December review: 'The Sellout', by Paul Beatty

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Book: The Sellout, Paul Beatty


Publication date: 2015


WCRG Meeting: 7 December 2016


Rating: 5.1

Thank you to all who either attended the meeting in person, or submitted their reviews in advance at our last meeting on December 7th, 2016 where we discussed, The Sellout by Paul Beatty.

This book evoked some strong views and a spirited debate. Most of us agreed that the satire on racism was addressing a subject that is still important in the world in spite of the major changes of the sixties in the United States. What we found difficult to accept was the concept of this novel. It won the Booker prize in 2016 so we would expect a structure that makes some sort of sense and characterisation that would arouse the readers’ interest. However, some felt that the characters were of no interest, others found some possibility of connection with the bus driver, Marpessa. The structure that seemed to be offered by the opening court scene, being also the last scene at the end of the novel, seemed not to be used to make any clear point and in fact the novel mocks the desire for closure. ‘Daddy’ the psychologist who gives the narrator occasion to mock psychobabble is against closure, but the book ends with a page entitled ‘Closure’ –‘I’d never understand and he’s right, I never will’.

The book has received great admiration in reviews and in the press commentary for its Swiftian satire and for its outrageous mockery of almost everything that the white middle classes hold dear. Even the residential area of Dickens had disappeared! The Wolfson group mostly found that it was so much directed to an American audience that they couldn’t understand the language or the cultural references and there was perhaps an undercurrent of annoyance with the Booker judges for opening up the prize to the rest of the English speaking world. Here we might have the reality of reverse discrimination where only one kind of whites was allowed before and we now suffer from the opening up to everyone. (We did also acknowledge that other Booker writers whom we had read before were not always easy to read).

Our corresponding members were equally divided and firm in their views with some very positive comments: ‘I love his extended riff on the whitewashing of literature’. Everyone had enjoyed that element but the idea that to understand segregation a black man needs to take a slave and re-segregate a hospital did not seem to most to be enough to fire a novel. One person wanted to switch it off. Another was ‘bored after twenty pages’ and ‘didn’t care enough to continue’. One consequence of the strength of views was that the Americans and one person who had lived in America in our group found the book very funny and really enjoyed the wit and saw value in the satire while the rest were perhaps experiencing being shut out or segregated. At least the novel and the discussion led us to think again and maybe consider whether in the UK we can feel the need to look at our comfortable assumptions.

When we voted, the book was awarded 5.1