The review by
Kiese Laymon on Paul Beatty's latest novel, 'The Sellout' is a worthwhile read in itself. We've provided it here:
"I knew when I read "The White Boy Shuffle" as a junior in college that
Paul Beatty had written the book every afflicted black boy wannabe
novelist dreamed of creating. Because we lived in the United States, and
because we were black boys, and because we were not white boys, and
because the publishing industry in the United States was the publishing
industry in the United States, we knew there could be only one.
Not one great one. Not one from the West Coast. Not one who got the
chance to publish something filled with layers of odd-shaped nihilism,
and so many shades of black love, black awkward and black fear. American
literature was not hip-hop. We knew that. There could only be room for
one youngish black boy
novelist who dared to love us and show us that we
were way mushier, way weirder and way more brilliant than we thought.
White supremacy would have it no other way.
Beatty — who grew up
in West Los Angeles, went on to study with Allen Ginsberg and now lives
in New York — shifted the expectations of what we could do with
secondary characters and literary sound for a generation of young
novelists influenced by hip-hop, pull-up jumpers, Toni Morrison and
Richard Pryor.
Twenty years later, it's fairly obvious that the
United States is a Kara Walker exhibit and a Paul Beatty novel
unknowingly masquerading as a crinkled Gettysburg Address.
Appropriately, in "The Sellout," Beatty's newest novel, we initially
meet our narrator, Bonbon, in the frigid chamber of the U.S. Supreme
Court.
Told mostly in flashback, "The Sellout" shows us how a young black
boy raised by a single father, who is also a renegade academic, ends up
in front of the Supreme Court. As a young man, Bonbon is led to believe
that his father's ambitious academic work might lead to a lucrative
memoir that will ensure financial security.
However,
after police kill his father, Bonbon realizes that instead of an actual
memoir, his father left him a bill for a drive-thru funeral. Inspired
by the imagination of Marpessa, his ex-girlfriend and neighborhood bus
driver, Bonbon tries to revive the town of Dickens, a "locale" that has
literally been removed from the map of Southern California. With the
help of Hominy Jenkins, the last surviving Little Rascal, not to mention
the most well-known resident of the town and a wannabe slave, Bonbon
manages to reinstate a peculiar kind of slavery, segregate the buses and
the local high school and get shot. All of this lands him in the
Supreme Court.
"The Sellout," like "The White Boy Shuffle," is
piloted by black American voices. Long flourishing passages that often
feel too thick and too concentrated might be read as the necessary work
of unfolding, undoing, unlearning and ultimately understanding confused
characters in a clumsy nation committed to lots of death, dumb and
destruction.
Nearly every chapter gives us an opportunity to meet
wonderfully etched secondary characters like Marpessa, King Cuz and the
superbly trifling Foy Cheshire, who actually names the narrator "the
sellout." But we're also given a slew of other peripheral characters who
often too conveniently exist to drop well-timed one-liners. This
repetitive narrative move doesn't slow the pace of the novel as much as
it makes a spectacle of the novel's pace. Ultimately though, as the book
gets closer and closer to the Supreme Court trial, "The Sellout" makes
room for both satirical spectacle and earnest literary whispers.
Beatty's reliance on so many textured backstories and secondary
characterizations feels both revelatory and absolutely intentional.
Near
the end of the book, Bonbon remembers watching a black comedian go off
on the only white folks at a comedy show, a white "interloping" couple
who kept laughing inappropriately at what the comedian called "our
thing." Lamenting his inability to ask the comedian to explain what he
meant by "our thing," Bonbon recalls, "No, when my thoughts go back to
that evening, I think about my own silence. Silence can be either
protest or consent, but most times it's fear. I guess that's why I'm so
quiet and such a good whisperer…"
This acceptance of stillness in
such a loud, spectacular book, which may also be read as Beatty's brand
of narrative whispering, is where this novel is at its most dazzling and
ironically its least absurd. "The Sellout," while riding beneath
terrifying waves of American racial terror and heteropatriarchy, is
among the most important and difficult American novels written in the
21st century.
The
novel nudges us to understand and then
conveniently forget that while black Americans have always been watched,
imitated and uber-disciplined, we've rarely been loved or cared for or
fairly treated by those watching. Our communication, like the
communication between black characters in "The Sellout," will always be
incredibly nuanced, comically basic and ultimately private precisely
because we have always been under surveillance by a nation obsessed with
watching and listening but wholly unable to see or really hear us.
"The
Sellout," in all its spiky satirical absurdity, exists not just in a
world created by hip-hop and cradled by the Internet. "The Sellout"
firmly situates itself between white supremacy and black love, between
thick anti-blackness and communal black innovation. It is a bruising
novel that readers will likely never forget, especially those readers
with the stomach to imagine and the will to remember the mystery and
enduring thump of "our thing.""
