-American psychologist my dad had never met but claimed as his mentor. Most kids got bedtime stories and fairy tales; I had to fall asleep to readings from chapters with titles like “The Utility of Models of the Environments of Systems for Practitioners.” My father was nothing if not a practitioner. I can’t remember a time when he didn’t bring me along on a nigger whisper. On the drive over he’d brag that the black community was a lot like him—ABD. “All but dissertation?” “All but defeated.” When we arrived, he’d sit me on the roof of a nearby minivan or stand me atop an alleyway Dumpster, hand me a legal pad, and tell me to take notes. Among all the flashing sirens, the crying and broken glass crunching softly under his buckskin shoes, I’d be so scared for him. But Daddy had a way of approaching the unapproachable. His face sympathetic and sullen, palms turned up like a dashboard Jesus figurine, he’d walk toward some knife-wielding lunatic whose pupils were dilated to the size of atoms smashed by a quart of Hennessy XO and a twelve-pack light-beer chaser. Ignoring the bloodstained work uniform caked in brain and fecal matter, he’d hug the person like he was greeting an old friend. People thought it was his selflessness that allowed him to get so close, but to me it was his voice that got him over. Doo-wop bass deep, my father spoke in F-sharp. A resonant low-pitched tone that rooted you in place like a bobby-socked teenager listening to the Five Satins sing “In the Still of the Night.” It’s not music that soothes the savage beast but the systematic desensitization. And Father’s voice had a way of relaxing the enraged and allowing them to confront their fears anxiety-free. When I was in grade school, I knew from how the taste of the pomegranates would bring you to tears, from the way the summer sun turned our Afros blood-orange red, and from how giddy my father would get whenever he talked about Dodger Stadium, white Zinfandel, and the latest green flash sunset he’d seen from the summit of Mount Wilson that California was a special place. And if you think about it, pretty much everything that made the twentieth century bearable was invented in a California garage: the Apple computer, the Boogie Board, and gangster rap. Thanks to my dad’s career in nigger-whispering, I was there for the birth of the latter, when at six o’clock on a cold, dark ghetto morning two blocks down from where I live, Carl “Kilo G” Garfield, hallucinating high on his own supply and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s brooding lyricism, burst out of his garage squinting into his Moleskin, a smoldering crack pipe dangling from fingertips. It was the height of the crack rock era. I was about ten when he clambered into the bed of his tricked-out, hot-rod yellow Toyota pickup truck, the TO and the TA buffed out and painted over so that the brand name on the tailgate read just YO, and began reciting his verse at the top of his lungs, the slurred iambic pentameter punctuated with gun claps from his nickel-plated .38 and pleas from his mama to take his naked ass inside. THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT-SKINNED SPADE Half a liter, half a liter, Half a liter onward All in the alley of Death Rode the Olde English Eight Hundred. Forward, the Light-skinned Spade! “Charge for the Bloods!” he said: Into the alley of Death Rode the Olde English Eight Hundred … When the SWAT team finally arrived on the scene, taking cover behind patrol car doors and the sycamore trees, clutching their assault rifles to their chests, none of them could stop giggling long enough to take the kill shot. Theirs not to reason what the fuck, Theirs but to shoot and duck: Niggers to the right of them Niggers to the left of them, Niggers in front of them Partied and blundered Bumrush’d at caps and hollow point shell While hooptie and hoodlum fell They that had banged so well Came thro’ the jaws of Death Back from the ho’s of Hell, All that was left of them Copyright © 2015 by Paul Beatty

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Winner of the Man Booker Prize Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction Named one of the best books of by The New...

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Winner of the Man Booker Prize Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction Named one of the best books of 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.

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“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.” —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

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The Sellout: A Novel by Paul Beatty

A finalist for the 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 ...

Introduction

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.

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Most could not finish the book; writing style was difficult and presentation offensive. It is a book about the politics of racial betrayal. There is a lot of vulgarity; the book if not for the faint... (read more)

This is a trash book with tons of garbage words. Could not read this for long.

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The Sellout: A Novel Hardcover – March 3, 2015

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 length 304 pages
Language English
Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date March 3, 2015
Dimensions 6 x 1 x 9 inches
ISBN-10 0374260508
ISBN-13 978-0374260507
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Editorial reviews.

“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 ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1 x 9 inches
#10,093 in Black & African American Literature (Books)
#19,092 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Paul beatty.

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

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Paul Beatty on Los Angeles Lit, The Sellout , and Life After the Man Booker

In conversation with oscar villalon.

In 2016, Paul Beatty became the first American author to win the Man Booker Prize. Given that perhaps most readers came to know Beatty’s prose through an excerpt from his first novel published in Granta in 1996, the honor seems especially appropriate if not foreordained.

That first novel, The White Boy Shuffle , wildly comic and set in the Los Angeles that would erupt after the Rodney King verdicts were announced, was critically lauded, but also became something of a cultural totem for its knowingness about race and identity. (Early in Phil Jackson’s tenure as the coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, he gave a copy to Kobe Bryant, who appreciated the gesture, the New York Times reported, but “given the provocative content, he thought Jackson assumed a bit too much about his upbringing so early in their relationship.”)

Beatty’s next novel, Tuff (2000), was set in New York City, where Beatty used to live year-around until recently splitting his time between there and the Bay Area, and featured the mammoth and Candide-like Winston “Tuffy” Foshay. His following novel, Slumberland (2008), takes place in ’80s West Berlin where a Los Angeles DJ tries to track down a reclusive jazz musician. And in 2006, Bloomsbury published Hokum: An Anthology of African American Humor , whichBeatty edited. Beatty is also the author of two poetry collections, 1991’s Big Bank Take Little Bank and 1994’s Joker,Joker, Deuce, and studied with Allen Ginsberg. If one asks him might there be any more poems he’s completed, he saysno in such a way to make you think he hasn’t written any poems in years. Then in 2015, his novel The Sellout waspublished and the reception arguably surpassed the excitement that greeted The White Boy Shuffle . Along with glowing reviews and its inclusion on best-of-the-year lists, the book garnered Beatty a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker.

It might be an understatement to say that when it comes to talking to Beatty about his work, he’s less than comfortable.There are many good reasons for this. (A disastrous onstage interview at the Sydney Writers’ Festival in Australia is butone example. “Do you think that people become black? Do they have to learn what it means to be black?” Beatty wasasked by a white interviewer. “Things,” the Los Angeles Times reported, “became heated.”) And among those reasons isan author’s reluctance to have to explain his or her work. Shouldn’t the work speak for itself? But also the author’spersonality: Not everybody enjoys being the center of attention.

The following conversation with Beatty combines interviews that took place on two occasions. The first was in August 2015 at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, where Beatty appeared to a packed house as part of the book tour for TheSellout . The second occurred in July 2017 at the Morgan Library in New York City at a reception sponsored by the Man Booker Prize. Among the people in attendance were other recipients of the prize, notably, Marlon James, whom Beatty addressed during our talk.

___________________________________

Oscar Villalon: Your first novel, The White Boy Shuffle , was set in LA, and the following one, Tough, was set in NewYork. Slumberland was set in Berlin. And now with The Sellout we’re back in LA. What drew you back to your hometown?

Paul Beatty: That’s a good question. I think even Slumberland —in my head—is set in LA. I made a conscious effort tostart The Sellout there for some reason. At some point I just made a decision that I’m very comfortable writing about LA.One of the things that always strikes me about LA is how little LA changes in some ways.

OV: What do you mean?

PB: I think in terms of language, is what I mean, really. I remember—this is around 20 years ago—I remember listeningto some Snoop Dogg song when he first came out, and he was saying all these rhymes that I think people thought were new, but they were rhymes that kids had been saying in elementary school. He was using all these old words. I also thinkabout style, how there’s a certain thread that people really hold on to in LA.

But I think the real reason I set The Sellout there is that there’s this weird neighborhood in LA.

OV: Which one?

PB: There are a lot of weird neighborhoods in LA. [Laughs] This one is called Richland Farms. It’s a small little sectionof Compton. My sister teaches there, and when we were little my mom used to drive us to—I don’t even know if they still have it—to the Watts Parades, which were like a celebration of the Watts Riots. Not a celebration of the riots, but . . . Iguess a celebration of surviving the riots?

You’d go through there and occasionally you’d go down these streets and you would see black people on horseback, justriding down the street. It’s something that stayed in my head. My mom also used to take us to these polo matches in Will Rogers State Park. There’s a weird connection there for me. So one day my sister was telling me that her students come toclass with milk that they’ve bought from their next-door neighbor’s cows—like the neighbors milk the cows and sell thekids the milk for 50 cents. So it’s this weird section of Compton that’s zoned for livestock and stuff like that. It’sjust something I’ve always been thinking about and no one knows about it.

Do you know who this basketball player Arron Afflalo is? He’s from Richland Farms. So when I was researching the area,the only thing I could find was Afflalo talking about growing up listening to cows and chickens. That’s the only thing I could really find online. So it was something I had in my head for a while and I had to find a story that lived up to thesetting.

OV: From there sprung this narrator, Bonbon.

PB: Yes, the narrator and some of the other characters.

OV: How would you describe Bonbon?

PB: These are hard questions, Oscar.

PB: [Laughs] How would you describe him?

OV: I think he’s affable.

PB: He’s affable?

OV: Yes. I don’t want to say he seems like a “jokester.” He has this everyman quality. He’s certainly observant of hisworld and part of his community, but with distance. So he has a frankness and a directness that’s appealing.

PB: I think he’s damaged, actually.

OV: Well, who isn’t?

PB: His father has invented what he calls Liberation Psychology and has done all these classical experiments on his son.Do you know the Milgram experiment where you hook people up as a test of authority? He does a perverted version ofthat. He just fucks with his son.

OV: And then his father gets shot by the police. He’s sort of untethered by that. He’s now on a farm, he drifts, and thenone thing after another happens and he acquires a slave: Hominy Jenkins. Who’s Hominy Jenkins?

PB: Hominy is the last surviving Little Rascal and he was Buckwheat’s understudy.

OV: Then that develops to the point where Bonbon is trying to segregate a desegregated school. Now this is one of thethings that struck me about the book . . .

PB: I know Oscar too well for [doing an interview]. This is the problem.

OV: The book is extremely funny, but I also think it’s extremely incisive. And it could be described as satirical but I keptcoming across so many reviews and pieces where what was being described made me think, “Well, that’s real. That’sactually not satirical.” For example, at one point there is a screening of extremely racist cartoons, and I’m pretty sure allthe ones you’re describing are real.

OV: And that Bonbon rides on a horse. There’s nothing satirical about that, or that the neighborhood of Dickens suddenly disappears. Its borders no longer exist. And, of course, that’s what happened to South Central Los Angeles. South CentralLos Angeles doesn’t exist. Now it’s called South Los Angeles. So these aren’t zany things that you’re making up.

OV: That’s it?

PB: No, no, I’m trying to help you a little bit.

OV: Don’t kill yourself now.

PB: [Laughs] No, I’m glad to hear you say that. I mean, the reason I’m so tired lately is that I’ve been talking a lot aboutthis book. Everybody’s very comfortable with saying, “Oh, you’re a satirist, you’re this, you’re that,” and all this other kind of stuff. For personal-freedom reasons, I say, “No. That’s not me. I just write. Whatever it is, is what it is.” I guesspeople don’t often think about what satire really is—but for you to talk about how real it is, is a comfort to me. Becauseeven some of the more ridiculous stuff in there, that you would think is obvious satire, is sort of real—or definitely basedin something.

OV: We know the book is very funny, there are all these delightful things going on with the plot, but there are also all these “serious matters” that come up. One of them is this idea of closure. At one point Bonbon states, “Daddy neverbelieved in closure. He said, people mistake suicide, murder, lap band surgery, interracial marriage, and overtipping forclosure, when in reality what they’ve achieved is erasure.” So toward that, I think what the book tries to do is prevent thatidea of erasure, and show how you may have your own formulation of how you think things are working, but it’s notnecessarily the case that it’s true.

PB: It’s not like I realized my intentions while I was writing the book, but because I’ve been talking so much about TheSellout , I’ve been able to make up some fake intentions after so long . . . It’s not like I sit down and outline this shit andsay, “I want to address this.” But one of the things is just how we talk about race. Social constructs are part of it, likethere’s a “closure,” there’s an “endgame,” there’s all this kind of shit. We talk like there’s just black and white. So one of the things about this neighborhood, Dickens, is that it kind of reads as black, but it’s not a black neighborhood.

There’s a bit in the book that’s inspired by a friend who’s a principal in Compton. I went to visit him one day and we’re standing in the schoolyard, and one of the kids comes up to him and says, “Mr. Principal, Mr. Principal, a white kid stolemy blah-blah-blah.” And my friend Ronald goes, “Oh, well go do this, blah-blah-blah.” And I just went, “ What whitekids?” And the white kids were the Latino kids. That’s just something that stuck in my mind for a little bit! I talked to mysister about it. It was like a little phase that lasted about three or four years as the school population was transitioning. Iassume it started with the kids, but the teachers, you know . . . I’m not making any sense.

OV: No, you are.

PB: I have these weird languages in my head. The nonsense language my friends and I spoke growing up. My, for lack ofa better word, academic language. A bunch of stuff. And it’s the same with demographics a little bit. I’m just trying toweave all those into one thread, instead of talking “us, them, those.” I don’t know how thick that thread, that yarn is, butthat’s what I’m trying to do.

OV: The danger with writing about anything like this is trying to simplify things. There’s nothing remotely simple aboutit. Especially when you talk about race or class in this country, it’s like a kaleidoscope, it keeps refracting every time youturn it to examine it. There’s always a different perspective. But a lot of this process, as the book would suggest, is just trying to get that clarity, however you may think you do that.

It just so happens I’m reading Robert Grave’s memoir Goodbye to All That , and there’s an introduction by Paul Fussell,who addresses the fact that Grave wrote about World War I with humor, with broad comedy, which some people werereally put off by—“How could you write about this terrible thing in broad comedy?” He then quotes Swiss author anddramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Dürrenmatt’s post-Second World War conviction that “comedy alone is suitable for us.” That’s what he believed. The reason? “Tragedy presupposes guilt, despair, moderation, lucidity, vision, a sense ofresponsibility—none of which we have.” What do you think of that?

PB: I guess I don’t think it that clearly, but I agree with that. I’m evil. I think that everything’s funny at some level, youknow? I did this collection of African American humor that no one found funny. I’m exaggerating. A lot of people found it funny, but there was a large part of the populace that didn’t find the cover [which depicts a watermelon rind] very funny.It just brought to mind that there’s a weird lack of irony, especially when it comes to African Americans and what you cando and talk about and say. I’m a big Ernst Lubitsch fan, and there’s this movie, To Be or Not to Be . It’s making fun ofWorld War II . . . and it just always struck me how there’s very little of that type of comedy about people of color in theStates.

OV: Why do you think that is?

PB: I think people feel that there’s a lot of stuff to be done first. You have to rehumanize yourself, would be the rightthing to say. You’ve got to assert your intellectual equality.

There’s a bunch of shit that you have to do! You’ve got to bring up all the stuff that’s been ignored, you know? At leastthat’s what people feel like you have to do. I think you can do all that and be funny at the same time.

OV: And then you can be Jack Benny.

PB: Or Richard Pryor . . . I just read this book about a month ago called The Nazi and the Barber . It’s by EdgarHilsenrath. He wrote it in the early ’70s and it was banned in Germany for a long time, and I think published here in theStates. And it’s a funny, really mean, crazy book about an SS officer who’s a concentration camp prison guard whoescapes being prosecuted for war crimes by passing as Jewish. It’s just a weird, crazy book—I don’t even know if I like it,but I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s like just flicking me in the ear all the time, you know? But there’s just a refreshing sense of “I don’t give a fuck” to the book, so the book sits on your chest after you close it. And it’s still sitting on me.When I wrote The Sellout —this is also bullshit that I’m saying . . .

[Audience laughs]

You guys know this Steven Wright joke? Remember he used to have this joke where he would say, “You know when youlean back in a chair and you just catch yourself? I feel like that all the time.” But in talking about The Nazi and theBarber , in a weird way that joke came to me. I kind of wanted to be in that space for a little bit, you know. Like I flinch a lot—people touch me, I flinch. So I wanted to have this long flinch, in a weird way. Just in part. That’s not the whole thing, but that’s a part of it. And so I realized that being comfortable and uncomfortable is just something I think about alot, a part of how I operate. In The Sellout , I made a very conscious decision to talk about that—and it manifests itself inrace, class, education, all this other stuff, taking the bus in LA. It manifests itself in that stuff.

OV: There’s a scene where Bonbon surfs and he gets on the 4:30 am bus and heads out to, I don’t know, is it Dockweiler,where is it going?

PB: He’s going down to the end of Rosecrans.

OV: Have you actually ever seen surfers take the bus?

PB: Definitely.

OV: There’s a section in The Sellout titled “Unmitigated Blackness,” where Bonbon is talking about these stages ofblackness. The last one is Unmitigated Blackness and that’s when you don’t give a fuck. His examples are Sun-Ra,Richard Pryor—who else did you throw in there?

PB: Frida Kahlo?

OV: Yes, Frida Kahlo. And I read that and thought, “Well, that’s great.” Then I see in the Acknowledgements you cite thegroundbreaking work in black identity development by William E. Cross Jr., his paper called “The Negro-to-BlackConversion Experience.” Is that what we were reading?

PB: No, that’s not it literally. I was in grad school for psych before I started writing, and I just stumbled across this guywho’d written this paper about the development of black identity, and it was in stages. I don’t remember the stages so you have to forgive me.

So stage one, you’re basically an Uncle Tom, you think everything that’s white is good, everything that’s black is bad. Iguess he wrote it in the early ’70s. There’s this gradual thing where by the end stage you’re like Malcolm X or something.But it was really genius the way he thought about the way identity forms, in terms of . . . there’s a word we used to say incollege all the time: consciousness. “So and so’s conscious, so and so’s unconscious.” The paper was just so clever, andfunny. It wasn’t supposed to be funny but I found it very funny.

OV: Why’d you find it funny?

PB: Because it was so smart. I tend to find things that are really smart somehow amusing. I use “funny” for everything, soyou’ll have to forgive me. I remember I blew the paper up, which was really hard to do back then. You had to go to the Xerox machine, you know what I mean? But I blew it up and made a big poster on my wall because it was just sobrilliant. And as time went by, he changed the stages. It was interesting how he changed and the stages changed. I found itfascinating and when I first thought about writing [ The Sellout ], I was going to divide the book up into those stages. Actually, I wasn’t even going to use it in the book but it was such a part of the way I was thinking that I crammed it inthere at the end.

OV: Catch-22 appears in the book. Bonbon loves Catch-22. At one point he says, you have to be pretty funny for him toput down Catch-22 . Joseph Heller and also Camus and Kafka. In fact, Bonbon and his girlfriend bond over Kafka. I waswondering if you could talk about those three particular writers—Heller, Camus, and Kafka.

PB: Well, I have to talk about my friend [now wife], Althea. I’m going to embarrass Althea, but this book is dedicated toher. She is a person very close to me, and we bond over things like Kafka and Camus and stupid movies and stuff. It’s just really important to how I think. I must have read Catch-22 when I was really young, 12 or 13, but that’s a book that hasjust really stayed with me.

OV: What about it?

PB: It’s hard to tell. I mean, this is not what I thought at 13 but, again, in retrospect—the fact that he was able to define the indefinable. I remember I once wrote some line about Barack Obama, “the ineffability of being so f’able.” I love when people are able to talk about this stuff that you can’t talk about, and there’s something about that book that has really stayed with me. I even like the movie [of Catch-22 ], which is terrible. I like Art Garfunkel, too, so that goes a long way, but . . .

OV: Getting back to Los Angeles, might another reason for you setting The Sellout there be because you wanted to figure out that community of Dickens, and get down what that community is like?

PB: I’m not trying to figure out anything, because it doesn’t exist. But when I was writing the book, trying to get thatfictional neighborhood right was really difficult. It’s one of the reasons it took me so long to get some traction, to get tothe word “absurd,” absurd and real at the same time.

Marlon James said something that I say all the time, I repeat it and I think I credit Marlon most of the time. He saidsomething about his latest book, he said, “My job isn’t to solve the mystery but to render the mystery.” I said, oh, that’s so beautiful, it’s perfect. And it’s a million things. You know, one of the things that’s interesting about The Sellout , is, I think,so many people want to solve their own mysteries, all the time . . . and some people realize that’s not what it’s about. It’s interesting, the different readings. And somehow that applies to LA. I think there are parts of the book where I’m writingabout how people write about LA—or how people read LA.

OV: How do they usually read LA?

PB: I can’t say how they usually do, but there’s Bret Easton Ellis’s LA, which comes up in the book. There’s what’ssupposed to be Latino LA, what’s supposed to be African American LA, what’s surfer LA. I think people think of thesethings with borders, which is what I don’t see, really.

I’ve been thinking about reading a lot, because I’ve been listening to people talk about The Sellout and they’re basically telling me how they read. I think it’s changing a little, I hope, but I feel like people put on a “I’m going to read an AfricanAmerican book” attitude, and they read their African American book. “I’m going to read a woman book,” and they readtheir woman book. It’s just so weird, in terms of how we read, how we talk about what we’re reading. I’ve been asked todo all these blurbs, so it’s making me pay attention to blurbs, reading a little more contemporary literature than I usuallydo. I think about my book, or Marlon’s book, or whoever’s book, and what you see they compare it to. “Oh, it’s like X, Y,Z, and this and that.” I get compared to Pynchon and all this other kind of stuff. But I have never read a blurb for a book by a white author where they said, “Oh, this book is like Ralph Ellison,” or “This book is like Toni Morrison.” It’sinteresting. Everything is so one-directional all the time in terms of this hierarchy of thought. Having said that, there are alot of people who don’t think like that.

OV: When you won the Man Booker, I was very thrilled. First, because it was you, so I was very, very happy. But second,I was also thrilled because the first American to win a Man Booker did so for a novel about LA. And not only is it aboutLA, but it uses LA as a way to look at things. Having said that, do you think we’re beyond seeing writing about LA as“regional” yet?

PB: I don’t know if we’re past that. We still talk about the perception that West Coast, Southwest literature—this “Non-New York” literature, is I guess what I’m saying, “Non-New York American”—is somehow niche or cultish.

This is a stupid observation but we’re talking about LA and it’s making me think of my childhood, me and my friends. Weused to get terrorized by these kids that later started this gang. They used to terrorize us. Rocky and Byron. And then that would be so funny because you would meet them and they were normal guys, you know? When they weren’t beating youup every now and then they could have interesting conversations. But I remember my friend was saying, “I’m cool with Rocky and Bryon now.” And of course the next week he got beat up.

It’s one of those things that was a lesson for me, where I thought, “Yeah, I’m never cool, I’m never past anything, becausenext week it’ll be back.” So I don’t know.

OV: You teach an MFA class at Columbia called Literature from Los Angeles. Why did you decide to do that?

PB: Why? I guess my reason is twofold. I stole the idea from a friend of mine who actually taught a class like that. She’salways complaining, “These kids never have any setting!” So I wanted to talk about setting and what setting means, notjust in terms of place but what the notions of setting are. So it’s partly that. And partly a way of getting the students to read stuff they haven’t read before. So we read Chester Himes, we read Michael Jaime-Becerra; we read Wanda Coleman,we read Karen Tei Yamashita; we read Bret Easton Ellis, we read Bukowski. We read a ton of stuff.

OV: What was the reaction?

PB: I think they really enjoyed the class. I don’t know how true it is of LA, depends on how nostalgic or romantic I wantto be about the place, but a lot of that work is this countervailing “I’m gonna go left” kind of stuff. I think sometimesstudents are very cautious of saying the right thing, doing the right things, and these books—and it’s not on purpose, thesewere just the books that we chose—these are books that aren’t in service to anything, necessarily. They’re in service to the stories that they want to tell.

OV: I think this is probably true, too, for California writers in general. They work in a place where tradition, whateverthat may be, is not so important. That is, whatever tradition is as defined by NewYork. They do their work and if it worksfor them, it’s great. They don’t necessarily feel the need for it to fit in within a certain scope. All those people you mentioned—Chester Himes, Bukowski, and Wanda Coleman—you could say they’re iconoclastic. Their writing justcomes from a place. It has urgency. This is not to say that they’re not erudite, that they’re not cognizant of traditions oftheir craft; their writing is just informed by different things.

PB: Yes. I don’t think this is something specific to LA. So we read Christopher Isherwood’s “A Single Man.” It’s abeautiful book. This is a book about LA from the perspective of someone who’s not from LA—but it’s a very LA book. It has these things, mostly about loneliness. And all these LA books, including mine, are fundamentally about loneliness, I think, because some part of that is geographically influenced somehow.

OV: Let’s talk about the Man Booker. What’s life post-Man Booker?

PB: It’s good. But I’m not . . . I’m not a person that seeks attention, I have to say.

OV: This is the perfect prize for you then.

PB: So it’s nice to have some attention in certain ways, but it’s hard for me a little bit. I’m really, really appreciative. I’mgoing to places I haven’t seen, I’m meeting really nice people. So life is good. It’s broadening my own world a little,which is really nice. I’m not the most pro-active person. I don’t travel unless someone asks me to go somewhere. Peopleare asking me to go places, that’s nice.

OV: And what’s it been like going to these different places and seeing the reaction to the book?

PB: I don’t know. The prize is part of a whole spectrum, a whole continuum, so for me it’s hard for me to just isolate theprize. One of the really nice things is, I’ll be in Hackney or I’ll be in Calcutta and somebody will stand up and give an amazing diatribe about what this book has meant to them. How this book has touched them. And it’s not all the time,but often it’s not about that the book’s American or that the book’s in LA, it’s about all these other, bigger things, which don’t necessarily have to do with how we discuss literature in these safe, categorical kind of ways.

Where was I, was I in Sydney? No, I think I was in Melbourne. I did something similar to this [interview], and thiswoman—she must have been 75-years old—she stood up and started talking about the book, and then she started talkingabout me and she just saw right through me.

OV: What did she say?

PB: She called me a reluctant turtle or something. I can’t remember what she called me. A misanthropic turtle? Or a crab?She called me a hermit crab, that’s what it was. There was an adjective in front of there somewhere. But she was dead-on.I was like, Oh Jesus Christ. Because I’m not a person who really engages with what people are saying. And I don’t reallypay attention to awards very much.

But it was funny, because when I first met—sorry, Marlon—but when I first met Marlon, not the first, the second time? Hehad already won the Man Booker. So Marlon has a good spine, and I’m like a fucking sapling, you know? It was because of what everybody was saying to you and how they were treating you. Some jealousy that was hidden with smiles, all thatkind of stuff. I was just cracking but Marlon handled everything really well. I was like, “Oh, this is a big prize,” youknow? And Marlon’s colonial circumstances are different . . .

That’s another aspect of the Man Booker—the Commonwealth. I was getting this—not flack, I haven’t really gotten anyflack—but people said, “Oh, American this, and all this.” Althea said a really good thing, she said, “You know what the good thing is about you winning? It’s that somebody else is going to win and America’s this insanely Yankee-centricplace, and instead of books always going in that direction, there’s going to be some other stuff coming this way maybe.” I was like, ah, that’s a really good way to think about that. It’s just opening up and I think that’s a good thing.

__________________________________

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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.

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“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

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ISBN: 1250083257

ISBN13: 9781250083258

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Hilarious without foregoing the important social commentary, the sellout mentions in our blog.

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Costco is switching up how it sells books. What it means for shoppers.

Costco plans to stop regularly selling books throughout the year starting in January.
The decision is meant to ease labor for Costco staff.
The shift is a symbolic blow to an industry that has already taken a hit from rising costs and lagging print sales.

The large stack of books in the middle of your nearest Costco may not be around much longer.

The New York Times reported earlier this week that Costco plans to stop regularly selling books year-round starting in January 2025, citing four anonymous publishing executives. Instead, the wholesale retailer will consistently sell books only during the last four months of the year, when holiday shopping picks up.

Costco representatives did not respond to requests for comment, but a publishing company confirmed the company's decision to USA TODAY.

Costco may not be the country's largest bookseller – Publishers Weekly editor-at-large Jim Milliot estimates that the retailer along with other big-box stores like Target make up just 4% of book sales – but the shift is a symbolic blow to an industry that has already been struggling to keep up with rising operating costs.

“It was sort of a point of pride within the industry, that books are not just elitist, books had a really solid mass market play,” publishing industry analyst and author Thad McIlroy said. “It really meant a lot to the industry that Costco was a strong outlet, and to have it turned into just Christmas gifts, that’s not a good thing.”

What does this mean for Costco members?

Costco's decision stems from the amount of labor required to stock books. Each title has to be unboxed and stacked by hand, whereas other products are simply rolled out on pallets. The company had already stopped selling books in its Hawaii and Alaska warehouses in 2022.

While Costco's book selection is limited, it has been a convenient way for shoppers to pick up their next beach read or check out a new cookbook while running errands. Now, there will be one less exposure point to books – a “big deal” for consumers, according to McIlroy.

“(Some people are) just not bookstore people. They don't buy books on Amazon. So I think there's a significant group of people who find their reading enjoyment via Costco, and that's going to be much diminished,” he said.

Pennie Clark Ianniciello, who worked as Costco's book buyer for 32 years before leaving the company in 2021, made a post on LinkedIn noting she was saddened to hear the news, but Costco "needs to make changes for their own business needs" and the publishing industry will find new ways to sell and promote their publishing lists.

"I do hope true book readers will find a new independent bookstore and others who used to 'cruise' the book selection will once again check other retailers and libraries for their literary treasures," she said in her post. "It will be unsettling for a time and uncomfortable adjustments will be made. I too, will be making new shopping plans for my books."

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'It's a really tough time to be a publisher'

Costco's decision comes as U.S. print book sales dwindle. The industry’s print volume hit 767 million last year, down 3% from 2022 , according to a February report from market research company Circana.

The firm notes that increased household debt could further tighten consumer spending, especially on higher-priced titles after the holiday season.

“It’s a really tough time to be a publisher, regardless of your size,” McIlroy said. “So having something like this kick you in the face when you're down is not a good thing.”

While certain titles see a good chunk of their sales from Costco members, the company's decision means little for the average author, according to publishing industry analyst Jane Friedman.

“Costco typically sold books and authors that were already wildly successful,” she said in an emailed statement. “If you're a bestselling author or a big publishing house, this isn't welcome news, but it's not going to change how publishing decisions get made. No one acquires books thinking ‘This is a Costco book!’ It's more like icing on the cake.”

McIlroy agreed that it'll likely be a specific subset of authors and publishers who “are really going to feel some pain.”

Costco plans to stop selling books outside the holiday season, publishing execs say

Costco plans to stop selling books on a regular basis, publishing execs told The New York Times.
They said Costco would sell books only for the holidays and maybe on some other occasions.
The decision was mainly down to the labor required to stock books, they said.

Costco plans to stop selling books on a regular basis, largely because of how much labor it requires, four unidentified publishing executives told The New York Times .

They said the warehouse giant would stop stocking books regularly from January and would instead sell books between September and December for the holidays, as well as potentially selling some books sporadically at other times of the year.

Costco didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider made outside regular US working hours.

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A Popular Costco Section May Disappear in January Books are reportedly moving to a seasonal-only aisle, and the move could affect sales for the entire publishing industry.

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Why We Shouldn't Fear AI in Education (and How to Use It Effectively)

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What does this mean for Costco members?

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Costco plans to stop selling books outside the holiday season, publishing execs say

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