Novel of the week

The Sellout by Paul Beatty Oneworld 304pp £12.99 The Week Bookshop £9.99

“Just how black can comedy get?” asked Simon Schama in the Financial Times. Paul Beatty’s The Sellout – which last month became the first American novel to win the Man Booker Prize – opens with its black narrator (known only by his surname, Me) appearing before the US Supreme Court charged with “keeping a black slave”. How Me got to be an “involuntary slaveholder” lies at the heart of this “howl-a-page” novel – and it proves to be quite the tale, involving entire LA boroughs “disappearing” from the map, whites being banned from a local school, and an elderly neighbour of Me’s trying to “lynch” himself. It takes “audacity” to tackle race relations through comedy, and Beatty plays for “very high stakes”. But The Sellout is a resounding triumph – a “marvellous, toothsome” novel that “knocks the stuffing out of right-thinking solemnities”.

I found this “hallucinogenic morality tale” intoxicating at first, but my excitement soon diminished, said Clive Davis in The Times. As Beatty lurches from “one improbable excess to another”, you end up being “pummelled into a state of exhaustion”. With its “faux-casual” references to Godard and Kafka, this novel seems “designed to be deconstructed in a university classroom” rather than merely read. I too found The Sellout less than uproarious, said Reni Eddo-lodge in The Guardian. Beatty aims his satire so widely – “every stereotype, rivalry and anxiety about race in the US is laid bare” – that he seems to be laughing not just at racial prejudice but at its victims. Still, “this book doesn’t shy away from anything” – and for that, at least, Beatty must be applauded.