“The Sellout” is a satire, despite what the author has reportedly claimed. After all, satire is, according to the Oxford Dictionary of English, humour meant to “ridicule people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.” This book fits that definition and emphasizes all of satire’s strengths and shortcomings at the same time. Early on, it reminded me of my past readings of Michel Houellebecq, minus his misogynist tendencies. Beatty has his satire blare loudly, like a trombone player taking over all the solos for the jazz orchestra. Even if the trombone is of the highest standard, it deafens(in this case blinds)the audience to the finer and deeper points made in this piece of art, as well as the flow of the narrative. “The Sellout” is not for sobriety.
We begin the story as the main character is awaiting trial for the absurdist but factually correct notion of holding another black man as a slave on his farm in the urban Los Angeles area. The other main storyline is the main character attempting to have his hometown of Dickens, California be restored as a town name after it was dropped in the name of gentrification. As Beatty explains,
“Dickens, like most California towns, except for Irvine,
which was established as a breeding ground for stupid,
fat, ugly, white Republicans and the chihuahuas and East
Asian refugees who love them, started out as an agrarian
community.”
Beatty’s originality and clever wit is prominent right from the beginning, as the excerpt above displays.
The main character was brought up as a guinea pig for his social scientist father, who ended up being killed by the police for a minor traffic infraction. Dickens itself becomes a current state of apocalypse with citizens left without basic services and having to fend for themselves. “The Sellout” lends itself to perturbable nostalgia, as Beatty suggests that it would be more desirable if we were in the times of open racism and hatred. Judging by 2017, I think it is wise to say that you have to be careful of what you wish for.
“Hollywood had all the blackness it needed in the demi-
whiteness of Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier, the
brooding Nearitude of James Dean, and the broad gravity-
defying Venus hot to trot roundess of Marilyn Monroe’s ass.”
The questions the main character brings forth are not about slavery so much as segregation, sometimes now in the guise of terms such as gentrification or a city being “holed out.” How do you segregate what has already been segregated, such as a black-dominated shantytown like Dickens? In “The Sellout” you see a fictitious white-only private school built that inspires the native black and Mexican population in public school to work harder now that they have a clear elitist goal. That brings us another one of Beatty’s important political, more philosophical questions: is the abolition of equity necessary for us to have higher standards? As the main characters says “on your little public television appearances you motherfuckers sound like Kelsey Grammar with a stick up his ass.” Beatty certainly wants to dispel any notions that racism is deceased or even decreased. Dickens represents a larger body of the oppressed that can easily being recognized as such, because they accept this as part of their life. That is the most prevalent idea brought forth in “The Sellout.”
In terms of the American white population, Beatty says the only type of black people who ever were accepted by them were the ones seen as non-threatening. The ones who have
“their master’s degrees from the Yale School of Drama and
Shakespearean training having gone to waste, as they stand
around barbecue pits delivering lines like ‘Prithee, home
boy, forsooth thou knowest that Budweiser is the King of
Beers.”
I realized after reading the book that Beatty is not saying that segregation is the answer to these racial issues, rather he is speaking about a culture, defined by the colour of skin, that is drowning in negative stereotypes, put forth by their oppressors, in which someone like O.J. Simpson can define an entire race.
As a writer, Beatty has rhythmically inclined, poetic skills, in what some would call a stream-of-consciousness form that come in out various forms, such as hilarious rhymes as: “Three in the afternoon, Mormons at my pad/Need new croaker sacks and feelin’ bad/Promising salvation to a nigger like me/Brigham Young must be stupid and high on PCP.” Another example is from when the group of intellectuals met. The group, started by the main character’s father, met regularly at Dum-Dum Donuts and from this we see Beatty’s mastery of satire.
“Jon McJones regurgitating the usual Republican Party
bullshit that a child born into slavery in 1860 was more
likely to be raised in a two-parent household than was
a baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-
American President…I’m not so selfish as to believe that
my relative happiness, including, but not limited to
twenty-four hour access to chilli burgers, Blu-ray and
Aeron office chairs is worth generations of suffering.”
This is Beatty’s disdain for the disdain of the idea that racism no longer exists.
Beatty’s constant satirical, poetical writing bounces in a way that sometimes infiltrates the flow of his ideas, along with the traditional shortcoming of satire(lack of depth in characters, narrative etc..). His twenty-first century stream-of-consciousness style sometimes is stuck on verbiage. Overall, however, this is minor in comparison to the importance of what he confronts all readers on when it comes to the issue of race. As you approach the end of the novel, he became more universally philosophical, having his main character repeat “you have to ask yourself two questions: “Who am I? and How may I become myself?”
InAD Life 