Not Pynchon but not unlike and maybe was influenced AND IS AN UNRESERVED RECOMMENDATION

[Mark Kohut]

Got THE SELLOUT, the new Man-Booker Prize winner out of the library, but
will now BUY; It needs UNDERLINED a lot. it is a paperback.... I remember
The White Boy Shuffle from Mr Beatty and, I gotta tell you --if you don't
believe the judges-- his book is off-the-charts brilliant, witty as three
stand-up comedians---like Carlin, Pryor and Silverman--she actually blurbs
it---, a smart choice by the publisher. His so-alive prose of witty verbal
lists and conjunctions can remind of Pynchon and Reed (among others). I’m
laughing here; I'm guffawing here; the hair on the back of my arms is
rising risibly. Funniest book since the last Portis i read.


SPOILER ALERT BUT HARDLY, GIVEN THE PROSE DOES IT:

The riffs, the surprising, obliquely apt lists of comparisons he applies to
various surreal situations: The prologue is him getting high, while his car
is illegally parked outside, in front of his Supreme Court appearance (!)
where the OTHER BLACK GUY disses him like a superior white guy in the power
structure. Then we learn he was raised in a farm (!) area of the city of
Los Angeles---Dickens, a ghetto community in South LA!--, where his dad was
a psychologist who ‘conditioned’ him with his experiments, such as trying
to prove that the Kitty Genovese Bystander Effect did not apply among
negroes who "supported each other" but then had to admit he overlooked “the
Bandwagon effect’ when all the bystanders jumped into hitting his kid after
he started hitting him in public! ...earlier he wrote of someone for whom
‘everything was a jazz comparison”..."childbirth is like jazz; even jazz is
like jazz” among a longer list of other comparisons that are not sticking
with me until I underline them...and I've already forgotten the best of
some of this list riffing because I laughed so hard because I compare too
many things to jazz....LOL...


I have not read a review of this, just got because BIG AWARD and knowledge
of his earlier one and wanted to read something new while I continue my
belated classics

self-education BUT


The conditioning chapter, and the prose, does make me think that the TRP of
Gravity's Rainbow, at least, is an influence, a source--in this section at
least-- because of Slothrop's conditioning chapter and because there is
shit in it, running down his legs and more. "My bowels evacuated me".

[aside to Morris and Ian, if he's still on the list; narrator alludes to
Jung in asides almost wistfully, nostalgically, surely as a contrast to
Americans' conditioning psychologists]


I UNRESERVEDLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK TO ALL ON THE PLIST WHICH IS REAL EASY
TO DO BECAUSE MAN--BOOKER AND WISH I WAS RICH ENOUGH TO SEND (ALMOST)
EVERYONE ON THIS LIST A COPY.


I would love to read this as a Group but we can't seem to do that well. Our
conditioning must be too individualistic --or something.


So there, happy holidays. Treat yourself or ask for it. No, i am not
getting paid to promote it. I did not even (yet) ask for a free copy from
someone at the publisher, my old one, although I've written someone about
it, but I will now after I buy at least one, surely a couple-three, the
writer deserves that and more. I hope he gets to, ah, well-off in the
economic status world. I will give that free one and some others away.
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