Bonbon’s official segregation of the school system, making all the white students attend the local private school and leaving the failing public school exclusively for people of colour, causes moral outrage in the neighbourhood. Throughout the novel, Beatty also masterfully captures the farcical nature of attempting to ignore the history of slavery and the legacy of segregation when they continue to exist in different guises. Through Marpessa’s furious response to Laura Jane’s assertions, Beatty argues that race has everything to do with African-Americans disproportionately experiencing poverty.

Marpessa challenges Laura Jane’s belief that being unable to achieve the American dream is solely about class, not race. Through conversations between a white woman named Laura Jane and Marpessa, Bonbon’s black girlfriend, Beatty also addresses some of the stereotypes people of colour face every day.

From heavy topics like police brutality, the portrayal of people of colour in entertainment, gentrification, and ongoing segregation in neighbourhoods across the United States, Beatty segues into the more mundane, but equally important, appearances of racism: on a bus, people avoid sitting next to a black man as much as possible. Beatty is willing to take risks and to shock, and in the process, he confronts the stereotypes that African-Americans in the United States often face. The novel’s central theme is the absurdity of the notion of a post-racial United States of America, as Beatty successfully demonstrates that people of colour experience racism in every aspect of their lives on a daily basis.

Since Bonbon’s last name is ‘Me,’ the novel begins with Bonbon facing the Supreme Court in the case of ‘Me v United States of America.’ This sets the tone of the novel, as Beatty systematically sets himself against every aspect of American culture and deconstructs it. When his father is murdered meaninglessly in an instance of police brutality, Bonbon attempts to revitalize his town and its people by reintroducing slavery and segregation. The novel’s protagonist is a black man nicknamed Bonbon, raised in Dickens, Los Angeles, by his sociologist father who studies race by running experiments on him. Bold and daring, The Sellout is witty and bitingly ironic, reminiscent of the styles of Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller. Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, which has deservedly won the Man Booker Prize this year, is filled with pure satiric genius. “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 the yearly equivalent of the GDP of a small sub-Saharan African country like Detroit.”

Book review the sellout