The Sellout
Paul Beatty · 2015
A Black man from a fictional Los Angeles neighborhood attempts to reinstate slavery and segregation. Beatty's satire is the most ferocious comic novel of the decade; it won the 2016 Man Booker Prize and proved that American racial absurdity requires absurdist literature.
The case against
Beatty writes in bursts of stand-up rather than scenes, and the jokes come so fast and so dense that the actual story (the narrator's plan to bring back segregation in Dickens) keeps getting buried under riffs. It is dazzling for fifty pages and tiring by two hundred. The satire never lets up long enough for a character or a feeling to land.
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