Just because racism is dead don’t mean they still don’t shoot n- on sight.’”Ī few years later, Dickens also dies.

Another one of his elaborate schemes to educate me on the plight of the black race and to inspire me to make something of myself, I half expected him to get up, brush himself off, and say, 'See, n-, if this could happen to the world’s smartest black man, just imagine what could happen to your dumb ass. Beatty’s humor only heightens the tragedy. (Failure to answer one question - “Prior to declaring independence in 1957, the West African nation of Ghana was comprised of what two colonies?” - gets the boy his first self-administered electric shock “of a voltage that would’ve frightened Thor.”)Įarly in the novel, the narrator’s father is shot to death by the police. The narrator doesn’t have what you’d call a “traditional” Southern California upbringing - unless one considers it not outside the norm to live on a 10-square-block inner-city farm, raised by a single father, a 20-year interim dean of the department of psychology at West Riverside Community College, who, “in his quest to unlock the keys to mental freedom,” subjects his 10-year-old son to social-science experiments, complete with electrodes attached to his temples. “The Sellout” tells of a young man who grew up in Dickens, a “ghetto community” on the outskirts of Los Angeles that is, in his words, “as black as Asian hair, as brown as James.”

It’s easy to pile on the laudatory adverbs and adjectives: “The Sellout” is such a scathing and hilarious novel that anyone reading it is tempted to share passages out loud with random seatmates on public transportation - even knowing that such intrusive readers are mocked in one of the novel’s many ludicrously inspired digressions. The author of the satirical novels “Slumberland,” “Tuff” and “The White Boy Shuffle,” Beatty has written a wild new book, an uproariously funny, deliciously profane and ferociously intelligent send-up of so much of our culture.

The sellout paul