Not P, but P-List turned me on to The Sellout, so here's my review!

[Mark Thibodeau]

Thanks to Mark K and all the talk about this book on the P-List, which
convinced me to buy this book a couple years ago. I finally read it
last week, and WOW.

Anyway, here it is...

My review of THE SELLOUT
A Novel by Paul Beatty

I finally finished Paul Beatty’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The
Sellout, about which I’ve previously stated my belief that it’s even
better than the hype campaign behind it has declared. Fortunately,
that pretty much holds through all the way to the beautifully (and
necessarily) understated denouement and conclusion.

So, what’s it all about, then? Well, it’s about a lot of things.
Story-wise, it’s about a fellow named “Bonbon” Me, the novel’s
protagonist, and his attempts to a) get his home town, a Los Angeles
“agrarian ghetto” named Dickens, put back on the map, and b)
reintroduce segregation and slavery in said neighborhood (with
shockingly counter-intuitive results).

But it’s also about so much more. It’s about the sense of community
and group consciousness and its loss in the swirl of Late Capitalist
atomization, which argues, Thatcher-like, that there’s no such thing,
and furthermore there never was. It’s about the rapidly fading memory
of the Black California experience of the last half of the 20th
century. It asks an incredibly difficult and dangerous question: is it
possible that being saddled with a somewhat negative identity is at
least better than being denied any sense of identity at all?

It’s also about the failures of traditional liberalism and the wanton,
contrary stupidity of Black conservatism. It’s about all the ways in
which fathers fail sons, men fail women, leaders fail their followers,
teachers fail their students… and vice versa. It’s about the
simultaneous, paradoxical impossibility-slash-need to forgive the
unforgivable sins of America’s unforgettable past. It’s about the
problem with history, about which Beatty writes: “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.”
(P.115)

And yet, it’s also one of the funniest goddamn books I’ve ever had the
pleasure of reading, ranking somewhere alongside John Kennedy Tool’s
Confederacy of Dunces and Howard Stern’s Miss America as being among
the tiny handful of books that I had to stop reading because I was
laughing so hard, tears blurred my vision. This is thanks in large
part to the character of Bonbon’s elderly ward, Hominy Jenkins, former
child star and last surviving Little Rascal, whose lifetime of
starring in racist Our Gang cartoon shorts have warped his mind to the
point where he thinks he’s Bonbon’s slave. Together, the two form a
sort of urban Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (Bonbon even eschews
motorized vehicles for the most part, choosing to get around town on
his trusty horse).

Another great source of comedy is the “Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals”
club, led by Black conservative thinker, writer, and TV talk show host
Foy Cheshire, who took over the club after the death of his nemesis,
Bonbon’s father, who—prior to being gunned down by police a few years
previous—was both an experimental psychiatrist and the neighborhood
(forgive me) “nigger whisperer”, who was often called in by
authorities to talk suicidal Black people down from the ledge, or
handle hostage negotiations involving people of color, as some of the
more “woke” high-ranking officers realized they didn’t have the proper
life experience to commiserate with most of these particular cases.

And really, I’ve only begun to scratch the surface in terms of the
treasures this novel offers the reader. Every page of The Sellout
contains a dozen or more wry observations in the vein of mid-career
Richard Pryor; stuff like: “If you really think about it, the only
thing you absolutely never see in car commercials isn’t Jewish people,
homosexuals, or urban Negroes, its traffic.” (P.139) And then there’s
the extended sequence in which Bonbon applies to a service that finds
sister cities the way dating sites do for those looking to be matched
up with a significant other. Upon getting a call back, he finds out
that Dickens’ “three sister cities in order of compatibility… are
Juarez, Chernobyl, and Kinshasa.” (P.146)

The genius of Beatty’s novel feels cumulative, and I’m keenly aware
that tiny excerpts aren’t doing the work any justice at all. You’re
just going to have to take my word for it that The Sellout is destined
to go down as one of the great novels of the 21st century. Or don’t
take my word for it. Buy a copy and read it for yourself. Or hell,
even go to a library and borrow a copy, if you’re a cheapskate.
However you choose to take it in, I promise you won’t regret it.