It’s tough to sell me on a novel that’s not funny. To me, fiction without humor is missing an essential part of the human experience. Paul Beatty’s Booker Prize-winning masterpiece is one of the funniest—and most human—novels I’ve ever read. Not only that, it made me feel entirely vindicated for insisting upon comedy.
The Sellout is so sharp you might not notice it’s cut you until you’ve already feeling faint. It’s a combination of laugh-out-loud comedy, precision social satire (rooted in a deep understanding of history), and literary tour de force. It’s so good it made me use the phrase “tour de force.” The mission of
The Sellout’s narrator, a black man, is to reintroduce (official) segregation to his rural neighborhood within inner-city Los Angeles after it is mysteriously disappeared from the map. The novel fittingly begins with the narrator lighting a joint in the halls of the Supreme Court, where his re-segregation endeavor landed him. As
Kevin Young wrote in his review, “Beatty takes the same delight in tearing down the sacred, not so much airing dirty laundry as soiling it in front of you.” But
The Sellout celebrates as much as it torches. It is, in addition to being one of the great satirical novels of the decade, and maybe of all time, a celebration of blackness in an allegedly post-racial era (keep in mind, this was 2015).
–Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor
Paul Beatty, The Sellout (2015)