Race against bigotry: On Man Booker winner Paul Beatty's 'The Sellout'

It was rejected 18 times before it found a publisher in the UK, and even Claire Armitstead, The Guardian’s influential books editor, admitted she had never read any of Paul Beatty’s four novels before The Sellout made it to the shortlist of the Man Booker Prize. That’s something unlikely to happen ever again with Beatty winning the Man Booker earlier this week. Such are the dividends of this most prestigious of prizes.

In retrospect, The Sellout, a novel about race, the ineffable ways in which it works and its tenacious hold on US society, was a particularly apt choice this year given the political climate in that country, what with the continued deaths of African-Americans at the hands of police and how much race has been a part of the discourse of this year’s election campaign. Amanda Foreman, who headed the 2016 prize jury, admitted as much, calling it “a novel for our times”. 

In The Sellout, the narrator, Bonbon’s father, is accidentally gunned down by the LAPD. Then, Dickens, the “ghetto community” on the outskirts of Los Angeles where Bonbon lives and where this novel is set, is “erased” from the map and Bonbon decides to do something about it, more precisely, to draw attention to it in a way that would force whoever it was that made these maps to put it back. 

And so, in a parody of history, Bonbon “enslaves” an old black man called Hominy Jenkins, once a popular star of a children’s comedy series called Little Rascals, and gets him to work on his farm, where he grows (and smokes) weed and watermelon. He then “re-segregates” the schools in the area to keep non-whites away - ironical since they anyway had only black and Latino students. The authorities, of course, don’t get the point, or the irony, and Bonbon is arrested and hauled up for trial in the US Supreme Court for violating the constitution.

The Sellout is funny, but it’s also very angry and quite sad in parts. Speaking at Politics and Prose, a leading cultural hub in Washington DC, soon after the book came out in March 2015, Beatty spoke about a student telling him he felt “so sorry for you guys - you had it so bad. It shocked me, because to me it feels worse now”; about how despite the “Obamas in the White House” and other events “that mean something but day to day don’t mean anything”. 
  
These are concerns that have occupied Beatty’s fiction since his first novel, The White Boy Shuffle (1996), an affective, zany, biting novel about a black boy growing up with the demeaning, often violent reality of race discrimination in the densely populated inner city in the American South. His second, Tuff (2001), was about a drug gangster, a passionate Luis Bunuel fan, who decides to run for the City Council elections. Slumberland (2008), the third, was about a Los Angeles DJ who goes to Berlin in search of a saxophonist nicknamed Shuwa whom he wants to play an avant-garde voodoo music over a sonic masterpiece he’s created.

These are issues and stories that will discomfit many of Beatty’s American readers, including African-Americans, who seem to be caricatured for their failure - perhaps of the imagination? - to rise above their old ways. Will it resonate with readers in other places, who may not experience race or colour prejudice, but experience other forms of bias?