Paul Beatty's The Sellout is the first novel by a US author to win Britain's prestigious Man Booker Prize. I haven't read the competition, but I would be hard pressed to say it didn't deserve the honor.
The unnamed narrator was raised by a renegade social scientist who treated him as a guinea pig, which reflects more detachment than malice. When the father dies, the narrator's hometown in Los Angeles County is also disappeared from the map. The narrator has a brainstorm to bring it back. Namely he intends to segregate the town, going as far as to found an entirely Potemkin prestigious white school with the windows papered over by images he's found on the internet. In this he's also supported by his slave, Hominy Jenkins, the Last Living Little Rascal, and thus a man with a lot of juicy stories about Our Gang.
Giving a partial summary of the plot is both insufficient as a descriptor and necessary to give you an idea of what the book is like. Beatty is a very funny writer, and seems to have blessedly little filter.
Another book I've been reading, The Accidental Mind by David J. Mandel goes into how dreams were once seen as messages from the gods or otherwise from another world. In those days you could tell someone your dreams and they'd have a reason to pay attention. Now everyone just seems to get bored and irritated.
I bring that up because the story in The Sellout isn't "all just a dream" but it does seem to move on the energies of the subconscious. In a real way it's about the processing of grief, especially if you're an outsider to begin with. A lot of us can relate to that. This book, however, would not have been written by a white author. Not in anything recognizable as its current form, anyway.
The unnamed narrator was raised by a renegade social scientist who treated him as a guinea pig, which reflects more detachment than malice. When the father dies, the narrator's hometown in Los Angeles County is also disappeared from the map. The narrator has a brainstorm to bring it back. Namely he intends to segregate the town, going as far as to found an entirely Potemkin prestigious white school with the windows papered over by images he's found on the internet. In this he's also supported by his slave, Hominy Jenkins, the Last Living Little Rascal, and thus a man with a lot of juicy stories about Our Gang.
Giving a partial summary of the plot is both insufficient as a descriptor and necessary to give you an idea of what the book is like. Beatty is a very funny writer, and seems to have blessedly little filter.
Another book I've been reading, The Accidental Mind by David J. Mandel goes into how dreams were once seen as messages from the gods or otherwise from another world. In those days you could tell someone your dreams and they'd have a reason to pay attention. Now everyone just seems to get bored and irritated.
I bring that up because the story in The Sellout isn't "all just a dream" but it does seem to move on the energies of the subconscious. In a real way it's about the processing of grief, especially if you're an outsider to begin with. A lot of us can relate to that. This book, however, would not have been written by a white author. Not in anything recognizable as its current form, anyway.
3 comments:
You said he's funny and since I don't have the book or access to a copy at the moment I've done that thing easiest to manage at short notice, meaning I looked up some quotes from the novel. He's definitely amusing and somewhat caustic too and you're right that no white person could have written a passage like this one:
“I'm so fucking tired of black women always being described by their skin tones! Honey-colored this! Dark-chocolate that! My paternal grandmother was mocha-tinged, café-au-lait, graham-fucking-cracker brown! How come they never describe the white characters in relation to foodstuffs and hot liquids? Why aren't there any yogurt-colored, egg-shell-toned, string-cheese-skinned, low-fat-milk white protagonists in these racist, no-third-act-having books? That's why black literature sucks!”
Having spent a fair amount of time reading Carl Jung, his theories have brought me to conclude that although our dreams may not be messages from the gods they're very definitely messages from the collective unconscious. It's really too bad that transactional analysis was abandoned by most psychiatrists in favor of drugs. Dreams have much to teach.
Another nice tight review.
That's a great passage, and reading it again made me smile. It's sort of like being invited to eavesdrop on a conversation that in real life would have been silenced as soon as I entered the room.
Realistically pharmaceuticals do have a role to play in treatment, certainly in cases where people might hurt themselves otherwise. But dreams, as you say, have something to teach us about ourselves and about our world. It's a shame that we're not paying attention.
And thank you, I try. :)
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