READ! The Sellout by Paul Beatty

I survived my first year of graduate school! It’s been about two weeks since I finished the semester, which I’ve been thoroughly enjoying after months of self-doubt, crying, and worrying about final papers. I went back to visit NYC (it’s been exactly a year since I graduated from NYU, and it was strange to walk around the campus again and see all the new restaurants and buildings that have popped up in the area), binge watched shows and movies, and started exercising after realizing all the stress eating resulted in my personal graduate school version of the Freshman 15. As challenging as the past semester has been for me, I was also pushed to explore literature beyond my own narrow interests, and especially enjoyed the novels for my contemporary U.S. political novels class. I wish I had been good about writing down all my thoughts for each book, but I thought I would share at least one of the books I read today, which might be one of the most bizarre books I’ve ever read. I also went to a book sale recently and bought every Asian American novel I could find there, so hopefully when I overcome my laziness, I’ll be writing my impressions of some of them in this blog over the summer. For now though, here are some of my thoughts on Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. 

Paul Beatty’s The Sellout 

Paul Beatty is an author and professor at Columbia University (despite the possible jabs at academics in his novel). He was the first US writer to win the Man Booker Prize in 2016 with The Sellout, a novel that is narrated by a man who only goes by his last name “Me.” This narrator boasts an almost magical green thumb, growing marijuana and watermelons on a strange bit of farmland in the suburbs of Dickens, which lies on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Dickens, as a predominantly non-white area, is removed from the map in an effort to raise house prices in the surrounding neighbourhoods. Me, while traumatized from his childhood under a strict psychologist father who performed experiments on him in what seems to be attempts to foster awareness about the African American experience, is drawn to helping his community. Finding himself with a self-proclaimed slave who follows him around, Me is caught up in the re-segregation of a bus and school. Ironically, all these crazy changes bring order to this town and puts Dickens back on the map—and while most of the plot points seem to make the book a picaresque novel, it also results in sobering reflection about what it is to better a black marginalized community. As the title forces the reader to consider, is Me really a sellout?

Before taking a class on contemporary political fiction, if I had been asked to name a “political novel,” my mind might have immediately turned to something like George Orwell’s Animal Farm—which is in fact referenced in Paul Beatty’s The Sellout in a satirical parody of the farm commandments: “All Piggers are created equal, but some Piggers ain’t shit” (54). While there are many points in the The Sellout that I might call satirical, and in the case of a book like Animal Farm I am forced to conflate the satirical with the political because of its satirical depiction of a political system, I was surprised to find that Paul Beatty is openly critical of the term satire in his interviews. This is ironic given the many reviews that praise the novel for its satiric genius, and the blurb of my own copy of The Sellout describes the book as a “biting satire” that shows “a comic genius at the top of his game.” When asked the question “Do you think of yourself as a writer of satire?” in an interview with the Paris Review, Beatty responded:

No, not at all. In my head it would limit what I could do, how I could write about something. I’m just writing. Some of it’s funny. I’m surprised that everybody keeps calling this a comic novel. I mean, I get it. But it’s an easy way not to talk about anything else. I would better understand it if they talked about it in a hyphenated way, to talk about it as a tragicomic novel, even. There’s comedy in the book, but there’s a bunch of other stuff in there, too. It’s easy just to hide behind the humor, and then you don’t have to talk about anything else. But I definitely don’t think of myself as a satirist. I mean, what is satire? Do you remember that New Yorker cover that everyone was saying was satire? Barack and Michelle fist-bumping? That’s not satire to me. It was just a commentary. Just poking fun at somebody doesn’t make something satire. It’s a word everyone throws around a lot. I’m not sure how I define it.

In many other interviews, Beatty critiques satire in relation to humor as a roadblock to considering the deeper implications of the thing being made fun of. The ending of The Sellout echoes this preoccupation with the function of humor, where the narrator attends a stand-up comedy night during which a white couple is chased out by the comedian. When the comedian shouts, “This is our thing!” the reader might find this moment comical, perhaps even empowering. Yet Me views the scene with regret, wishing he had “stood up to the man and asked him a question: ‘So what exactly is our thing?’” (288). Beatty seems to warn against humor as something that might blind people from the critique behind the comedic source and intended audience—something the white couple might be accused of being blind to by joining the crowd uninvited and laughing loudly, engrossed by the humor without grasping the implications behind the jokes about black identity. Yet while the comedian blatantly points out their privilege, Beatty invites the reader to do even more than that—not just to point, or to point and wink and laugh, but practice a form of critique that goes beyond identification and laughter.

Perhaps one way of looking at the kind of humor Beatty is using in The Sellout could be humor that doesn’t just come from funniness, but from discomfort. Discomfort is where the book begins, as the narrator sits “in a thickly padded chair that, much like this country, isn’t quite as comfortable as it looks” (3). The outlandish events of the book could be considered funny for how bizarre they are, but any laughter that is induced has to be a nervous one when one is forced to laugh at the sobering issues of slavery or segregation. The novel seems to critique the kind of parody that does the opposite of creating discomfort; the character of Foy Cheshire, who is part of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, is obsessed with uplifting the black community in his own way through re-education. Whether intentional or not, Foy Cheshire’s revised literary classics sound like satirical rewrites, ranging from Uncle Tom’s Condo to The Great Blacksby (166). However, Cheshire’s books are clearly not taken seriously, and they carry the dangerous intent of trying to eliminate any discomfort experienced from reading the original books. Cheshire explains how he first started rewriting these books: “I tried to read this book, Huckleberry Finn, to my grandchildren, but I couldn’t get past page six because the book is fraught with the ‘n-word.’… That’s why I took the liberty to rewrite Mark Twain’s masterpiece. Where the repugnant ‘n-word’ occurs, I replaced it with ‘warrior’ and the word ‘slave’ with ‘dark-skinned volunteer’” (95). Yet these rewrites erase the understanding of the historic context the books were written in, and take away the opportunity to engage with the books through a critical lens. While revision and exaggeration might be closely linked with satire, these acts can be problematic if they simply seek to please or even simply bring laughter over disconcerting critique. Beatty reminds us, “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” (115). While this passage isn’t explicitly linked to Cheshire’s rewrites, the readers can sense disapproval of Cheshire’s tactic to rewrite and retell history through his books. Ultimately and ironically, it is discomfort and pain that bring positive change to the narrator’s community. Whether we look at Hominy’s slavery, the segregated bus seats, or the fake white-only school that acts as an “on-call Caucasian panopticon,” (209) there is something about discomforting self-awareness that whips people to action. I’m not suggesting that Beatty believes these physical measures are necessary to bring real-life change, but I think there is something to be said about confronting topics that make us squeamish and refusing to reduce them to something merely comical or less anxiety inducing.

I wonder if we can consider this idea of productive discomfort in contrast to the emphasis on empathy in many supposedly political novels and in the liberal discourse of universal understanding and cooperation. Empathy can be an effective form of autocritique and allows you to feel someone else’s discomfort, but it is also often reduced to something optimistic, soothing, even redemptive. If we can see how empathy fails to bring about action and is an individual and perhaps even self-centered experience, perhaps the act of evoking discomfort in other people and refusing to shy away from one’s own discomfort is an alternative way to critically engage with the world. Like Beatty, I’m not quite sure how to define satire. I think The Sellout is still satirical, but does more than depict society’s flaws through a funny and clever approach—it does all that, but it also isn’t afraid to cause discomfort along the way.