This book stumped me. I’m aware that this is a satire, but at times I’m not sure if the messaging is controversial or Beatty is just simply taking the piss. It is a difficult book to gauge because after finishing this, I just feel that I missed the essence of the book. Some of the events that take place in the book are just wtf, that doesn’t happen in real life? But reading more through the rationale for the book, some of these explanations make sense, but it still left me feeling a little lost. However, as African American writing goes, this is the funniest that I’ve read, and I was constantly laughing.
The entire storyline is absurd, and absurd I guess, is the most apt word which fits the theme of the novel. It is a story of a nameless narrator whose surname we know is “Me” — a bit of a pun here when the novel starts with a supreme court case — “Me vs the United States of America”. It is not the setting you imagine, in a town of Dickens just a horse’s gallop away from LA. When his father was murdered by incompetent white policemen, the narrator took over the land and became a farmer himself. The story really got going when the town of Dickens disappeared off the face of the map. The rest of the book is the attempt to reclaim Dickens.
That’s all I can say about what happened in the book, because within is a wonderful mess. And funny as fuck. When I think of the name “Dickens”, the fictional town that’s gone walkabouts off the face of the earth, the first thing I think about as most people will is Charles Dickens — the most popular whitest dude in literature. But Dickens is a semi-rural area with hood elements. It is almost surreal in some ways because the narrator’s preferred mode of transportation is his horse, while he sells watermelon and marijuana, which he grows out of his farm.
It all gets weird when we meet Hominy, a disgruntled black former child actor who is part of Dickens’ attraction. The eradication of Dickens rendered Hominy purposeless — his fans ceased to drag him out of obscurity and he decided to become the narrator’s slave. Little by little, racist artefacts that has long since removed from history are restored in Dickens, such as segregation in schools and bus seating. In fact, bringing back segregation and slavery tend to have a positive impact on crime and behaviour in general. This is what riddled me in the book.
The narrator’s archnemesis, Cheshire Foy stood on another side of the spectrum, trying to blackwash America by mutating its literature into black literature with the hilariously named The Old Man and the Inflatable Winnie the Pooh Swimming Pool, Measured Expectations and Me Talk White One Day. But his lense is jaded by ego, and the deformed stories often place his character as a hero. Foy is an academic who became a celebrity, but whose mediocre shows keep getting canceled and pushed back earlier in the morning to less and less viewers. At some point he was hinted as being homeless, sleeping in his car despite his status. Is this Beatty’s niggle on the state of black leadership in America?
Maybe we will need to take these absurd propositions as it is intended: a satire. BLM will be up in arms if anybody kicks off the talks of restoring slavery, no matter who started it. But slavery is well and alive for a lot of African Americans now — America is not a land of equal opportunity. While the book was written during the Obama administration, racism is more rampant than ever. There is no such thing as “post-racial America”, that even saying this seems as contradictory as military intelligence. Restoring slavery and segregation seems to be a better solution than the status quo, and when you think about this, it is a terrifying proposition, especially in a passive aggressive politically correct world.
I took my time before I wrote this review because in all honesty, there is so much that I want to mention but won’t include for the sake of glutting the review. The Sellout is an immensely dense book as it is funny. There is social commentary here that’s sharp and witty as it is profound. Here is an example:
In neighbourhoods like Dickens, before concerned parents with secret service earpieces stuffed into their auditory canals marshaled your every move, you used to learn more on your way to and from school than you did in school.
Or this gem:
If things didn’t work out, I can always fall back on being black.
Another reason why I took my time with this review is its difficult racial theme, especially from someone who is not in the majority (I’m Indonesian born Australian but an expat in Malaysia) and have little experience of this kind of prejudice. But isn’t that why we read? Books like the Sellout is an important read so as not to walk on eggshells when we discuss race.
