The Sellout

Soooo.... this might just be a book review this year.  But probably not.  Politics is exhausting, Iowa is tomorrow and for all the passion, all the talk of precipice and disaster... I would rather read something.  My law school classmate Richard Dooling recommended this to me.  He knows my tastes and in the first ten pages I admired the authors style... his..."patter".  Beatty immediately establishes a tone and a cadence which separate his prose out from the pack.

I don't know if it s "post Ferguson" book.  I rather doubt it because it is too lovingly scripted to have just come about in the last year and a half.  The story is narrated by a young black man who recalls growing up in urban LA in a town that has since been swallowed up, called "Mitchell".  If this were not odd enough the man's father and then the narrator himself farms land in this urban wasteland and he takes pains to point out through the book, is not a wasteland at all.

The book revels in blackness.  I cannot recall if there is single white character other than perhaps the police who wade in occasionally and with impact.  His father is a self schooled intellectual and an expert on the black struggle who raises his son on books and pop quizzes about America, racism and history and is a great case for the premise that no one impacts a child's upbringing like his or her parents.  His father holds court in the neighborhood with a group of like minded characters at Dum Dum Donuts and they hold forth, big time one another and solve the worlds problems.  This west coast, black Algonquin Round Table features his fathers cohort and nemesis, Foy Chesire who rights blackcentric rewrites of American classic literature. for example, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn becomes “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.”  You get the idea.

When the narrators father is "Accidentally" shot by the police he takes on his fathers mantle locally and also has a sidekick who is the narrator's slave named Hominy.  Hominy is the sole surviving "Little Rascal" and he adds sadness, humor and weirdness to an already offbeat story as the narrator attempts to date, surf, recreate the town of Mitchell and re-segregate schools to challenge ALL thoughts on race, racism and the American dream. 

It is a funny book and sad book and above all a well written book which causes people like myself, who have the best intentions, to evaluate where this intentions and instincts come from and whether they are real empathy for the sufferings of others or does that empathy just serve to allow us to maintain the status quo and feel bad about it with our half hearted hearts.  There is nothing half hearted about Beatty's book and it a really good literary read.  It is also an easy read.  Buy it.