Rude and riotous
Zadie Smith reckons the best time to edit a novel is three months after it’s been published, and half an hour before you go on stage to read from it for the first time. So maybe it’s not a bad idea to review Paul Beatty’s 2016 Man Booker prize- winner a while after the trumpets have stopped sounding and the heads ceased shaking.
You can understand the trumpets: Beatty’s satire of institutionalised US racism is an astonishing and astonishingly successful fusion of mordant humour and social perception, in page after page of prose that’s both lyrical and lacerating.
You can also understand — partly — the shaking heads; they include 18 UK-publishers who turned down the book. Does The Sellout’s win confirm prognostications that now the Booker is open to writers in English from all nationalities, those outside the US may as well take up crochet? And then there’s the relentlessly unsettling, uncomfortable content.
For those who haven’t read it, welcome to a novel whose African-American protagonist wants to assert his culture by reintroducing segregation and slavery. Caught your breath? Bonbon Me is an urban farmer and dedicated marijuana smoker from outer — in all senses — Los Angeles. His father was shot dead by police at a traffic stop. How close and contemporary can you get?
Our anti- hero sets out to resegregate a local high school. He also aims to get black people financially into the . . . the black and to grow potatoes in Southern California plus he aims to bury his Daddy in the back yard, as soon as he’s done the requisite paperwork. So it’s rude and riotous. Every sacred cow is disembowelled. The Nword hammers in your ears. So do several other impolite expressions. Black History Month, the NAACP (“civil rights zombies”) and the US Constitution are mocked with varying degrees of irreverence.
The result is curiously cathartic. And like most good satire, it’s an emphatically moral ( and sensible) tale. How soon does idealism decline into idiocy and tolerance flip to compulsion? Some of the most telling points come in throwaway lines: “How come you never see any black damsels?”
Beatty is obsessively inventive, his writing is a tsunami of inventions, aphorisms, riffs on language.
Did it deserve to win? Of course — and so did several other novels.
How soon does idealism decline into idiocy and tolerance flip to compulsion?