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What it argues
The Sellout opens with its unnamed narrator — Me, a Black farmer from the fictional Los Angeles suburb of Dickens — appearing before the Supreme Court of the United States, charged with reintroducing slavery and segregation. The novel then proceeds, via flashback, to explain how he got there. His father, a radical social scientist, has been killed by the police. The town of Dickens has been literally erased from the map. And the narrator, in an act of absurdist protest, decides to reinstate the geographical and social boundaries of the town — including by acquiring an elderly Black man named Hominy Jenkins, who insists on being his slave.
The novel is a satire of American racial politics in the tradition of Swift and Twain — fierce, unsparing, and deeply committed to the proposition that there is no position in the American racial conversation that cannot be made to look ridiculous. Beatty skewers Black nationalism, white liberalism, respectability politics, therapeutic approaches to race, and the performative politics of the post-civil-rights generation with equal contempt. The novel's argument, to the extent a satire has an argument, seems to be that America has so thoroughly confused symbol with substance in its approach to race that remedying the confusion requires absurdity of a very particular kind.
What it gets right
- 1.
Satire is not irresponsibility. The novel's absurdity — reinstating slavery, redrawing segregation lines — is a precise diagnostic tool, not a dodge.
- 2.
The American conversation about race has become so performative that it can no longer address the actual conditions of Black American life. The novel's absurdism names that gap.
- 3.
Hominy Jenkins, who demands to be enslaved, embodies a dark argument about internalized oppression — what happens when people identify with the conditions of their own degradation.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Paul Beatty is an American novelist and poet born in Los Angeles in 1962. He is the author of four novels: The White Boy Shuffle, Tuff, Slumberland, and The Sellout, which won the 2016 Man Booker Prize — the first American novel to do so. He has also published two collections of poetry and edited the anthology Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor. Beatty is known for a satirical voice of exceptional density and range, and for a willingness to make readers uncomfortable in ways that few American writers attempt. He teaches creative writing at Columbia University.
