The style is a little claustrophobic for me. Sentences are too heavily loaded with description and qualification and the whole structure seems to groan with the excess weight. In places, this can create vivid scenes and images but, on the whole, I found it too cluttered and busy.
The Sellout’s early life is tragic and cruel to me. Perhaps it’s his Father’s interest in Psychology that make his mistreatment of his son that little bit more acute. I didn’t find it amusing or funny. The admixture of serious, sometimes heartbreaking, suffering with jocular, sometimes surreal, plot and character details was also a little jarring. If I had to defend this, I would say that all lives involve humour and that just because something is horrifying to you, a white, middle class man, that needn’t mean that those were the only emotions of people experiencing it first hand. The character of the Sellout himself is surreal. In some ways he is portrayed as a kind of hood superhero with his incredible horticultural skills, his surfing and his equestrianism. Details that seem unlikely, incongruous and more suitable to a fairy story. Equally, his relationship with his father and his responses to it are unusual. He disagrees with and hates his father, but never does anything about it. Stoically accepting his childhood role as psychological lab rat. Perhaps this is understandable, how could he know any better? But as he grows older his reverence for his father and his adoption of various parts of his character, for example “nigger whispering” or continuing to farm and live in the same place even after his father dies and he inherits a lot of money, become less understandable. Maybe it is a comment on how black people's lives are destined to repeat those of their parents, which occurs as a theme elsewhere in the book, because of the historical and societal obstacles they face. From a strictly individual perspective, I found it hard to comprehend the Sellout’s actions following his father’s death and this feeling would only increase as the book went on! Why is someone as intelligent, resourceful and reflective as The Sellout making these choices and behaving like this?
My best explanation for what happens in the rest of the rest of the book is that the Sellout becomes increasingly mad. Is it the experience of being an intelligent black man in America that makes him go mad? Incidentally, it is never entirely clear to me why he is called a Sellout; perhaps because he took compensation money from the police after they shot his Dad? In any case, the Sellout’s program of segregation begins engagingly with Hominy’s desire to be his slave and bring back the old days. Hominy’s birthday party on the bus was probably the high point of the book for me. The scenes are wild, raucous and surreal but enjoyable too. The revellers discuss identification by skin tone, why it only happens to black people and the relative importance of class vs. race in the organisation of society.
From this point on as the segregation increases, so does my confusion! As Sellout’s segregational activities broaden to encompass shops, the hospital, the school and even the construction of another, “whites only” school, the connection with reality begins to weaken. The actions seem to be less about Hominy, as they were at the beginning, and more about the Sellout’s own agenda. Has he become, or is he becoming, as mad as Hominy? Eventually, we find famous black luminaries at the meetings of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, white children trying to force their way into the school and Sellout high as all hell at the Supreme Court represented by a hustler with an extensive wardrobe! How much of this is fantasy and how much of it is intended as critique or ridicule was somewhat lost on me in the confusion.
Clearly, this is a work of satire but it wasn’t clear to me exactly what was being satirised. Early in the book, Sellout argues with the wonderfully ridiculous Foy Chesire about his desire to remove the word ‘nigger’ from his version of Huckleberry Finn. He reflects that it is braver and more valuable to explain the word, its history and its usage to children rather than simply trying to blank it out and pretend it never existed. He says, “That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.” This part was powerful and meaningful for me. As Faulkner tells us, “the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past”. People can’t just forget slavery, forget forced labour and forget segregation like it never happened. So is the satire of this book that people can’t forget it but they aren’t allowed to remember it either? From this perspective, Sellout is trying to awaken the collective memory of his community but isn’t allowed to; another oppression to compound the multiple original oppressions? This could be true but one aspect of Sellout’s segregation that doesn’t seem to fit with this is the improvement in social indicators that takes place as segregation increases. Nonetheless, there does seem to be a sense in which it is far more convenient for white people to forget this history than it is black people; Beatty seems to argue Black people are stuck with it whether they like it or not. However, would be even less acceptable to society if Sellout was white? I find it simply impossible to believe that the author would genuinely consider that racism and the ‘spectre of segregation’ really make people realise how far they’ve come and bring them together, as the book itself suggests. So is the book mocking the idea of segregation? Another way of approaching this satire may be to see it as mocking the idea of society “post-segregation”. Sellout lives in, and shows us, a segregated society, which is totally legal, but when he points out that it is segregated and labels it as such that is a crime and he is punished. Physically segregating people is fine, so long as you don’t call it by name. The problem with this approach is that Dickens shouldn’t see any change when the signs go up if Sellout is simply calling the situation what it is. Unless people's awareness of segregation is what drives their improved behaviour? Again, I struggle to believe we are supposed to take this at face value. Lastly, I got the impression that the book may be intended to satirise the constitution and judicial system of the US. The 1st, 13th and 14th amendment occur regularly throughout the text. I didn’t know these amendments but 1 seems, broadly, to defend freedom of speech and religion, 13 bans slavery and 14 protect the rights of citizens of the USA. Is Sellout saying that the constitution is contradictory because people can’t truly be said to be free unless they can bring back slavery and segregation? Or is it more that the first amendment can never feel true for a community that was historically so horrifically mistreated?
Suffice to say, it wasn’t clear to me what the point of the book was! To be sure, it made some excellent observations and critiques in the course of the story but, when I considered the narrative as a whole, I struggled to identify the key criticisms or themes. Much like the busy, cluttered style of the prose, I felt like the narrative was so chock full of surreal twists and appearances, nonstop action and unusual tangents that it became hard to identify the author’s main purpose. It was enjoyable enough to read, and insightful in places but too chaotic for my tastes...or too advanced for my comprehension! As with, Ta-Nehisi Coate’s Between The World And Me I found more description and diagnosis of symptoms than prescriptions for recovery but perhaps that is the nature of the illness.
