The Sellout by Paul Beatty.

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

These bits are from the novel The Sellout by Paul Beatty. It recently became the first ever American winner of the Man Booker Prize. It is a fascinating book. The protagonist is a lively and interesting narrator and Beatty does cartwheels and somersaults of language that I do not think I have encountered anywhere but in Tom Robbins. The book plays with complicated questions about race in LA and, by extension, in America. It is a good book and resists being simple in either its questions or its answers.

There is a lot more to love about the book other than what I’ve typed out below, but - real talk time - one of the projects of the book seems to be performing a normalization of the N-word and while it is quite effective in the books, I’m not going to retype those passages with my white fingers and post them here, I just don’t want to get into the debate about whether or not it is appropriate for me to do that. You go do it on your blog.

(pg 37)

“... pretty much everything that made the twentieth century bearable was invented in a California garage.

(pg 39) On watching police lights in the city.

“... hurtling away from me like some distant spiral galaxy, the red and blue sirens spun silently but brilliantly, lighting up the mist of the morning marine layer like some inner-city aurora borealis.”

(pg 89)

At 4,084 square miles, much of Los Angeles County, like the ocean floor, remains in large part unexplored.”

(pg 138)

“The subtle message of the luxury car commercial is ‘We here at Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Lexus, Cadillac, or whatever the fuck, are an equal-opportunity opportunist’”.

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