It just sort of disappears, and nobody is told why. The plot is set in motion when Dickens, the city Me lives in, is surreptitiously wiped off the map, triggering an identity crisis in its residents. Me surfs for fun, and smokes weed in the supreme court, where he ends up facing retribution for breaking some of the country’s most hallowed laws about race. Farmland in the middle of a poor city is an odd setting, but it’s real enough: you’ll find Richland Farms in the heart of rap-famous Compton, Los Angeles. Me is a black man who owns a farm in a poor black urban neighbourhood. This is convenient, because the novel is written entirely in the first person.
Our protagonist is never fully named, but we are told that his surname is Me. The devices are real enough to be believable, yet surreal enough to raise your eyebrows. Everything about The Sellout’s plot is contradictory.
Maybe that’s the point of this whirlwind of a satire. You might even close the book feeling desensitised to one of the most contentious words in the English language. Although the “er” is a harsh and oppressive end to a harsh and oppressive word, his repetitive use comes off with a friendly familiarity. Paul Beatty’s version is the slave master spelling of nigger, not the 90s hip-hop “nigga”. The Sellout is a fast-paced, verbose book, but one particular word crops up again and again. I f there is one thing we know about words you shouldn’t say, it’s that those words end up becoming very alluring.
0 kommentar(er)
