The Sellout by Paul Beatty

Reviewed by: The Sellout by Paul Beatty Derek C. Maus (bio) Beatty, Paul. The Sellout. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. To begin, a declaration: it is high time to bestow an adjectival eponym on Paul Beatty (I cast my vote preemptively for “Beattific” rather than the usual sorts of constructions like “Beattyesque” or “Beattian”). Because, yo, Time magazine and Jonathan Franzen, I’m really happy for you and I’mma let you finish, but the award for “Great American Novelist” belongs on the bookshelf of the man who produced this verbal spectacle as the opening paragraph of his fourth novel: This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything. Never cheated on my taxes or at cards. Never snuck into the movies or failed to give back the extra change to a drugstore cashier indifferent to the ways of mercantilism and minimum-wage expectations. I’ve never burgled a house. Held up a liquor store. Never boarded a crowded bus or subway car, sat in a seat reserved for the elderly, pulled out my gigantic penis and masturbated to satisfaction with a perverted, yet somehow crestfallen, look on my face. But here I am, in the cavernous chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, my car illegally and somewhat ironically parked on Constitution Avenue, my hands cuffed and crossed behind my back, my right to remain silent long since waived and said goodbye to as I sit in a thickly padded chair that, much like this country, isn’t nearly as comfortable as it looks. (3) As he awaits his hearing before the Supreme Court, the novel’s protagonist—explicitly named only by his case, Me vs. the United States of America—muses on a variety of topics, including whether a modern-day version of Abraham Lincoln would make a better basketball player than president: “[H]e could catch the rock on the break, pull up for a bearded three-pointer, hold the pose, and talk shit as the ball popped the net. The Great [End Page 954] Emancipator, you can’t stop him, you can only hope to contain him” (4). He lights up a joint right there in the halls of justice, reasoning that the charges laid against him are “so heinous that busting me for possession of marijuana on federal property would be like charging Hitler with loitering and a multinational oil company like British Petroleum with littering after fifty years of exploding refineries, toxic spills and emissions, and a shamelessly disingenuous advertising campaign” (7). Over the course of the novel’s three-hundred pages, the reader finds out that these charges are the result of an elaborate campaign to restore the status of his hometown of Dickens, “a ghetto community on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles.” The community’s original nineteenth-century charter not only excluded “Chinamen, Spanish of all shades, dialects, and hats, Frenchmen, redheads, city slickers, and unskilled Jews,” but also established it in perpetuity as a zone of “residential agriculture,” leading to a unique neighborhood: “You know when you’ve entered the Farms, because the city sidewalks, along with your rims, car stereo, nerve, and progressive voting record, will have vanished into air thick with the smell of cow manure and, if the wind is blowing in the right direction—good weed” (27, 28). The Farms, along with the rest of Dickens, have been “quietly removed like those towns than vanished from maps of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, atomic accident by atomic accident” (57). After his cantankerous father is killed by Los Angeles police officers, though, the narrator decides to reverse its literal and figurative erasure from the map in a satirically provocative form of urban renewal that not only involves painting fake road-signs and boundary lines but also reinstating racial segregation and even slavery within Dickens (albeit for reasons that bear only superficial similarities to their historical precedents). The outrageousness of his actions is only exacerbated by the fact that he funds his efforts in large measure by using his agricultural talents to develop exceptional strains of “the plant life that had the

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