The Sellout by Paul Beatty

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

This year’s Man Booker Prize winner, The Sellout by Paul Beatty, is an irreverent, hilarious novel. The story puts its focus upon the difficulties of race relations in the modern world and explores issues to do with ethnic identity politics. The narrator, known only by his surname, Me, recounts his efforts to bring together the community of Dickens by the fairly unconventional method of reinstating segregation. As the story unfolds, the reader is guided through Me’s life, from stories about the farcical parenting techniques of his sociologist father, to the narrator’s unwilling acquisition of a dedicated, but work-averse, slave, the former child-actor Hominy Jenkins. Beatty’s writing is full of humour and he has a great knack for producing laughter-inducing similes. Despite the serious subject matter, the book is riotously funny, and may remind readers of classic American comedy novels like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions.

 

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