The Sellout, Paul Beatty, OneWorld, pp.
289
The grim humour that stole this
Christmas for me is Paul Beatty’s The
Sellout. The first novel by an American author to win the Man Booker Prize,
the book is a biting satire on race relations in a country that has just seen
the end of an African American Presidency.
And it is in questioning these large symbolic breakthroughs in ameliorating
the everyday lives of any group that is not mainstream that the book does
unabashedly. The collective resistance under the leadership of Dr Martin Luther
King, the rejuvenation set out by Harlem renaissance, the historic Presidency
of Barack Obama are taken as one off events and questioned on both intrinsic
and relative merits on the community they sought to better and ended up leaving
worse off.
‘I whispered racism in a post-racist
world’, says the protagonist, who is an African American tried in the Supreme
Court for owning a slave and practising racial segregation. Indeed our
protagonist is a product of experimentation from childhood and bears its brunt
with an equanimity that accepts reality and attempts to change it by using its
own logic. He makes it through his childhood home schooled and generously
experimented upon by his father a behavioural psychologist. In this process he
becomes an object and this experience of total isolation from agency exists in
him with fierce bouts of resistance. He loses his family, his neighbourhood
disappears from the maps and minds of the administration and he is left hanging
listlessly with his friends in a no man’s land. From this window incognito, he strikes
back using the very instruments that made him suffer. He makes the entire
society flinch by unleashing the same kind of experiments back on them.
Of this novel, I can say the journey is
the message. The language with its endless puns, metaphors and slang is
abrasive and uncompromising. On writing this book, Beatty remarked, ‘It was
hard for me to write, it’s a hard book to read.’ There is savage wit ripping
off every holy cow, blurring the sacred, eviscerating the sacrosanct,
lampooning nuance leaving us with just the heart of the problem. But then,
Beatty trenchantly puts it in his novel, ‘being offended is not an emotion.’ Parts
of the book make us laugh, then cringe and in many significant ways reflect the
times we live in.
This book was turned down eighteen
times by established publishers before being accepted by a small two people
publishing company in Scotland called Oneworld. It is also the publisher’s
second Booker in a row after last year’s winning novel ‘A brief history of
seven killings’. As far as the Man
Booker prize goes, satire barely makes it as favourite. Yet, out of the 155
books that entered the prize this year, The
Sellout was the unanimous choice of the jury and is a great work of fiction
comparable to the tradition of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain.
