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Never stop reading. (Content originally posted at Blogger.)

The Sellout, by Paul Beatty

The Sellout: A Novel - Paul Beatty

Paul Beatty’s searingly caustic and smart satire, The Sellout, begins with the unnamed narrator about to appear before the Supreme Court for unspecified crimes against the Constitution. After the prologue, the narrator takes us back to his childhood before showing how he ended up with a slave and segregating his hometown of Dickens, California. The fact that the narrator is African American creates a dissonant absurdity as he meditates and rants about race. The Sellout is a thought experiment more than it is a novel. In retrospect, its internal logic doesn’t quite work for me. The satire and the arguments of the novel are more than enough to make up for any shortfalls in the plot...

 

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.