The narrator’s father served as the community’s ‘Nigger Whisperer,’ talking black people down from self-destructive behaviour. When he was growing up, his father did dubious social science experiments on him, having him pick cotton while singing Paul Robeson spirituals or ogle a white woman in the South to see what would happen. He rides a horse and knows enough about animal husbandry to castrate a calf, a skill he demonstrates at a local school’s career day. The narrator studied agriculture at university and started growing watermelons and marijuana. For one thing, Dickens is a ghetto of south Los Angeles that has seemingly regressed a couple of centuries to become an agrarian society. His upbringing is downright peculiar, though. He is who he is: a sort of African-American Everyman. The United States, and that’s all we ever learn of the protagonist’s name: a surname that seems more like a pronoun. Then again, Beatty takes very little entirely seriously in this zany, irreverent take on racial politics in America today. What with his slimy showman of a lawyer and the stash of marijuana he uses to get high before his hearing, it’s clear this character isn’t taking the charges against him very seriously. The narrator has been summoned here to defend himself against a grievous but entirely true accusation: that he has reinstituted slavery and segregation in his hometown of Dickens, California.

The novel opens with a prologue set at the U.S. Not only did he get away with it, he won a National Book Critics Circle Award for it – beating out contenders such as Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies and Anthony Marra’s The Tsar of Love and Techno. The Sellout, Paul Beatty’s fourth novel, is such an outrageous racial satire that I kept asking myself how he got away with it.

The sellout review