The Sellout

Paul Beatty's The Sellout, a razor-sharp satire about a young man's solitary childhood and the race trial that propels him to the Supreme Court, displays a comedic master at the peak of his abilities. The American Constitution's foundational principles, urban living, the civil rights movement, father-son relationships, and the black Chinese restaurant—the golden grail of racial equality—are all under attack.

The narrator of The Sellout, born in Dickens' "agrarian ghetto" on the outskirts of southern Los Angeles, accepts his fate as a member of the lower middle class of Californians, saying, "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." He was raised by a contentious sociologist as a single parent and was the focus of several racial psychology experiments during his early years. He is made to feel as if his family's financial problems would be resolved by the book that his father's groundbreaking work will produce. But he discovers there was never a memoir after his father is slain in a police shootout. The bill from a drive-thru funeral is all that's left.

Driven by this dishonesty and the overall decay of his city, the narrator decides to make amends once again: Dickens has been physically taken off the map in order to save California any more shame. With the assistance of Hominy Jenkins, the last living Little Rascal, the most well-known person in the town, he starts the most ridiculous action imaginable: he segregates the local high school and reinstates slavery, which puts him before the Supreme Court.