Rating:  ☆

Recommended by:  

Author:   Paul Beatty

Genre:  Fiction, Humor

289 pages, published March 3, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Born in the “agrarian ghetto” of Dickens—on the outskirts of Los Angeles, the narrator of The Sellout tells of his upbringing by a single father who exposed him to 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.  The narrator then 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 reinstates slavery and segregates the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.  

Quotes

“That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.”

 

“If Disneyland was indeed the Happiest Place on Earth, you’d either keep it a secret or the price of admission would be free and not equivalent to the yearly per capita income of a small sub-Saharan African nation like Detroit.”

 

“My father had a theory that poor people are the best drivers because they can’t afford to carry car insurance and have to drive like they live, defensively.”

 

“If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That’s Always Passed Out on the Couch.”

 

“The wretched of the Earth, he calls us. People too poor to afford cable and too stupid to know that they aren’t missing anything.”

 

“I’m so fucking tired of black women always being described by their skin tones! Honey-colored this! Dark-chocolate that! My paternal grandmother was mocha-tinged, café-au-lait, graham-fucking-cracker brown! How come they never describe the white characters in relation to foodstuffs and hot liquids? Why aren’t there any yogurt-colored, egg-shell-toned, string-cheese-skinned, low-fat-milk white protagonists in these racist, no-third-act-having books? That’s why black literature sucks!”

My Take

I picked up The Sellout from the library after seeing several rave reviews on the internet and a reference to it as a book that captures the current zeitgeist.  Hopefully, I will save you the pain of reading this horrible book.  I HATED it!  It seems that every other sentence contains the f-word, the characters to a person are irredeemable, the story meanders all over the place with little cohesion and the writing is dull.  Enough said.