Skip to main content

The Sellout


Book Review

Paul Beatty’s Booker-winning (2016) novel, The Sellout, is hilarious satire that makes fun of many things that America holds sacred.  But the satire and its fun are so much American that many Indian readers may find it hard to comprehend.  Frankly, I had to refer to the internet scores of times in order to understand the allusions that the novel carries on almost every page.

The book and the author
The narrator of the novel referred to by only his surname, Me, is facing a trial in the Supreme Court for keeping a black slave.  Me is black himself. The slave he keeps is Homini, the last of the Little Rascals actors still alive.  Homini wanted to be a slave.  It helps him retain his African-American identity.  The whiplash on his back makes his back feel good though his heart feels good while living in a Black-only area.  The narrator also has a strong though complex affiliation with Dickens, a Black-only ghetto. 

Me’s father was a sociologist who used the little boy as a subject of many psychological experiments.  As a grown-up Me wished to tell his girlfriend Marpessa (who deserted him and married somebody else) about one of those experiments when she accuses him of getting a “fucking hard-on” looking at a naked white woman swimming in the ocean.  His father locked his head into the tachistoscope and for three hours flashed split-second images of the forbidden fruit of his era, “pinups and Playboy centrefolds,” in his face.  It was “Aversion therapy.”  Then we get a list of American pinups and Playboy models.

The novel is replete with such names and allusions.  It plays on literary pieces and names.  It makes use of psychological terms and concepts to satirise different things.  Those who are not familiar with all those allusions will find the novel hard to understand, let alone enjoy.

Some of the allusions are easy to understand.  For example:

Theirs not to reason what the fuck,
Theirs but to shoot and duck:

Niggers to the right of them
Niggers to the left of them,
Niggers in front of them
Partied and blundered...

Or:

1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
2. Whatever goes on four legs, or six wings and a biscuit, is a friend.
3. No Pigger shall wear shorts in the fall, much less the winter.
...
6. All Piggers are created equal, but some Piggers ain’t shit.

In case you don’t understand those allusions, leave Beatty’s book alone.

However, if you’re willing to do more research than an obscenely paid Indian university prof of lit would ever do in his/her entire career in order to understand a novel, this is just the book for you. 


Indian Bloggers


Comments

  1. Quite Interesting, Sir!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Will give it a try sometime. Humour and satire are my favorite genres.

    ReplyDelete
  3. नोटबंदी के बाद डिजिटल पेमेंट पर जोर, जानें क्या है डिजिटल पेमेंट
    Readmore Todaynews18.com https://goo.gl/BgzxC9

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...