The Sellout
by Paul Beatty
Summary
The narrator, known as Bonbon, grew up in Dickens, a poor and agricultural corner of Los Angeles, raised by a father who conducted psychological experiments on him. Dickens has been quietly erased from the map by the county. Bonbon decides to put it back, and settles on two methods: reintroducing segregation at the local school, and accepting the offer of an elderly former child actor who wishes to become his slave.
That is the setup, and it exists to let Beatty say things about race in America that cannot be said any other way. The book opens with Bonbon before the Supreme Court, smoking, and works backwards.
It is relentless. The jokes come several per page, the register never settles, and Beatty attacks everything: white liberals, respectability politics, Black intellectual life, his own narrator. Nothing is spared and nobody is safe, which is the tradition he is writing in.
Be honest with yourself about whether that is what you want. There is very little plot, the satire is sustained at a pitch that some readers find exhausting after a hundred pages, and it assumes fluency in American racial politics that not every reader has. Those who stay with it tend to describe it as the funniest serious book they have read.
It is best taken in short bursts rather than swallowed whole, fifty pages at a time, because the density of the jokes is genuinely tiring at length. Nothing else on the Booker list reads remotely like it, and nothing else is likely to make you laugh out loud on a train and then immediately check whether anyone saw.
Historical Context & Significance
The Sellout won the Booker Prize in 2016, and Paul Beatty became the first American to win it, two years after the prize opened to writers of any nationality regardless of where they were published.
Amanda Foreman, the historian who chaired the judges, said the book plunges into the heart of contemporary American society with a savage wit she had not seen since Swift or Twain. The five judges deliberated for four hours over six finalists drawn from 155 submissions, and the decision was unanimous.
The novel had already taken the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the Booker made it an international success after a career in which Beatty had been admired and modestly read. The win also sharpened the ongoing argument about opening the prize to American writers, since one of the next two winners was American.