The Sellout [J0186]

2016 - HCDJ Nice clean condition. A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality-the black Chinese restaurant. Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens-on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles-the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "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." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.Fuelled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident-the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins-he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.

From mixed recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "This book had me laughing out loud more than once, which doesn't happen often. The language alone is worth it, so sharp, and completely unhinged in the best way. His mind goes off on tangents that somehow still land, which I both admire and slightly envy. Under all the absurdity there's a very real and serious undertone, and that contrast is what makes it work. It never feels like it's joking just for the sake of it."; "Found it difficult to read at times, the language was sometimes hard to decipher. Interesting and funny book."; "This book and author is way smarter than me. The book is laugh out loud funny in spots and while laughing, I wasn't 100% sure I should be because I wasn't 100% sure it was intended to be funny. The story is nuts - hard to imagine coming up with something like this. It's worth the read just for the diatribes the author goes on."