Paul BeattyRezensionen

I've finished The Sellout by Paul Beatty, Man Booker winner this year, which is like Dave Chappelle (SNL) on steroids. The story of a "nigger-whisperer" and farmer from a small black enclave in LA called Dickens. As a "crisis negotiator, "I found myself in my pajamas, at least once a week, standing barefoot in an apartment complex courtyard, bullhorn in hand, staring up at some distraught, partially hotcombed-headed mother dangling her baby over a second-floor balcony ledge. When my father did the whispering...every payday he'd be inundated by teeming hordes of the bipolar poor, who having spent it all in one place, and grown tired and unsated from the night's notoriously shitty prime-time television lineup, would unwedge themselves from between the couch-bound obese family members and the boxes of unsold Avon beauty products, turn off the kitchen radio pumping song after song extolling the virtues of Friday nights living it up at the club, popping bottles, niggers and cherries in that order, then having canceled the next day's appointment with their mental health care professional, the chatterbox cosmetologist, who after years doing heads, still knows only one hairstyle--fried, dyed and laid to the wide--they'd choose that Friday, 'day of Venus,' goddess of love, beauty and unpaid bills, to commit suicide, murder, or both. But under my watch people tended to snap on Wednesday. Hump day."

This book took me a long time to get into, to get used to his language and craziness and a feeling of not wanting to be there at all, but now I look up at my favorite quotes and marvel at Beatty's creativity and smack-on descriptions and realize he is a winner. At times, I was thinking of Tom Robbins or J. P. Donleavy - you can see I don't keep up with today's comic writers much - because his plots and situations seemed so outlandish and out-of-my-world and they may be, but his is a formidable talent for writing. I am with him. The book club was not, only one other liked it. More favorite quotes:

"Most times there's so much Nina Simone 'Mississippi Goddam' despondency in the night air it becomes hard to focus. The deep purple contusions about the face and arms...And invariably, softly in the background, billowing the curtains through the parted sliding glass doors, there's always Nina Simone. These are the women my father warned me about. The drug-and-asshole-addled women who sit in the dark, hard up and lovesick, chain-smoking cigarettes, phones pressed to their ear, speed-dialing K-Earth 101 FM, the oldies station, so they can request Nina Simone or the Shirelles' 'This is Dedicated to the One I Love' aka 'This is Dedicated to Niggers That Beat Me Senseless and Leave.' Stay away from bitches who love Nina Simone and have faggots for best friends,' he'd say, 'They hate men.' "

"That's the problem with history, we like to think it's a book--that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn't the paper it's printed on. It's memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you." p.115

"You never see people in commercials that look 'Jewish,' just as you never see black people that come off as 'urban' and hence 'scary,' or handsome Asian men, or dark-skinned Latinos.. you see more ads featuring unicorns and leprechauns than you do gay men and women...But if you really think about it, the only thing you absolutely never see in car commercials isn't Jewish people, homosexuals or urban Negroes, it's traffic." p. 139

Sister Cities. "Some unions, like that of Tel Aviv and Berlin, Paris and Algiers, Honolulu and Hiroshima, are designed to signal an end to hostilities and the beginning of peace and prosperity. Others are shotgun marriages because one city (e.g.,Atlanta) impregnated another (e.g., Lagos) on a first date...Some cities marry up for money and prestige; others marry down to piss off their mother countries, Guess who's coming for dinner? Kabul! Every now and then, two cities meet and fall in love out of mutual respect and a love for hiking, thunderstorms and classic rock 'n' roll. Think Amsterdam and Istanbul. Buenos Aires and Seoul." p.145

"For the most part in L.A. County you can gauge the threat level of a community by the color of its street signs. In Los Angeles proper the signs are a hollowed-out metallic midnight blue. If a bird's nest constructed of pine needles was tucked inside the sign, it meant evergreen trees and a nearby golf course. Mostly white public-school kids whose parents lived above their means in upper-middle-class neighborhoods like Cheviot Hills, Silver Lake and the Palisades. Bullet holes and a stolen car wrapped around the post signified kids about my hair texture, allowance level, and clothing syle in neighborhoods like Watts, Boyle Heights, and Highland Park. Sky blue signified kick back cool bedroom communities like Santa Monica, Rancho Palos Verdes, and Manhattan Beach. Chill dudes commuting to school by any means necessary from skateboard to hang glider, the good-bye lipstick prints from their trophy-wife mothers still on their cheeks. Carson, Hawthorne, Culver City, South Gate and Torrance are all designated by a working-class cactus green; there the little homies are independent, familiar and multilingual. Fluent in Hispanic, black, and Samoan gang signs. In Hermosa Beach, La Mirada and Duarte the street signs are the bland brown of cheap blended malt whiskey. The boys and girls mope their way to school, depressed and drowsy, past the hacienda-style tract housing. The sparkling white signs denote Beverly Hills, of course. Exceedingly wide hilly streets lined with rich kids unthreatened by my appearance. Assuming that if I was there I belonged. Asking me about the tension of my tennis racquets. Schooling me on the blues, the history of hip-hop, Rastafarianism, the Coptic Church, jazz, gospel, and the myriad of ways in which a sweet potato can be prepared." p. 191

"Daddy never believed in closure. He said it was a false psychological concept. Something invented by therapists to assuage white Western guilt. In all his years of study and practice, he'd never heard a patient of color talk of needing 'closure.' They needed revenge. They needed distance. Forgiveness and a good lawyer, maybe, but never closure. He said people mistake suicide, murder, lap band surgery, interracial marriage, and overtipping for closure, when in reality what they've achieved is erasure." p. 261

I think this is probably quite a good book. I think satire is also quite hit-and-miss. It's especially tough if one is from a different culture entirely than the satirist! So, while I think I appreciate Beatty's highly-acclaimed book, I didn't understand a lot of it. Perhaps one day I shall. But seems pretty cool overall.

It's a smart book, but novel-length satire just isn't my bag. You know, it's enough already.

This is a tragicomic tour-de-force.

The opening of Paul Beatty's "The Sellout" could be the most shocking beginning for a novel I have ever read, or am likely to read. I started laughing -- out-loud --from the get-go and didn't finish until 288 pages later. He gives me passages as funny as some of the best in John Barth's "The Sot-Weed Factor," Sterne's "Tristram Shandy," "Candide," "The Yawning Heights" by Alexander Zinoviev, even the greatest of them all, Cervantes' "Don Quixote."

It is so shocking partially because of the language, as bald and brash as the toughest rap, and flying across conventions of polite society like black fly season in Northern Ontario. It stings and it really hurts.

Beatty's anti-hero, variously called Bon-Bon, Me, and "The Sellout" is like a blackface Thomas Jefferson in modern-day Los Angeles: a farmer, a slave-owner, and an erudite provocateur. A true Californian proud of his sweet fruit. And hilariously proud of his genetically-modified watermellons. I told you it stings!

Angry that the County of Los Angeles has amalgamated his neighbourhood, Dickens, he sets on a path of renewal by reintroducing segregation into the American way of life. Really apartheid. And his plans succeed when poor black youth show growing school test scores and neighbourhood institutions show a revival.

I can tell you from first hand experience that Americans do not like to think of their great political experiment as a failure. Beatty shoves it in their faces.

Given the current turn of events in the US Government, Beatty's contention that integration doesn't work, that white Americans don't like Mexicans, Asians, Aboriginal Americans any more than black Americans rings true. Especially that so many white Americans count themselves at the bottom of the body politic.

Integration never sufficiently answered the biggest questions asked of a contemporary black American: who am I? How do I become myself?

Not just questions for black Americans, or Angelenos. Great questions for us all.

If a certain sadness pervades the novel, it could almost be read as a requiem for the Obama years where so much anticipation was built up only to be deflated by an intransigent Republican Congress.

OK, but didn't finish in three week loan period and was unable to get again.

A wild ride, demolishing racist tropes and stereotypes and attitudes, often by inflating them until they explode. Hilarious at times. It starts off a little angular & uninviting. But it quickly presents a layer of humanity for the vulnerable, kinda passive, somewhat defeated, protagonist. Ultimately it is rich, funny and a little uncomfortable.

I sampled this on Kindle and it's clearly a deftly written satire. As a white chick from the suburbs I feel like reading the whole thing and waxing poetic about its brilliance would be another form of condescension or appropriation. Disrespectful, somehow. At the very least, it would be like laughing at jokes I don't truly understand and partly suspect - or know full well - are making fun of me. I feel pretty well-aware of how fucked up things are in this country; my time is better spent trying to understand how I can help change them, not merely commiserating and pretending I "get it."

Yeah, nah, sorry. This book just didn't do it for me. I guess that's maybe since I'm not black or American and I have recently become really fed up with American politics. So the satire didn't really resonate with me because it seemed that it was saying stuff that was either obvious, or that just passed me by. Maybe if I was up to my neck in all that stuff it would have been more engaging.

There are also a number of technical flaws. Although the one liners are good, structurally the plot just feels like it's there to set up those gags. None of the characters seem to grow or develop, there is no dramatic tension and it's not clear what the characters want, or how they're unsatisfied with what they have. And when they do want something, they seem to get hold of it by chance as much as by effort. They're also not likeable. The protagonist and narrator lacks warmth and the characters around him aren't so much larger-than-life as overdrawn.

I found the writing pretty ugly. I shall give three examples, with commentary, to illustrate my point:

"On the wall behind him were two framed, poster-size photos, one of a variety box of insanely puffy and succulent-looking donuts that looked nothing like the shrivelled-up lumps, so-called fresh pastries hardening before my eyes in the display case behind me."

Ignore the fact that shop-bought donuts are not shrivelled up lumps, and the ugliness of "so-called" there, and the fact that fresh pastries do, in fact, harden. The real question is how can something happen before your eyes in a display case behind you. I really wondered if this was part of the satire, but I can't see how it's deliberate. I think it's just a laughably bad description. Presumably it was impatiently typed out on the way to the next joke.

"For black people 'too many Mexicans' is the excuse we, the historically most documented workers in history, give ourselves for attending racist rallies protesting the undocumented workers..."

I mean, sure, maybe this doubling up of "history" is deliberate, but a) it's a very bad sign that a reader could suspect that it's not, because the writing is so consistently sloppy and b) if it's deliberate, what is it there for? There doesn't seem to be an interpretation where it's deliberate other than just because repetition is sometimes funny.

"She should've known that while 250 poor colored kids getting inferior education will never be front-page news, the denial of even one white student access to a decent education would create a media shit storm"

OK, I find "shit storm" as two words ugly - especially in the same sentence as "should've" - but that's probably just a matter of personal preference. The real problem here is the sentiment. Firstly, it's almost certainly wrong - new data about poor school performance for minorities could certainly make the front page - but secondly, even as hyperbole it doesn't especially work because the sentiment is so obvious. It's really only one step away from "why don't the media ever report good news?" In this regard it's not reflective of the book as a whole in that some ideas put forward are quite sophisticated, but it is reflective of its inconsistency. There is a sense that the writer didn't leave any jokes out, no matter whether he even agreed with the sentiment or if it changes the tone or derails the narrative thread of a scene.

There's no doubt that this book has quality. It wouldn't have won the Booker Prize if it didn't, but I'm afraid it was mostly lost on me.

I admire much of the writing, but zero story and not funny enough/biting satire to hold up on its own.

This is one messed-up, sly, opulent, lowbrow, over-intellectualized, honest, tricky ride.

So, this book is tough to review so compromising with a three star rating.

The premise is a black man (last name Me, nickname Bonbon) is being tried by the Supreme Court for owning a slave and re-segregating his hometown of Dickens. The book takes us through BonBon's unconventional childhood as the son of a sociologist, his realization that his hometown is being subsumed by surrounding vicinities, and his attempt to ensure that doesn't happen by re-segregating the town. His sidekick in this endeavor is Hominy, a child star on The Little Rascals, who pretty much acted out every racial stereotype as a child, and has shackled himself to Bonbon as his "slave".

Yeah.

So, I give Mr. Beatty an "A" for originality and fearlessness, and I liked his protagonist. But overall, I didn't feel like I really "got" the book with a few exceptional spots. Two chapters to be exact.

Clearly it is satire, and Beatty touches on many, many racial issues throughout, but for me, the humor was lacking. Maybe because Beatty uses SO MANY cultural references, and while I think I'm pretty up on popular culture, some of them escaped me. Even when they didn't, I didn't necessarily find them terribly funny.

My feeling was the book was trying too hard. The brilliance of it escaped me because I was so busy looking to understand the trees, that I really never saw the forest. Even though the story is very readable, I had a lot of trouble wrapping my mind around the implications of the various digs, jabs, exaggerations, ironic asides, etc.

I am fully willing to admit that maybe I just wasn't smart enough for this book. Or maybe I'm not the target audience. Regardless, definitely not my cup of tea. Suggest to Kindle readers that you download a sample to try before you buy. The beginning of the book gives you a very good idea of the entirety of the book, though my favorite chapter was by far Chapter 24 where the commentary is less woven into a story and more straightforward. And in my mind, a lot more humorous.

I wonder if I just don't like satirical novels in general. I looked up a list of popular satirical novels, and I gave unusually low ratings or poor reviews each to [b:Infinite Jest|6759|Infinite Jest|David Foster Wallace|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1446876799s/6759.jpg|3271542], [b:A Confederacy of Dunces|310612|A Confederacy of Dunces|John Kennedy Toole|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1436747103s/310612.jpg|968084], and the much beloved [b:Pride and Prejudice|1885|Pride and Prejudice|Jane Austen|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1320399351s/1885.jpg|3060926]. That saddens me because I think of satire as something that bright people appreciate. I wanted to like this book too, but I just didn't.

A second read, I'd raise the rating to 6 stars were it possible. Driven by a racial theme, Beatty shows his skill at parody. I doubt there's another contemporary story about a guy who's home-schooled by an unorthodox psychologist father in a South Los Angeles 'agricultural district' where farming is popular. Having grown up in So CA I busted out laughing the FIRST time I read it! Characters include Hominy, a former black "Our Gang" understudy who prefers being a slave, a former girlfriend turned bus driver, school teachers and cops; the countless plot elements make for a laugh out loud romp! Adding the Dum Dum Donuts Intellectual Club and a public transit bus trip that ends up on a beach in addition to countless other scenes, its the kind of book that has you shaking your head in wonder. Whether you're a fan of parody or not, this is HIGHLY recommended regardless of your preferred genre.

I was first introduced to Beatty when noticing "The Sellout" on the library staff picks shelf. Blown away by his wit, character development and poignant tongue-in-cheek, over the top humor, I was sold. Beatty is one of a kind in many respects and he demonstrates more of his uniqueness with Slumberland. To wit, "Race, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the mother ship Free Enterprise. It's five-hundred-year mission: to explore strange, new, previously segregated worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no niggers had gone before" A black author who rarely pulls punches, this story demonstrates his remarkable knowledge of music, the main character being a 'jukebox sommelier' in search of Charles Stone, aka The Schwa. As with The Sellout, there are many passages that are laugh out loud. A PhD level vocabulary and sappier wit, Beatty is a true gem.

The book went over my head, and I am not ashamed to say it. I agree that Paul Beatty writes well, but it isn't easy to follow the plot without fully understanding the cultural context.

Does a plot exist? The book started with the name of the hero's hometown, Dickens, disappearing off the map and ends with its reappearance.

But why is he a sellout? I didn't understand this.

I needed to read this hilariously scathing satire slowly. Few books, especially books this funny, have made me as uncomfortable. I mean that as a the highest compliment. This book, written by an American, about race relations in America, won the Man Booker prize making him the first American to do so.

The brilliantly written and savagely witty book makes you think - soul search even. I recommend it highly to anyone interested in great literature, the human condition, or race relations.

I picked this book up because it was on the NY Times best of 2015. I am glad I did because I found this book absolutely hysterical in its ironic and biting humor.

If I didn't know who the author was and just picked this book up blind, I would have declared this the most racist piece of work that I have ever read, even beyond Huck Finn! A black man who raises watermelon (and other fruits), who's best friend is the other black child on the Little Rascals and happens to love racism, who restarts his town re-segregates schools, and puts up give up seats to white customers signs on his buses. This is a twisted story, but knowing the entire time it was written not only for the shock, but for the irony, it was a funny, funny book. I actually found myself laughing out loud at some of the stuff.

It becomes disjointed in places and doesn't have the easiest flow, but it is worth the read, but only if you can handle a lot of "n-words" thrown about, deep racism, and can take a joke. If not, it isn't for you. It was for me.

Contemporary satire on race relations in America set in the fictional neighborhood of Dickens, near Los Angeles, on a farm. As the story opens, the black protagonist is at the Supreme Court, where a case has been brought against him for owning a slave and instituting segregation in Dickens. It flashes back to the protagonist’s upbringing and provides the backstory of how he arrived at the Supreme Court. The plot is necessarily absurd and outlandish.

To fully appreciate this work, you need to share the author’s sense of humor and it helps to be up to speed on American pop-culture references – I am quite sure I did not catch them all. It is a bit too crude and over-the-top for my taste, but I appreciate the creativity and social commentary. I give the author credit for tackling a difficult subject. I particularly enjoyed the tongue-in-cheek parodies of literary classics, which runs more to my personal taste in humor. It is a mixed bag for me, not a favorite but I found it worthwhile.

Wicked satire. And probably one of the funniest books I've ever read.

This book took me places. It isn't a comfortable read but its a must read. Genius it is!

Funny and unusual.

I didn't understand the book. I'm sure the author put a lot of thought into it, but probably because as a 1.5 generation immigrant I don't have a lot of cultural capital for U.S. culture, so a lot of his thoughtful hyperbole and I assume hilarious references are lost on me. I don't understand any of the characters in the book. I don't understand why the dad abused the son. I don't understand why the actor wanted to be a slave. I don't understand why it mattered whether the hometown was off or on the map. I don't understand why the main characters believed segregation would bring higher quality of life for minority, and why in the novel, it actually did bring about higher quality of life. I really should have stopped reading after chapter 1 lol I can now tell people I read this famous book. But I don't understand where any of the characters are coming from, I don't understand the storyline, and I don't understand 90% of the jokes and innuendo. I guess this book was written for really smart, culture-savvy readers.

Like nothing else I have ever read. Wowzers.


Yeah I say 'wowzers' more often than I ought. So be it.

It's a piece of satire, but not overly sarcastic. But not naive. Reading it, I felt the way I feel when reading Chuck Palahniuk without the trope of dark undertone -- because racism has its own dark undertones that don't need any help being fucked up. It was cathartic and educating to hear this voice talk about race and America in a serious study, delivered in an absurd manner that managed to be funny and page-turning. From what I understand, the audiobook is even better.

A remarkable book. At first it seemed to be trying too hard to be funny, and it is indeed very funny in places. But it found its place in a serious, if satiric, examination of race in America. I'm not sure that this will resolve anything, but it should be read alongside serious non-fiction books presuming to move the conversation on race in America forward.½