Americans have an affinity for art that seems somehow prescient. After Donald Trump won the 2016 election, it was impossible to avoid references to Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and—amusingly and not altogether inaccurately—Mike Judge’s film Idiocracy.
More recently, Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower has been credited with predicting the Los Angeles wildfires.
It’s similarly tempting to ascribe a seer status to Paul Beatty, whose novel The Sellout was published in 2015. The book deals with gentrification, police violence, and racism. But Beatty didn’t need a crystal ball for his biting satire. He was depicting an America that was already there.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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The Sellout follows Me, an urban farmer living in Dickens, California, a community south of Los Angeles “established as a breeding ground for stupid, fat, ugly, white Republicans and the chihuahuas and East Asian refugees who love them.” The town, now mostly populated by people of color, gets its charter revoked, “part of a blatant conspiracy by the surrounding, increasingly affluent, two-car-garage communities to keep their property values up and blood pressures down.”
Such a situation doesn’t sit right with Me, still reeling from the police murder of his father, even as he ekes out a living selling watermelons and weed. So the character, who has inherited his father’s role as a “whisperer” to the Black people of Dickens, comes up with a desperate solution: bring back slavery and segregation. “Apartheid united black South Africa, why couldn’t it do the same for Dickens?” he muses.
The Sellout won the Booker Prize (in a first for a U.S. author) and a National Book Critics Circle Award. The question isn’t whether the novel has endured—it recently came in at No. 17 on the New York Times’ list of the 100 best books of the 21st century—but why. A key to the book’s success is Beatty’s commitment to the bit, which is so steady that we sometimes forget it’s not really a bit at all. If The Sellout flirts with absurdism, that’s because its inspiration—the United States circa 2015—is intrinsically absurd. (This can be difficult to remember, since the following year, the country went from what could charitably be called a train wreck to a train wreck on fire and falling off a cliff.)
Beatty grounds the book by invoking real people as characters and making the setting recognizable—sort of. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas and former vice president Kamala Harris (then California attorney general) both make unnamed (and profane) appearances. The effect is not to offer us an out. There are no suggestions of a dystopia we can avoid if only we change our ways. The novel also portrays the changing face of Los Angeles. “When the housing boom hit in the early part of the century,” Beatty writes, “many moderate-income neighborhoods in Los Angeles County underwent real estate makeovers. Once pleasant working-class enclaves became rife with fake tits and fake graduation and crime rates, hair and tree transplants, lipo- and cholosuctions.”
Dickens manages to escape this particular fate, but not for the better.
What sets The Sellout apart—and the reason its resonance has lingered—is Beatty’s humor. His is the language of a stand-up comedian, and the novel is funny in a way that a lot of comic literature is not. The laughs don’t come from arch bons mots or dry, above-it-all narration; Beatty senses that when dealing with racism, a sledgehammer is the way to go.
Although the novel has the structure of a shaggy-dog story, it has an ending—an earned one. It’s a book that sets us up for a punch line, but delivers something unexpected instead.
Things don’t always make sense in The Sellout—they’re not supposed to, just like things almost never make sense anymore. But, Beatty reminds us, this isn’t new. Hate grips the country just as it always has. A single Black president, even a two-term one, can’t counteract the nation’s origins in racism. We’re never going back to the good old days because they didn’t exist in the first place. So what about hope? Or, as a character asks Me, “When does shit ever end?”
“It doesn’t,” he says.•
