"The Sellout"

Humor, transgression, and beauty in Paul Beatty's outrageous novel

Content warning: contains redacted racial slurs in quoted sections of the novel being reviewed and generally awkward content about race in America from a nervous, middle-aged white man.

Octavio Paz once said that “humor is the great invention of the modern spirit,” a claim that Milan Kundera elaborated on at length in his book Testaments Betrayed:

A fundamental idea: humor is not an age-old human practice; it is an invention bound up with the birth of the novel. Thus humor is not laughter, not mockery, not satire, but a particular species of the comic, which, Paz says (and this is the key to understanding humor's essence), “renders ambiguous everything it touches.” People who cannot take pleasure from [ambiguity] will never understand a thing about the art of the novel…

If I were asked the most common cause of misunderstanding between my readers and me, I would not hesitate: humor.

In the many interviews he was obliged to do after the success of his Man-Booker-winning novel The Sellout, Paul Beatty expressed a similar feeling. He insists, again and again, that the novel is not satire:

[T]he reason I’m so tired lately is that I’ve been talking a lot about this book. Everybody’s very comfortable with saying, “Oh, you’re a satirist, you’re this, you’re that,” and all this other kind of stuff. For personal-freedom reasons, I say, “No. That’s not me. I just write. Whatever it is, is what it is.” I guess people don’t often think about what satire really is—but for you to talk about how real it is, is a comfort to me. Because even some of the more ridiculous stuff in there, that you would think is obvious satire, is sort of real—or definitely based in something.¹

Nevertheless, reviewers are unable to understand “what it means” without that label. For The Sellout “renders ambiguous” a great deal that our culture is, at least presently, unable to contemplate without somber moralizing. Thus: if The Sellout is funny —and it is, insanely so— reviewers believe it must be “making fun of” various sacred cows, must exist contra whatever it doesn’t treat with the customary obsequious respect, must be “satirizing” something, such that knowing readers are “in on the joke” being made of some other.

Yet in this instance, this would be impossible to believe. For example, apart from its general concern with race —already a topic treated as permanently and profoundly “serious” in America— The Sellout features a black protagonist who reintroduces segregation and slavery in his distressed hometown, the semi-fictional Dickens, California, with wildly successful results; that is: it produces better social outcomes; people behave better on the bus; “order” is “restored.” Can Beatty really be arguing that segregation and slavery were good? Quite obviously: no. But American Manicheanism accepts no substitutes: there is only good and evil, everything on Earth fits cleanly into one or the other category, and every day is a new battle against the forces we oppose. Unfortunately for American literature, this attitude is lethal for art; fortunately for American literature, Paul Beatty, at least, does not have it.

This leaves white reviewers, especially, in a pickle. Unable to ignore an outstanding novel from a talented black writer, they nevertheless have no idea what to say about it; some import an otherwise delightfully absent white psychological frame into the space of the story, in order to suggest that all of it —the black and Latino characters, the black culture and history, the style, the plot points— are somehow “about” white people and their various misdeeds. I find this reduction particularly amusing: centering a black author’s novel on white people found nowhere in the text in order to sustain the proper politics as one attempts to explain why one loved it!²

Some of the reasons I loved it, at least:

• It was funnier than anything I’ve read in years; I laughed out loud dozens of times.

• I thought it was inventive, imaginative in novel ways, provocative and different.

• I found its bold, aggressive prose and characters completely electric and compelling; I loved the protagonist and his various intimates; I loved his father, and his father’s insane obsessions.

• It seemed liberated, free from the bulky and unwieldy and dull obsessions of the zeitgeist, on its own wavelength, on a realer wavelength than most “discourse.”

When Beatty says that for a reviewer to “talk about how real it is, is a comfort to me,” it’s possible that he had something like this last point in mind. What do he and Paz and Kundera think is so “real” about humor and ambiguity, anyway? Kundera, continuing his remarks from above, says that thanks to the ambiguity of humor, the novel is “a realm where moral judgment is suspended.” He goes on:

Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil…

Creating the imaginary terrain where moral judgment is suspended was a move of enormous significance: only there could novelistic characters develop–that is, individuals conceived not as a function of some preexistent truth, as examples of good or evil, or as representations of objective laws in conflict, but as autonomous beings grounded in their own morality, in their own laws. Western society habitually presents itself as the society of the rights of man, but before a man could have rights, he had to constitute himself as an individual, to consider himself such and to be considered such; that could not happen without the long experience of the… arts and particularly of the art of the novel, which teaches the reader to be curious about others and to try to comprehend truths that differ from his own.

Thus: there is a human reality that can only be understood individually; we should be curious about and attentive to this reality at least alongside, if not over, the “realities” of ideology or scaled judgments or tribal othering or whatever fresh, clever theories try to tell us that reductive dehumanization is mandated by this or that “objective truth”; the novel is where we first developed this attitude and where it lives most vividly, but it’s found in many of the arts. It is virtuous —and, a nerd might argue, politically consequential— to “do the work” of attending to this reality instead of to the tides of generalizations that wash across our memescape.

The Sellout reminded me most of: A Confederacy of Dunces, a novel in which we come to love and root for a technically detestable protagonist (and my favorite-ever novel set in New Orleans); the works of James Ellroy, which often feature the same situation (and share with The Sellout an intensity of prose I don’t encounter often); and even Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, a book which I struggled to read and did not enjoy, but whose film adaptation delighted me. In all these cases, those looking for morality tales will be disappointed, because the protagonists are not “good,” but possess a curious charisma that’s tellingly resonant.

Charisma

For many years, I’ve thought often of William James’ description of charisma:

“The [charismatic] always had good consciences, for conscience in them coalesced with will, and those who looked on their face were as much smitten with wonder at their freedom from inner restraint as with awe at the energy of their outward performances.”³

James says first: charisma comes from there being no gap between “conscience,” our moral beliefs and values, and “will,” our moment-to-moment desires and behaviors. Most of us have a rather large gap, but the charismatic do not. Second, those affected by charisma are “smitten with wonder” at the charismatic person’s “freedom from inner restraint.” Their freedom perhaps becomes our freedom, or at least demonstrates that such freedom is possible.

The protagonist in The Sellout is named “Bonbon” Me, and he’s certainly free from “inner restraint.” Specifically: Bonbon is not constrained in his thought, speech, or action by the memeplexes about race in America, memeplexes which surround him on all sides. His father was a demented “Liberation Psychologist” of a particular vintage in black American history, subjecting his son to bizarre experiments in order to develop his racial consciousness along the correct lines. Bonbon regularly attends a meeting of black intellectuals he holds in bored contempt, and he doesn’t bother to keep himself in check at all. When the leader of the group shares that he’s producing a corrected version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn titled The Pejorative-Free Adventures and Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of African-American Jim and His Young Protégé, White Brother Huckleberry Finn, as They Go in Search of the Lost Black Family Unit, Bonbon mocks him. The leader replies:

“This is serious. Brother Mark Twain uses the ‘n-word’ 219 times. That’s .68 ‘n-words’ per page in toto.”

“If you ask me, Mark Twain didn’t use the word ‘n——’ enough,” I mumbled. With my mouth filled with at least four of America’s favorite cookies, I don’t think anyone understood me. I wanted to say more. Like, why blame Mark Twain because you don’t have the patience and courage to explain to your children that the “n-word” exists and that during the course of their sheltered little lives they may one day be called a “n——” or, even worse, deign to call somebody else a “n——.” No one will ever refer to them as “little black euphemisms,” so welcome to the American lexicon—N——! But I’d forgotten to order any milk to wash the cookies down with. And I never got the chance to explain to Foy and his close-minded ilk that Mark Twain’s truth is that your average black n—— is morally and intellectually superior to the average white n——, but no, those pompous Dum Dum n——s wanted to ban the word, disinvent the watermelon, snorting in the morning, washing your dick in the sink, and the eternal shame of having pubic hair the color and texture of unground pepper. That’s the difference between most oppressed peoples of the world and American blacks. They vow never to forget, and we want everything expunged from our record, sealed and filed away for eternity. We want someone like Foy Cheshire to present our case to the world with a set of instructions that the jury will disregard centuries of ridicule and stereotype and pretend the woebegone n——s in front of you are starting from scratch.

Foy continued his sales pitch: “The ‘n-word’ is the most vile and despicable word in the English language. I don’t believe anyone would argue that point.”

“I can think of a more despicable word than ‘n——,’” I volunteered. Having finally swallowed my gooey chocolate-and-crème chaw, I closed one eye and held a half-bitten cookie so that the dark brown semicircle sat atop Foy’s gigantic head like a well-coiffed Nabisco Afro that read OREO at its center.

“Like what?”

“Like any word that ends in —ess: Negess. Jewess. Poetess. Actress. Adultress. Factchecktress. I’d rather be called ‘n——’ than ‘giantess’ any day of the week.”

“Problematic,” someone muttered, invoking the code word black thinkers use to characterize anything or anybody that makes them feel uncomfortable, impotent, and painfully aware that they don’t have the answers to questions and assholes like me. “What the fuck you come here for, if you don’t have anything productive to say?”

Foy raised his hands, asking for calm. “The Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals respect all input. And for those who don’t know, this sellout is the son of our founder.” Then he turned to me with a look of pity on his face. “Go on, Sellout. Say what you came to say.”

Bonbon always says what he came to say (and perhaps needless to note: the redactions are mine; in the novel, the words are spelled out normally). For any reader, but especially a white reader, this passage is dizzying, disorienting, discomfiting, even terrifying; I can admit to being uncomfortable even quoting it in this post, although I also imagined how Bonbon would mock me for my anxiety and my decision to use hyphens. Its exuberant ambiguity —careening from dangerous jokes to what seem like potentially real insights which are immediately dissolved into more jokes, set in an absurd context but with much that is real— leaves one without the customary intellectual and moral footholds we all rely on when thinking about race in America. Is Bonbon “arguing” that sexism is “worse” than racism? Maybe! Is Bonbon serious about what he takes as the message of Huckleberry Finn? Maybe! Who is ridiculous in this scene, and who represents good or evil? Is Bonbon saying what Beatty thinks? Or is he a character Beatty has created to pillory certain points of view? All readers will have their reactions and positions, but as Kundera noted:

[It’s not] that the novelist utterly denies that moral judgment is legitimate, but that he refuses it a place in the novel. If you like, you can accuse Panurge of cowardice, accuse Emma Bovary, accuse Rastignac - that's your business; the novelist has nothing to do with it.

Feel free to accuse Bonbon of racism. Paul Beatty has nothing to do with it. For his part, it’s evident in the book and in interviews that he really wasn’t trying to “say” anything of that variety anyway (although, I’ll argue, in doing so he said a great deal):

It’s not like I sit down and outline this shit and say, “I want to address this.” But one of the things is just how we talk about race. Social constructs are part of it, like there’s a “closure,” there’s an “endgame,” there’s all this kind of shit. We talk like there’s just black and white…

I think that everything’s funny at some level, you know? I did this collection of African American humor that no one found funny. I’m exaggerating. A lot of people found it funny, but there was a large part of the populace that didn’t find the cover [which depicts a watermelon rind] very funny. It just brought to mind that there’s a weird lack of irony, especially when it comes to African Americans and what you can do and talk about and say. I’m a big Ernst Lubitsch fan, and there’s this movie, To Be or Not to Be. It’s making fun of World War II . . . and it just always struck me how there’s very little of that type of comedy about people of color in the States…

I think most people would accept this argument, when stated abstractly in an interview. But I am desperate to know how most readers —and again, especially white readers— took this passage:

The city of Dickens’s paltry contribution to the long-running tradition of black funnymen is an open-mike night, sponsored by the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, that on the second Tuesday of the month transforms the shop into a twenty-table club called the Comedy Act and Forum for the Freedom of Afro-American Witticism and Mannerisms That Showcase the Plethora of Afro-American Humorists for Whom … there’s more, but I’ve never managed to finish reading the temporary marquee they hang over the giant donut sign that hovers over the parking lot. I just call the place the Plethora for short, because despite Marpessa’s insistence that I had no sense of humor, there were a plethora of unfunny black guys who, like every black sports analyst trying to sound intelligent, use and misuse the word “plethora” at every opportunity.

As in:

Q: How many white boys does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: A plethora! Because they stole it from a black man! Lewis Latimer, a black man who invented the lightbulb and a plethora of other smart-ass shit!

And believe me, jokes like that would get a plethora of applause. Every black male, I don’t care what shade or political persuasion he is, secretly thinks he can do one of three things better than anyone in the world: play basketball, rap, or tell jokes.

What’s shocking about it is only that it applies to black people an observation we all know to be true generally: people misuse language to sound smarter or better than they are often, with regularly hilarious results. Acknowledging that black people do it too —in this case, with the word “plethora”— can make a white person uncomfortable. It may also, if their own unavoidable observations have been held in abeyance by an “inner restraint” they don’t like to think too deeply about, make them laugh, leaving them “smitten with wonder at [Bonbon’s or Beatty’s] freedom” and possibly reeling.

In sum: America’s anxious relationship with race has created space for charismatic transgressions to feel liberating, even if only briefly.⁴ Beatty doesn’t comment on how we “should” be, and I have no idea myself. What is subversive about humor is in part that it doesn’t come bearing “solutions,” proposing “national conversations," selling this or that book or program or campaign. It only makes people laugh as they seem to see through something they hadn't before —although it’s hard to specify what this means, exactly— but that turns out to be “problematic” enough to get many people in trouble.

Bonbon himself eventually gets into trouble for a whole slew of race-related crimes. The novel is bookended by scenes with him before the Supreme Court, smoking weed semi-surreptitiously.⁵ When the Chief Justice agonizes about how hard it is to talk about race, Bonbon thinks:

I’m high as hell, but not high enough not to know that race is hard to “talk about” because it’s hard to talk about. The prevalence of child abuse in this country is hard to talk about, too, but you never hear people complaining about it. They just don’t talk about it. And when’s the last time you had a calm, measured conversation about the joys of consensual incest? Sometimes things are simply difficult to discuss, but I actually think the country does a decent job of addressing race, and when folks say, “Why can’t we talk about race more honestly?” What they really mean is “Why can’t you n——s be reasonable?” or “Fuck you, white boy. If I said what I really wanted to say, I’d get fired even faster than you’d fire me if race were any easier to talk about.” And by race we mean “n——s,” because no one of any persuasion seems to have any difficulty talking out-of-pocket shit about Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, and America’s newest race, the Celebrity.

So many passages read like riding a roller coaster. Should this make us laugh? Cry? Shake our heads? Demand some kind of intervention?⁶ By this part of the book, it’s very hard not to root for Bonbon no matter what he does. His interiority is so well-rendered that we wind up inside him, to some extent; his charisma, his freedom, and his subjective personhood are vaster and more real than my scaffolding of beliefs, anyway. I don’t care about what he did; I just think he’s funny.

When I close the cover, I’m left with the words of Pema Chödrön, quoted by Maggie Nelson: “[He] did not keep ethical norms and my devotion to him is unshakable. So I’m left with a big koan.” I think a lot of the best fiction achieves this in us, something which normally requires love or years of spiritual practice. Bonbon does evil; Bonbon is good.⁷ There will be no “closure,” a concept you'll note Beatty above —like James Ellroy⁸— scorns as ridiculous.

Jokes aside

The Sellout isn’t only funny or only provocative; it has some dream-like and moving moments, and Beatty writes about childhood and love with what seems to me like extreme psychological-phenomenological fidelity. Highly appealing to me was his depiction of social and cultural life in Dickens, which reminded me of parts of New Orleans. The less a white person says about what they love about black cultures, black neighborhoods, black modes of living, the better, I’m very sure; I don’t even know if we’re supposed to acknowledge their existence anymore, a central theme of the novel, as it happens.

Dickens, the inner-city-agricultural neighborhood inspired by Richland Farms in Compton, ceases to exist as elite white neighborhoods crowd in on all sides; it’s not destroyed, or gentrified, or overcome: it simply stops being referred to, such that even as America is ostensibly less racist than ever whole zones of black experience and culture are being edited out of our collective memory. Its “Welcome to Dickens” signs are taken down; they don’t mention it on the weather report anymore. Much of what’s in Dickens is being erased, too: the last black member of The Little Rascals —who asks to be Bonbon’s slave— lives there, but his “best performances” of minstrelsy are missing; the intellectual club is disintegrating, and with them the Black Nationalism movement and all its cultural, political, and aesthetic products; Bonbon is a fruit and marijuana farmer, that is, a half-urban / half-rural black man, another invisible and probably declining constituency. These phenomena all existed and in some places continue to, but in mainstream culture, the signage for these possibilities has been taken down, at least partly by well-meaning white people.

Rather than insanely offensive jokes, many reviewers quoted instead the following passage, a much safer excerpt:

That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.

A sense I had reading this book was that this was the history that’s stayed with Beatty, and probably with many black Americans. That is: not what’s in textbooks or newspapers, or not only that; not only the world of political theories and contested interpretations; not only horrors and tragedies; not only battle and progress and setbacks and exhaustion; but also: what life in the neighborhood was like; what the rhythms of speech were; what horny young people did to pass time; the cars and clothes people thought made them look high-status; how people organized their perceptions and managed their longings; the smells, the tastes, the sensations; the ways of being that go unrecorded and unacknowledged by the world at large because they cannot be scaled without fatal information loss, can only become stereotypes that describe no one or, worse, forbidden data that “might send the wrong message.”⁹

This history is not only alive in individuals, it’s also a delight in all sorts of ways. It is an escape from reductive cultural tropes, which oppressively smother all that is particular and human; and, as is true of most expressions of human life, this history is simply charming and appealing in scores of ways. Almost every way of being has something entrancing about it, if one understands what it accomplishes, and perhaps the same is true of individuals.

This is what The Sellout is “about,” to me. Through the use of novelistic humor —that relativizing corrective that washes away the falsely-orderly, self-serving systems of dogma we use to replace messy, human realities— Beatty is able to show us a clearer view of a particular world, and a particular set of characters in it, than would have been possible otherwise. Like everything real, it all has a peculiar beauty, even when its interspersed with egregious violations of the moral values we believe we hold dear. In other words: it’s much more than a comedy, even as it is, above all, an expression of humor, and just like real life, it’s both very fucked-up and very funny.

Thanks to David and Omar for feedback and to Ben Cohen for the recommendation!

1. All quotes from Beatty in this post are from this interview; I read as many as I could find, but this one, conducted by a friend of his (and an accomplished writer in his own right), was by far the best.

2. I myself, to my childhood shame and my adult ambivalence, am white; like most white people, I try not to think about it. The closest I’ve ever come to achieving racialized consciousness is imagining professional white reviewers trying to deal with The Sellout; perhaps, pasty and earnest like me, they were delighted by it, by its humor and intensity and freedom; perhaps, like me, they spent hours trying to understand “how a white person should relate to this,” this text full of stereotypes and epithets and transgressive gags; perhaps, like me, they agonized about the tendency of white people to center and sought to avoid doing so, only for many sentences to lead back to their feelings and their interpretations of the novel, an unavoidable problem in a review but here made worse by the racial context it involves. In a way, I like to think that this, too, becomes part of the humor of the novel.

3. I’ve written about this often, once focusing on what this definition explains about Steve Jobs.

4. I probably don’t need to point out that this has intense political consequences as well.

5. Any conservatives who enjoyed the novel for its skewering of what they perceive as “liberal racial sensitivities” will be distressed to realize that Beatty doesn’t spare Clarence Thomas, or Condoleeza Rice, or anyone else, for that matter. This man is off the map.

6. I think the last element is especially disorienting; the book is often dense with variance in this way: I, at least, did not expect this passage to end with a casual gesture towards the idea that celebrities are a new category of human being.

7. “After the period in which art, philosophy, and politics looked for the integral, uniform, concrete, and literal man, the need for an elusive man who is a play of contradictions, a fountain of gushing antinomies and a system of infinite compensation, is growing.” Witold Gombrowicz, in a passage I quote a lot.

8. Ellroy: “Closure is bullshit and I would love to find the man who invented closure and shove a giant closure plaque up his ass.”

9. Again: Beatty is not writing contra anything; he does not deny, although you can tell he finds funny, the claims of more serious intellectuals; he simply thinks, like Liz Lemon, that you can have it all. But the aside: “would be the right thing to say,” does suggest a bit of ironical distance from the perspective he’s summarizing and at least suggesting he finds reasonable. He’s probably ambivalent; he’s a novelist, after all!

I think people feel that there’s a lot of stuff to be done first [before you’re funny or talk about these things]. You have to rehumanize yourself, would be the right thing to say. You’ve got to assert your intellectual equality.

There’s a bunch of shit that you have to do! You’ve got to bring up all the stuff that’s been ignored, you know? At least that’s what people feel like you have to do. I think you can do all that and be funny at the same time.