Review of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout

Few novelists write characters as improbably multitudinous as Paul Beatty. In The White Boy Shuffe, Gunnar Kaufman is a poet, basketball player, and messiah. In Tuff, Tuffy Foshay is a drug-slinger, competitive eater, sumo-wrestling enthusiast, and candidate for city council. In Slumberland, Ferguson ‘‘DJ Darky’’ Sowell is a sax player, jukebox sommelier, porn film composer, and expat. Beatty’s men are everything men—Renaissance dudes in protest of a world that forces them to be defined by their race.

In Beatty’s fourth novel, The Sellout, the titular protagonist is a farmer, ostrich breeder, weed dealer, and ultimately a self-made social scientist. He’s known only as ‘‘The Sellout’’ because he is derided as such by his late father’s friends, who congregate in a Dum Dum Donut in Dickens, California, a fictional town in Los Angeles County modeled after Compton. Dickens is about to be wiped off the map by real estate moguls to raise the property values of the surrounding areas. After the signs welcoming people in and out of Dickens are removed, The Sellout decides to help put the town back on the map. Like his father, who subjected his son to race experiments that included painting a Barbie black so he wouldn’t prefer white women, The Sellout begins conducting race experiments of his own. These include taking a slave and resegregating schools and buses. His attempt to set Dickens back to pre-Civil-Rights-Act America lands him in the Supreme Court at the start of the book.

If this sounds detestable, it is, but underscored by his sharp humor, Beatty manages, as he’s done in all his novels, to make the reader empathize with his everything man. In this outrageously funny passage, The Sellout has, horrifically, taken his former minstrel boy neighbor as a slave, but it’s the neighbor who begs to be enslaved, yearning for a past when he was relevant.

‘‘You want to make me happy?’’
‘‘Yes, you know that.’’
‘‘Then beat me. Beat me to within an inch of my worthless black life. Beat me, but don’t kill me, massa . . .’’
‘‘Isn’t there another way?’’
‘‘Bring back Dickens.’’
‘‘You know that’s impossible. When cities disappear, they don’t come back.’’
‘‘Then you know what to do.’’
They say it took three sheriff’s deputies to pull me off his black ass, because I whipped the shit out of that nigger.

Despite their intelligence and soft hearts, Beatty’s protagonists continually ask: Who am I (if not black)? How may I become myself (if not black)? What should I do with my life (based on the limitations forced upon me by my blackness)? Who is my audience (if not black)?

The Sellout is Beatty’s clearest articulation to date of the dilemma facing black American men. Beatty’s men use their blackness as a bollard to push against for community and identity. But race also prevents them from clearly defining themselves. If The Sellout weren’t black, he’d be a horticulturalist, civic activist, worldclass weed dealer, and Angeleno. Instead, even after all his social experiments, no matter what The Sellout does, he continues to be an invisible man to himself.

What happens when Dickens is segregated isn’t just absurd: it’s frighteningly real. When The Sellout advocates for the segregation of Chaff Middle School, he puts up a sign in front of an empty lot for The Wheatley Academy Charter Magnet School for the Arts, Science, Humanities, Business, Fashion, and Everything Else (Coming Soon!). Just the idea of an all-white school drives housing prices and employment up. The mostly black and Latino students at Chaff Middle School suddenly perform better.

The Sellout isn’t the first time one of Beatty’s everything men has tried to reassemble a bygone symbol of oppression. In Slumberland, the avant-garde jazz musician the narrator is searching for is found trying to piece the Berlin Wall back together brick by brick. But that’s just an in-scene joke. In The Sellout, the idea of reclaiming one’s oppression is more fully explored.

Of Beatty’s novels, The Sellout is the funniest. His style has always been a blend of a pedagogue’s soapboxing, a stand-up comic’s chops, and a poet’s command of the auditory pleasures of wordplay. The professor, the comic, and the poet don’t always play well on the same stage (or in the same sentence). But in The Sellout, nary a page or two goes by without a laugh-out-loud bit like:

They come to L.A. aspiring to be white. Even the ones who are biologically white aren’t white white. Laguna Beach white. Bel Air white. Omakaze white. Spicolli white. Bret Easton Ellis white. Three first names white. Valet parking white. Brag about your Native American, Argentinian, Portuguese ancestry white. Pho white. Paparazzi white. I once got fired from a telemarketing job, now look at me, I’m famous white. Calabazas white. I love L.A. It’s the only place where you can go skiing, to the beach and to the desert all in one day white.

The second half of The Sellout threatens to get lost in the love affair between the narrator and Marpessa. While his affections for his high-school sweetheart serve to humanize a misanthrope, Beatty’s up-the-ante absurdities are so intoxicating he could have let the world he created get even weirder. About two-thirds of the way through the book, the plot loses momentum as it winds its way back to Washington DC. The third act doesn’t quite deliver the pyrotechnic climax that the outrageous premise promises. It’s never clear why it’s so important to The Sellout to keep Dickens incorporated, as he seems to disdain more of its residents than he likes.

The Sellout feels like a breakthrough work—a new starting point for the uninitiated. Brilliant and underappreciated, Beatty the Novelist seems to have won the inner tug-of-war between Beatty the Academic, Beatty the Poet, and Beatty the Comedian. He himself is one of his everything men. If he were to ask ‘‘Who is my audience?’’ the reply would be: anyone who likes to laugh and think.