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The Sellout

Paul Beatty

3.77 · Rating details · 48,678 ratings · 5,745 reviews

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 ...more

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Hardcover, 289 pages

Published 2015 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Nov 24, 2014 Jessica Woodbury rated it really liked it

Shelves: best-2015-arcs, authors-of-color

If Kurt Vonnegut and Dave Chappelle had a baby and really messed with its head, it would write this novel. I hope Paul Beatty takes that as a compliment because it's meant that way.

This is some seriously biting satire. You know it right away, since it begins with the main character, a black man, before the Supreme Court because he's charged with keeping a slave. Most of the novel is a flashback, showing us how the protagonist not only kept a slave but attempted to re-segregate his formerly ...more

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Jan 28, 2016 Glenn Sumi rated it liked it

Shelves: booker-winners

Paul Beatty’s novel is a savage satire about a “post-racial America,” and it points out how absurd that notion really is.

The black narrator, Bonbon, grew up in a “disappeared” L.A. suburb – once an “agrarian ghetto,” called Dickens – where he was subjected to his father’s sociological experiments about race.

After his father is “accidentally” killed by the LAPD (see? This is some serious shit), he wants to reintroduce slavery and, gradually, segregation, first in buses and then in a school Paul Beatty’s novel is a savage satire about a “post-racial America,” and it points out how absurd that notion really is.

The black narrator, Bonbon, grew up in a “disappeared” L.A. suburb – once an “agrarian ghetto,” called Dickens – where he was subjected to his father’s sociological experiments about race.

After his father is “accidentally” killed by the LAPD (see? This is some serious shit), he wants to reintroduce slavery and, gradually, segregation, first in buses and then in a school (ditto).

He elicits help from his friend, Hominy, the last surviving member of TV's Little Rascals (he was Buckwheat’s understudy). All his efforts eventually land him in jail, where his case goes to the Supreme Court.

I read this book months ago, but didn’t review it then. I’m not sure why. I didn’t get all the references, and while I found Beatty’s prose and ideas sharp, lively and “Omigod did he just write that?” funny, I also found the experience exhausting.

Humour – and this book is hilarious at times – is a brilliant way of dealing with serious subjects. But you’ve got to mix up your act. I guess I wanted the book to be more grounded, so the angry humour could stand out in relief. There’s the opportunity to do that in the possible romantic relationship between the narrator and a bus driver, but Beatty doesn’t do much with this.

Still, Beatty takes on every African-American stereotype and politically correct notion and successfully skewers it. Goodreaders especially will appreciate his extended riff on the liberal white-washing of literature.

Thus, Mark Twain’s classic gets renamed The Pejorative Free Adventures and Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of African-American Jim and His Young Protégé, White Brother Huckleberry Finn, as They Go in Search of the Lost Black Family Unit.

Some stand-alone sections are brilliant, savage little poetic salvos whose targets are worthy of sending up. (Beatty started out as a poet.) But as much as I enjoyed the book, and appreciated the ideas Beatty raised, I think I like my anger and injustice served up a bit more directly. ...more

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Dec 12, 2016 Steve rated it really liked it

As an urban commuter I felt that pulling a book out with lawn jockeys on the cover should come with a disclaimer. Hey everybody, it’s meant to be – you know – ironic. It’s written by a black guy; it’s satire. And just so you know, my iPhone doesn’t have one word of Breitbart News on it.

Satires, to me, are like hoppy craft beers. The natural skew to the bitter side should be balanced out for optimal flavor. Paul Beatty’s deft touch with a joke made the astringency you’d expect from charges of ...more

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Aug 29, 2017 Sean Barrs the Bookdragon rated it it was ok

Shelves: man-booker-prize-winners, postcolonial, contemporary-lit, 2017-10-book-challenge, 2-star-reads

The Sellout is a fun novel full of humour and many moments of bitter irony. The tone is angry, full of frustration and seething with sarcasm, but it is also repetitive to a fault.

After around thirty pages I felt like I’d read everything this novel had to offer. It was abundantly clear that the remainder would be pretty much the same thing, an author satirising the realities of Black American life through using several clever and creative narrative devices. After a while it began to grow so very The Sellout is a fun novel full of humour and many moments of bitter irony. The tone is angry, full of frustration and seething with sarcasm, but it is also repetitive to a fault.

After around thirty pages I felt like I’d read everything this novel had to offer. It was abundantly clear that the remainder would be pretty much the same thing, an author satirising the realities of Black American life through using several clever and creative narrative devices. After a while it began to grow so very tiresome to the point of utter annoyingness. It lacked direction and a sense of purpose beyond what was established very early on. At times it even felt like a series of loosely connected rants and personal grievances in the form of chapters. It was a very taxing read.

The writing did begin with undeniable power and authority; it was compelling and convincing though as the narrative progressed it did not pick up any momentum but lingered on similar ideas and stayed very stationary. I found myself yawning at the forced comic moments as this narrator circulated around the same themes yet again. By the end of the book it was a relief to finish; it was a relief not to hear the voice of the narrator ever again. For me, the style in which it was told offset much of what the book did successfully do.

The Sellout won The Man Booker Prize in 2016 and despite my despondency with the book I can see why. It is a very timely piece, addressing many of the problem blacks face in a country that has supposedly moved on from its original sin of slavery. Segregation has ended, racism is officially at an all-time low, but the issues remain. Society does not change overnight, or, as it may seem, over many decades. More time is needed. Scratch but the surface, as Paul Beaty has done here, and you will see how not so far in the past some of these ideas are. It is still very much recent history.

This is undoubtedly highly intelligent writing, but the style, receptiveness and general lacklustre the narrator portrayed was not to my liking. The first hundred pages or so ought to have been followed by a story of growth of some sort or, at the very least, an explanation or perhaps a suggestion why there wasn’t one from a narrator who at times appeared to be moving in a new direction but never seemed to fully commit beyond the first few steps he took. Perhaps I lacked the patience for this one. Perhaps my Englishness meant that some of the subtle nuances within the writing were wasted on me from a cultural standpoint. Whatever the reason, I can see why this book won but I don’t necessarily like it personally. This is pretty much sums up my response to the winner of the 2015 Man Booker as well. The Sellout, like A Brief History of Seven Killings, is a creative piece rich in originality, but not one I can engage with. ...more

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Aug 23, 2016 Hugh rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: modern-lit, read-2016, booker-winners

Satire is a difficult genre to assess and review, particularly when it is so tightly bound to a culture one does not share. On the positive side, this book is often very funny, and is full of ideas and snipes at deserving targets. Over the length of a novel, though, the tone is somewhat relentless, and the story does not seem to have enough weight to sustain the interest - it seems more like a series of set pieces. Not a book to read if you are easily offended either, but the issues Beatty ...more

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Dec 08, 2015 Trish rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction, funny, literature, quirky, race, social-science, parody

”…when I did what I did, I wasn’t thinking about inalienable rights, the proud history of our people. I did what worked, and since when did a little slavery and segregation ever hurt anybody, and if so, so fucking be it.”

My copy of this novel is spiked with tabs marking something deeply insightful, stabbingly funny, or needing revisiting. There is simply too much to point to: Beatty must have been saving up observations about race relations in America to get so much into this relatively short novel. He never tells us why his fictional California town is named Dickens—it can’t be about the author—but I think it has to do with a classic American imprecation “Go to [the] Dickens!” though I am certainly willing to be challenged on this supposition. Dickens is also used as an exclamatory “What the dickens!” standing in for “What the F@*k!” in marginally polite white dialogue, and perhaps even in the L’il Rascals film archives, though I am going to have to check on that.

”They won’t admit it, but every black person thinks they’re better than every other black person.”

Beatty’s narrator, Bonbon Me, is the sellout. He just doesn’t seem to get the “black” thing. He identifies as human first, black second. Beatty doesn’t target black folk alone. Everyone is skewered in this wild ride through a Los Angeles southwest suburb that still has farm zoning, allowing families to live among livestock, chickens, cotton, watermelon, and weed. A proud descendant of the Kentucky family called Mee and one whose forefather subsequently dropped the extraneous “e,” our narrator Bonbon Me has a case before the Supreme Court, a “screw-faced” black Justice, about his ownership of a slave in the present day. That alleged slave, Hominy Jenkins, literally declaimed his status one day to our narrator as a result of Me still having agricultural interests and therefore probably needing a slave. Hominy moved in. What could Me do?

Well, shortly after rapacious real estate developers convinced officials to remove signs demarking the township of Dickens, Me made and put up new signs and drew a white line around the streets and houses comprising Dickens and re-segregated: “No Whites Allowed.” One may be curious why he would do this, since the town was already black, but he felt he was saving something, making a point. They can’t just muscle in and erase a town…a culture…a people. That’s not fairness. People actually do care if you are white, brown, black or yellow. Sellout Bonbon had mused for some that if the black community in Dickens just took “their racial blinders off for one second, they’d realize [Dickens] was no longer black but predominantly Latino.” So he was just making Dickens “equal” by excluding whites. It’s not discrimination exactly. It’s equality.

”The Supreme Court is where the country takes out its dick and tits and decides who’s going to get fucked and who’s getting a taste of mother’s milk. It’s constitutional pornography in there…and what…about obscenity? I know it when I see it…Me vs. the United States of America demands a more fundamental examination of what we mean by ‘separate,’ by ‘equal,’ by ‘black.’"

Beatty demurs when critics point out his work as a satire. It isn’t, he says. It’s reportage. The material in this book is, in fact, observable in everyday America.

”Black people don’t even talk about race. Nothing’s attributable to color anymore. It’s all ‘mitigating circumstances.’ The only people discussing ‘race’ with any insight and courage are loud middle-aged white men…well-read open-minded white kids…a few freelance journalists in Detroit…”

Author interviews with Beatty are some of the most uncomfortable I have ever heard or read. Beatty stutters and avoids, sometimes flat out refuses to entertain a question. (Examples: Boston NPR Onpoint, and Ebony.) He clearly doesn’t like talking about “what his book means.” He wants his book to start the conversation. We’re supposed to be telling him what it means…to us…as individuals rather than as a class. He says often in interviews, “I am uncomfortable talking about this.” He does not appear to be uncomfortable writing about what he sees and what he thinks about what he sees, so folks interested in making him a spokesperson for black people will have to turn to his writing. But there aren’t answers there, either, really. It is just raw material for the discussion we are all meant to have.

In a reading Beatty gave at Politics & Prose, the Washington, D.C. bookstore, Beatty told the audience that he teaches a writing course at Columbia University and one of his students said to him, “I feel sorry for you guys” as though the race issue were finished, and is nothing now compared with yesterday. Beatty was shocked. It reminded me of young, upwardly mobile women saying they don’t experience sexism today.

Me, I incline towards Ta-Nehisi Coates’ June 2014 Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations.” Not that money will fix anything. It is the discussion about reparations that might fix something. Nigerian novelist Chris Abani, in a riveting conversation with American novelist Walter Mosley, says "America has had a unique relationship with blackness that, say, Europe really hasn’t had. As much as people like to pretend, slavery isn’t really over."
...more

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Jan 23, 2018 Felice Laverne rated it did not like it

Shelves: reviewed-on-amazon, african-american-fiction, man-booker-prize, cultural-surveys, contemporary-fiction, dnf, mini-review, read-2018

DNF

This entire novel, especially the prologue, reminded me of the ramblings of someone’s old grandpa rocking on the front porch of his clapboard home. I can only assume this is exactly what Beatty was going for, by the direction the novel ended up taking, but I felt like I was reading—no, sifting through—a bunch of nonsense I just wanted to be done with. And a lot of this read like an ultra-liberal excuse to spout out the n-word (hard er, mind you) as both a starting point, comma and full stop ...more

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Dec 01, 2015 Joachim Stoop rated it liked it

I don't recall reading a book which I loved so much in the beginning and was soooo fed up with in the end. It's too much of too much. There are about zero normal sentences and that was very tiring. It reminded me of Steve Toltz' Quicksand. I couldn't keep up with avalanches and avalanches of wit & satire. It's a damn shame, 'cuz I laughed out loud the first chapters.
I also think the book is better for native speakers (lots of linguistic humor) and if you live in the States (lots of inside ...more

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Sep 14, 2015 Claire rated it it was ok

One star for creativity, another for brilliant, innovative, hysterical prose, and a third for waking America up with a slap upside our "post-racial" national head. Every sentence in this novel is a combination of "Um, YES, that is so true!!" and "I can't believe I've never thought of it that way before!"

Minus a star for lack of compelling plot. Beatty gets so lost in his ridiculous subplots that I stopped caring what happened next. Will Dickens be saved from obsolescence? Will the Dum Dum ...more

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Aug 29, 2016 Jibran added it · review of another edition

Recommended to Jibran by: Booker longlist '16

Shelves: fiction, american

Subtitle: A mini dictionary of the oddities and eccentricities of Black America mixed in with a bevy of pop culture obscurities interspersed with some brilliant flashes of satire by Paul Beatty.

For the sake modesty, let me say that I'm in two minds whether the special outweighs the ordinary and vice versa. But there's no doubt that the book is designed as a commercial product for timely consumption given the rise in racial tensions in the US in the last few years. But this alone has never been a ...more

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Feb 25, 2015 John Pappas rated it it was amazing

Imagine Nina Simone singing "Mississippi Goddam" reincarnated as an atomic bomb that
explodes high enough for all of America to see, while Mark Twain chuckles and says "I told ya so," from the relative safety of a bunker deep in the canon of American literature. That's nowhere near how incendiary, biting, acerbic, witty, smart, funny, explosive, hard-hitting and revelatory Beatty's satire is. The first 50 pages had me wondering if he could sustain this voice, this force for another page...the ...more

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Mar 15, 2017 fourtriplezed rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: my-fiction, the-classics-or-deserve-to-be, booker

How does a white, late 50’s, Australian come to read a satire on race relations in the USA, an area he has little knowledge about in said subject?

I had recently read the brilliant A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James and was telling “all and sundry” what a superb read it was. I could recall a fair bit of the heady days of Marley and the powerful political fallout in Jamaica back in the late 70’s. I had got Exodus on release so was not in new territory subject wise. The writing and ...more

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Oct 29, 2016 Maxwell rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: man-booker, kindle, 2016, 2019

2019 review: Still not my jam. I gave it a 2nd shot and actually finished this time, but just didn't connect with this style. Satire is very hit or miss, and this was a miss for me.
___
2016 review: DNF'd it. Not in the mood for this right now. Will hopefully return to it in the future.

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Oct 28, 2014 Rebecca rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: reviewed-shiny-new-books, laugh-out-loud, booker-winners

(3.5) This is such an outrageous racial satire that I kept asking myself how Beatty got away with it. Not only did he get away with it, he won a National Book Critics Circle Award, and now the Booker Prize. The novel opens at the U.S. Supreme Court, where the narrator has been summoned to defend himself against a grievous but entirely true accusation: he has reinstituted slavery and segregation in his hometown of Dickens, California. All the old stereotypes of African Americans are here, many of ...more

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Jan 13, 2018 Michael Ferro rated it it was amazing

As good a satire as satires get. THE SELLOUT is simply one of the best books I've read in years. Hilarious, thoughtful, and necessary, it's a novel that gets better and sharper with each turn of the page. Beatty's wit and wry acumen makes his prose a delight to read and his critical eye for our insular American condition highlights the many problems involving race in our society.

Make 'em laugh and make 'em think, then you got 'em. Required reading for 2018 and beyond.

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Aug 02, 2016 Peter Boyle rated it liked it

Shelves: booker-nominee, booker-winners

"This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I've never stolen anything."

So begins the first page in this scathing satire of race in America. Our narrator is up before the Supreme Court, charged with attempting to reinstate slavery and segregation in his hometown of Dickens, a rundown neighborhood of Los Angeles. His accomplices are Hominy Jenkins, a former child star of the Little Rascals, and Marpessa Dawson, a foul-mouthed bus driver and the object of our hero's affections. But ...more

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Mar 02, 2017 Antonomasia rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: decade-2010s, 2017, el, booker, humour, modern-american-fiction

This isn't literary fiction so much as extended stand-up comedy. The sort that happens when Stewart Lee spins one of his crazed, spiralling stories that lasts half the set; yes it's political, but also surreal and vicious and somehow sympathetic, and just too fucking funny to dismiss as worthy or heavy-handed. The Sellout is not your negative-stereotype dreary litfic Booker winner. Those people who normally see a "Winner of the Man Booker Prize" sticker as a radioactivity hazard label? Plenty of ...more

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Feb 09, 2018 Darwin8u rated it it was amazing

Shelves: american, aere-perennius, 2018, fiction

"Unmitigated Blackness is coming to the realization that as fucked up and meaningless as it all is, sometimes it's the nihilism that makes life worth living."
- Paul Beautty, The Sellout

description

THIS novel. THIS one. It snuck up on my white ass and turned everything inside out. It is easily one of my favorite books I've read the last couple years. Funny. Sad. Touching. Radical. Poetic. I will actually frame this all into a real review soon, but for now, just know this novel seems to combine the ...more

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Oct 24, 2017 Esil added it

Shelves: must-get-to-in-2017

I read The Sellout for a book club. I'm new to the book club, so it felt important to read The Sellout from cover to cover so that I could prove myself a worthy member of my new book club. I almost made it, but I just couldn't get past the 85% mark on my kindle. By then I had caught wind that I wasn't the only one in the book club struggling with The Sellout. So I showed up, had a lovely time, talked very little about the book, decided I would stick to the club, and also decided that I would ...more

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Sep 13, 2016 Bookbeaver rated it did not like it

I certainly credit Beatty for letting the world know how bad racism is in our 'post-racism' society, but 50 or so pages of this rant was all I could take. I was looking forward to the 'comic' novel this has been praised as being, but unfortunately I found it to be trite and tiresome. Literary humor should sneak up and surprise you, even when you know it's coming, not continuously attempt to hit you over your head with itself. I understand this is a minority opinion, but it's mine and I'll stick ...more

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Nov 20, 2015 Lauren Cecile rated it really liked it

Outrageously irreverent, quirky, challenging and profound! An amazingly imaginative racial parody!

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Aug 19, 2017 Betsy Robinson rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Holy cow! I don’t know Latin, research psychology, California, every episode of The Little Rascals, and I’m white. So I don’t pretend to understand the tsunami of references that come so fast it takes your breath away in this satire about—

A brief and necessary digression: My own writing is sometimes rabidly politically incorrect and has been known to poke people who take offense at that. But I’m a neophyte compared to Paul Beatty. And although I love his kind of daring, freefalling, Macy’s ...more

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Mar 03, 2017 Lee Klein rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

Audacity, execution, authority, oomph, heft, humor -- the most enjoyable, truly enlightened, contemporary novel originally written in the English language I've read in a long, long time. I read some of the author's first novel after it came out back when I lived in Brooklyn and a friend recommended it but I didn't make my way too far through it, thinking it too derivative of Ishmael Reed, whose Flight to Canada and Mumbo Jumbo I read in college and loved. Now, the influence still seems there, Audacity, execution, authority, oomph, heft, humor -- the most enjoyable, truly enlightened, contemporary novel originally written in the English language I've read in a long, long time. I read some of the author's first novel after it came out back when I lived in Brooklyn and a friend recommended it but I didn't make my way too far through it, thinking it too derivative of Ishmael Reed, whose Flight to Canada and Mumbo Jumbo I read in college and loved. Now, the influence still seems there, the hyperbolic po-mo humor, at times like Mark Leyner walking the satirical high wire of serious sociological significance, but the overall world of the novel, delineated by Dickens LA with a DC frame, plus the wholly characterized characters and the inside jokes and the little pokes at Dave Eggers, Bret Easton Ellis, and the like, the obscure side-references loaded up in the last slot of a sentence's comic series, the clarity of every sentence and paragraph and the macro-level audacity, the old-fashioned yet not at all sentimental father/son story, I feel like it's safe to say that he's successfully integrated the Ishmael Reed, who's name-checked at one point, and individuated. Reading this every day on the Philly subway, wondering what the primarily black passengers think of this white guy reading a book with lawn jockeys on the cover, and wondering more so what someone might think when they read over my shoulder, was probably one of the best possible places to read this, especially when the story gave way to racism-related essayistic stretches. Nothing is necessarily unknown that he says but the total package delivered with such humor, energy, authentic intelligence (no Wittgenstein quotations!), with such alacrity and pizzazz (as an old prep-school football coach I had used to say about how we should execute drills), with insider info on the LA surf scene to boot and references to Sun Ra and Lee Morgan, and Adam Youch I guess, the total package hangs together so well and articulates the complexity of everything in the most effective possible way. The writing, the language, always guns it, veering around corners to find unexpected obstacles it blows right through -- one of the most exciting, refreshing, funny novels I've read, as soon as I'm done writing this I'll find a home for it on the bookshelf I reserve for major favorites. ...more

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Apr 09, 2016 Perry rated it liked it

Rhapsodical Reflections and Uproarious Ramblings on Racism in "Post-Racial" America
3.4/5

Re: Man Booker Prize, 2016
Consuetus Lector: "Blimey! In a manner of speaking, unbloodybelievable. This busts belief's bollocks, lampoons logic, cold-cocks common sense. Need I go on?"

This novel mostly reads like the rhapsodical ramblings and reflections of a racially righteous rebel challenging the status quo.

With mordant wit, incisive satirical spins and terrific comic timing, Paul Beatty ingeniously ...more

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Mar 23, 2015 Matthew rated it really liked it

As I finish this book, I sit in an airport, with CNN muted on the television above me. Baltimore. Riots. Race. It somehow seems like a fitting pair. It is worth noting, the Baltimore riots are substantially less humorous than Beatty's book.

In a time where race in America is at an absolute boiling point, Paul Beatty comes along with a book so bold and brave, people will see it as either absolutely repugnant, or undeniably brilliant. I'm in the latter group.

First thing first. This book is ...more

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Jan 23, 2018 Barbara rated it liked it

3.5 stars

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

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

Bonbon also ...more

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Nov 26, 2017 Michael rated it really liked it

Shelves: los-angeles, social-commentary, fiction, african-american, racism, humor, california, satire

Over the top madcap humor with a satirical scalpel slicing into layers of racism in America. It has the flavor of Swift’s “Modest Proposal”, in the main character’s latching onto a revival of segregation as a key to saving his community from being erased by gentrification. The story actually starts out with a Supreme Court hearing where narrator (last name Me; will designate him as “John”) is preparing to justify his efforts at resegregation as well as a charge of slavery. The hook on the reader Over the top madcap humor with a satirical scalpel slicing into layers of racism in America. It has the flavor of Swift’s “Modest Proposal”, in the main character’s latching onto a revival of segregation as a key to saving his community from being erased by gentrification. The story actually starts out with a Supreme Court hearing where narrator (last name Me; will designate him as “John”) is preparing to justify his efforts at resegregation as well as a charge of slavery. The hook on the reader lies in learning the stages that led John to this point. Overall, the brilliance of this tale shined through in the same vein as Ismael Reed’s zany, non-PC adventures in race relations back in the 70s. I got a lot of laughs from his outrageous scenarios and progressions of verbal riffs that land often fall off the cliff into the land of absurdity. Some of the humor fell flat, which is also true in routines of a great stand-up comedian like Chris Rock. If, like me, you get a bit anesthetized with too much satire in one sitting, you may do better reading this in small doses.

John is a black middle-aged farmer of sorts in an old black neighborhood on the outskirts of Los Angeles, Dixon. His father, a psychology professor at a local community college, had nostalgia about farming from his Kentucky roots and raises horses, goats, fruit trees, cotton, and, like the magic of the loaves and the fishes, still has room for a riding club on his few acres tucked away in what has become a gang-infested ghetto. His other impact on his son is from performing social psychology experiments on him while he growing up (such as trying to condition him against Nixon values), which often have unintended effects (such as often needing recordings of the Watergate hearings to get to sleep). After his father was gunned down by trigger happy police, John feels obliged to continue some of his efforts for the community service. This includes talking down community members in the throes of attempting suicide. Another effort he feels inadequate to fulfill is contributing to the regular cultural and political discussions at a coffee shop, the Dum Dum Donuts Intellectual Society, with a mission of collectively addressing community issues.

But John is a failure at talking people out of suicide and the discussion group has been taken over by a professor who has made it rich by rewriting middle-school classic texts to be more inspiring for black kids (“Uncle Tom’s Condo”, “The Point Guard in the Rye”, “The Great Blacksby”). When Dixon’s signs get removed and the neighborhood stricken from the L.A. map, he gets inspired to lead an effort to counter this attempt as erasing their legacy and revitalize the community. His friend Hominy, who once worked in Hollywood as one of early TV comedy “The Little Rascals” and believes in the value of parading the stereotypes through the humor first applied in minstrel shows gives him the idea of reviving the overtly racist institution of segregation as an antidote to hidden racism in modern society. His old girlfriend Marpessa, now a city bus driver, finds that use of his signs for segregated seating has a calming effect on gang violence on her bus. Another old Latina friend who is now a school principal finds the approach effective for identity building to have “Colored Only” signs and classes in her middle school, which is almost populated by black and Hispanic students. John begins to imagine promotional Dixon brochures:

The Urban Paradise on the Banks of the Los Angeles River. Home to Roving Bands of Youth Groups, a Retired Movie Star, and Segregated Schools!

For a fairly tame sample of Beatty’s genius in language skills applied to humor, I share a quote of an outburst of Marpessa at a Dum Dum Donut Club session which featured readings by a woman author about a white single mother of biracial children who “raised them as brown, called them beigeoloids, celebrated Brown History Month …”:
Everybody else loved the book, but during the question-and-answer session you went off on dude. ‘I’m so fucking tired of black women always being described by their skin tones! Honey-colored this! Dark-chocolate that! My paternal grandfather was mocha-tinged, café-au-lait, graham-fucking-cracker brown! How come they never describe the white characters in relation to the foodstuffs and hot liquids? Why aren’t there any yogurt-colored, egg-shell-toned, string-cheese-skinned, low-fat milk white protagonists in these racist, no-third-act-having books? That’s why black literature sucks!’

There were enough lively bits like this to keep me a satisfied customer for this read. Whether the whole package deserved a Man Booker prize for 2016 is subject to debate.
...more

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Nov 26, 2016 PattyMacDotComma rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction-adult, aa, politics-culture-social, award-win-listed, arc-netgalley-done

4.5
While I was mulling this one over, and its satirical suggestion that a kind of apartheid might be the way to address American racism, I was reading J.M. Coetzee's book which touches on a similar subject in Africa, Summertime. Quite a pair of prize-winning books!

----
Clever, witty, American but universal satire. I started this, got annoyed because I was bored, so I read something else. When I came back to it, I started over and enjoyed the ride.

I just immersed myself in Beatty’s unbelievable ...more

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Oct 31, 2016 BlackOxford rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favourites, american

Creating History

Whatever your conscious attitude toward race, and whatever your race, your self-image will be shaken by Paul Beatty's work. And whatever criticism that could be offered about the work has already been addressed within it. To coin a phrase: this changes everything. It cuts through everybody's bunk - white people's, black people's, sociologists', politicians', journalists', not forgetting novelists' major bunk-lode. Beatty's point is clear: the world of race in America is a lot ...more

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Nov 07, 2016 Tristan rated it liked it · review of another edition

DISCLAIMER: THE FOLLOWING TEXT IS THE EMBARRASSING RESULT OF YET ANOTHER WHITE ASS FOOL CULTURALLY APPROPRIATING THE BLACK MAN'S RAP GAME

Dig this (drop that beat)

Yo, yo.

Now, don't get me wrong

This brutha's prose is the damn near illest, speedin' by like an antelope on pure ass crack hunted down by lions, that's nature's SEAL team of killers
It's cracklin' and crackin', out of sight, like a symphonic orchestra of Thor hammerblows to a Cyclops' cataract eye on a stormy winter night

This nigga

DISCLAIMER: THE FOLLOWING TEXT IS THE EMBARRASSING RESULT OF YET ANOTHER WHITE ASS FOOL CULTURALLY APPROPRIATING THE BLACK MAN'S RAP GAME

Dig this (drop that beat)

Yo, yo.

Now, don't get me wrong

This brutha's prose is the damn near illest, speedin' by like an antelope on pure ass crack hunted down by lions, that's nature's SEAL team of killers
It's cracklin' and crackin', out of sight, like a symphonic orchestra of Thor hammerblows to a Cyclops' cataract eye on a stormy winter night

This nigga is spittin' his sizzlin' rhymes rhapsodic like there's no tomorrow
We have here some heavy shit he's puttin' out, yet cleverly veiled in satire,
so, if needed, he has an out, he has no need for bein' entangled in a screwed-up media quagmire

That cool fo sho, I don't complain, mucho respect,
I'm feelin' his flow, his wantin' to go clean and straight for the neck

But man, what a bombastic drag it becomes after a page or hundred fifty,
this cat - isn't he a f*ckin' poet? - in his creative writing classes should have learned about bein' pithy

Hell yes, I know it's a novel, but he could have at least bothered to craft a more substantive, emotionally investing story,
then he would have had somethin', approachin' bein' pretty bitchin' peremptory

Alas, the result has its merit, has a certain aplomb,
'tis a fine thing indeed, but not - as was advertised - quite the thermonuclear bomb

My main man Booker - properly British - had never before granted his much sought after gift to one of those American..gits

So we all knew it was bound to happen, why not now, it's a topical theme, plus as an added bonus, they unanimously seemed to be a fan,
so crownin' him the undisputed champion wasn't too wack a plan

Yeah, it's probably me

Being hyper contrarian when it comes to literary prizes and current hypes,
You see, me, if the subject is deserving, I'm not at all above making cantankerous snipes

Thus am I, this is how I roll

Homies, I implore you and your itchy trigger fingers , keep those uzi's holstered, this is not an all-out diss, this metaphorical blunt initially did leave me reelin', feelin' pleasantly high,
Yet, after further contemplation of the kind analytical, realising it was all rather superficial, I caught myself lettin' escape a slightly disappointed sigh

Peace.

...more

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About Paul Beatty

Paul Beatty

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Paul Beatty (born 1962 in Los Angeles) is a contemporary African-American author. Beatty received an MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College and an MA in psychology from Boston University. He is a 1980 graduate of El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, California.

In 1990, Paul Beatty was crowned the first ever Grand Poetry Slam Champion of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. One of the prizes ...more

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“That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.” — 115 likes

“Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it’s fear.” — 88 likes

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