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. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.įuelled 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. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes.

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.īorn 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. Named one of the best books of 2015 by The New York Times Book Review and the Wall Street JournalĪ 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. Winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction

The sellout book