The Sellout: A Novel
von Paul Beatty
Winner of the 2016 Man Booker PrizeWinner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in FictionNamed one of the best books of 2015 by The New York Times Book Review and the Wall Street JournalA biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality―the black Chinese restaurant.Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens―on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles―the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.Fuelled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident―the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins―he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.
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The Sellout: A Novel
von Paul Beatty
Winner of the 2016 Man Booker PrizeWinner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in FictionNamed one of the best books of 2015 by The New York Times Book Review and the Wall Street JournalA biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality―the black Chinese restaurant.Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens―on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles―the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.Fuelled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident―the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins―he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.
Aktuelle Rezensionen(2)
Rezension von kenBeatty's language and style can only be described as witty and charming, and paired with the subject matter, what happens is a collision of feeling. The tension lurks in the beginning, but when the plot occurs in full swing, the conflict is there, that heavy gut-feeling of <i>what the hell is happening how could this happen</i> all while being unable to divert your attention out of the narrative style's genius. The concerns about race will not vanish any time soon, so <i>The Sellout</i> will be important in the years to come.
Rezension von Carlos R. DiazPaul Beatty's "The Sellout" is an absurdity of the highest order. It is wrong and ridiculous, just like a monkey dressed in a tuxedo eating a steak at a fancy restaurant in a nice part of town. This biting satire is about a black man who is on trial at the U.S. Supreme Court because he owned a slave and tried to reinstate segregation at a public high school in modern-day Los Angeles. Like I said, "ABSURD." His slave is Hominy Jenkins, the last surviving Little Rascal. Hominy is a caricature of the unfettered racism that has plagued America for its first nearly two and a half centuries of existence. The narrator, an expert at husbandry who owns a farm, spews some of the most dead-on-balls accurate criticism about race relations in America. He skewers every single malicious stereotype of Blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians, Jewish community, Native Americans, celebrities and even the most vulnerable among us—the undereducated poor. He employs the N-word, the most toxic word in the English language, about as often as Mark Twain did in "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and Quentin Tarantino pens in the screenplays of his aesthetically violent films. Nevertheless, the novel is a satire and it belongs in the same shelf space as anything written by Jonathan Swift and the stand-up comedy of Richard Pryor, Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle. After all, satire is mockery with the intent to reform. Anyway, as always, that is all.