Paul Beatty

The opening of Paul Beatty's "The Sellout" could be the most shocking beginning for a novel I have ever read, or am likely to read. I started laughing -- out-loud --from the get-go and didn't finish until 288 pages later. He gives me passages as funny as some of the best in John Barth's "The Sot-Weed Factor," Sterne's "Tristram Shandy," "Candide," "The Yawning Heights" by Alexander Zinoviev, even the greatest of them all, Cervantes' "Don Quixote."

It is so shocking partially because of the language, as bald and brash as the toughest rap, and flying across conventions of polite society like black fly season in Northern Ontario. It stings and it really hurts.

Beatty's anti-hero, variously called Bon-Bon, Me, and "The Sellout" is like a blackface Thomas Jefferson in modern-day Los Angeles: a farmer, a slave-owner, and an erudite provocateur. A true Californian proud of his sweet fruit. And hilariously proud of his genetically-modified watermellons. I told you it stings!

Angry that the County of Los Angeles has amalgamated his neighbourhood, Dickens, he sets on a path of renewal by reintroducing segregation into the American way of life. Really apartheid. And his plans succeed when poor black youth show growing school test scores and neighbourhood institutions show a revival.

I can tell you from first hand experience that Americans do not like to think of their great political experiment as a failure. Beatty shoves it in their faces.

Given the current turn of events in the US Government, Beatty's contention that integration doesn't work, that white Americans don't like Mexicans, Asians, Aboriginal Americans any more than black Americans rings true. Especially that so many white Americans count themselves at the bottom of the body politic.

Integration never sufficiently answered the biggest questions asked of a contemporary black American: who am I? How do I become myself?

Not just questions for black Americans, or Angelenos. Great questions for us all.

If a certain sadness pervades the novel, it could almost be read as a requiem for the Obama years where so much anticipation was built up only to be deflated by an intransigent Republican Congress.… (altro)