The Sellout. By Paul Beatty. Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 304 pages; $26. Oneworld; £12.99.
THE narrator of Paul Beatty’s fourth novel, “The Sellout”, is Bonbon, a black man who grows artisanal watermelons and marijuana in southern California. One of the finer strains of weed that he develops is called Anglophobia. The joke, however, is now on the author. Earlier this year “The Sellout” was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize, a British award that rewards humour in fiction. On October 25th, Mr Beatty became the first American to win the Man Booker prize for fiction.
Born in 1962, Mr Beatty won his initial literary award in 1990 while making his name as a performance poet, both at festivals and on television. After publishing two volumes of poetry, his debut novel, “The White Boy Shuffle”, was described by the New York Times as “a blast of satirical heat from the talented heart of black American life”. “Slumberland”, his third novel, was about a black American DJ in Berlin.
In 2006 Mr Beatty went on to bring out “Hokum”, an anthology of African-American humour. In the introduction he wrote that he had read the canonical black American writers. While he welcomed their rhetoric, he said he came to miss “the black bon mot, the snap, the bag, the whimsy upon which ‘fuck you’ and freedom sail. It was as if the black writers I’d read didn’t have any friends.” The book included contributions from Toni Cade Bambara and Henry Dumas, but also pieces by writers not known for being funny or even writers at all, including Mike Tyson and the Reverend Al Sharpton. Mr Beatty ended the introduction thus: “I hope ‘Hokum’ beats you down like an outclassed club fighter…each blow plastering that beaten boxer smile on your face, that ear-to-ear grin you flash to the crowd to convince them that if you’re laughing, then you ain’t hurt.”
The laughter and the hurt are both wholly there in “The Sellout”. Bonbon, the hero, lives in Dickens, a fictional town on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles that is so run down it has been excised from the map to save California from embarrassment. In the novel’s opening pages, Bonbon’s hands are cuffed and crossed behind his back as he awaits the start of his trial in the Supreme Court. Bonbon has been indicted for trying, with the help of an old man called Hominy, to reinstate slavery and segregate the local high school as a way of bringing about civic order.
What follows is a filling-in of Bonbon’s back story, starting with his upbringing by his single father, a fixated social scientist who carries out experiments on the boy and is eventually shot by the police. Bonbon pulls his father’s body up onto the horse he keeps on his urban farm and plods home. The novel’s first 100 pages are searing; no racial or cultural stereotype is safe from Mr Beatty’s satirical eye. Tiger Woods, Bill Cosby, Oreo cookies, cotton-picking and penis size are all taken out and given a shaking. As for Stevie Wonder, Bonbon says his Latin motto should be, “Cogito, ergo Boogieum. I think, therefore I jam.”
“The Sellout” took Mr Beatty more than five years to finish. “I hate writing,” he admitted as he accepted a cheque for £50,000 ($61,000) from the Duchess of Cornwall at a dinner in London where the Man Booker winner was announced. “This is a hard book,” he went on. “It was hard for me to write, I know it’s hard to read.” The five judges were not put off: “This is a book that nails the reader to the cross with cheerful abandon,” Amanda Foreman, the chair of the panel, told the dinner guests. “But while you are being nailed you are being tickled.”