In Dickens, a place where ‘it’s the child who raises the parents’, traffic signs flag up ‘FALLING HOME PRICES’ and warn of ‘BLACK ON BLACK CRIME AHEAD’. Billed as a ‘caustic satire’, The Sellout really does have a zinger on every page. What follows is a biting attack on racism in America, relayed in a series of antic flashbacks that stylistically recall both Vonnegut and Heller, as well as the laconic register of Ellison and the demotic glide of Iceberg Slim.įrom its great first line (‘This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything’), Me’s wiseass monologue systematically deconstructs epidemic bigotry in the country he once loved. A resident of the anomalously named fictional Los Angeles suburb of Dickens (imagine if Slough were called Proust), Me is hauled before the Supreme Court of the United States for attempting to segregate a local school and bring back slavery. ‘L ike that black president, you’d think … you’d get used to square watermelons, but somehow you never do,’ says Me, the disingenuous black narrator of Paul Beatty’s latest, Booker-shortlisted novel during one of his many raucous comic riffs.
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