A friend came to visit me a couple years ago and left this book behind. It was already on my to-read list at the time, but it got shelved and set aside. (My to-read list is very long, and in a state of constant fluctuation.) The events of the last couple weeks inspired me to make a conscious effort to read more African American writers and so The Sellout finally got its moment. Plus I got another tick on the list of Booker winners I've read; this one is extra special as the first American Booker winner. The Sellout is a brilliant work of satire. This bleak picture of de facto segregation in Los Angeles and the narrator's attempt to uplift his community by reinstating de jure segregation (or at least the outward appearance of it), includes some of the funniest writing I've ever read. There were lines (not a few!) that made me burst out laughing as I read on my couch. And there were lines that made me cringe, where I'm sure my face looked just like a wide-eyed grimacing emoji. And there were lines so perfectly true they stopped me in my place.
I posted about this book on Instagram and a friend in Italy messaged me to ask if it was a good read. She has the Italian translation. (Lo Schiavista, it's called in Italian, which if I'm translating correctly means The Slaver.) It's hard for me to imagine how this book will translate; not into Italian, but to a reader not steeped in America's particular dysfunctions. I'll be curious to hear how she finds it.
It's hard for me to articulate what makes The Sellout so powerful. I think the narrator puts it best when he says, "It's illegal to yell 'Fire!' in a crowded, theater, right?" ... "Well, I've whispered 'Racism' in a post-racial world."
I pulled out Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down along with The Sellout last Monday, undecided as to which I should read first. Ishmael Reed actually gets a passing reference in The Sellout, when the narrator is taken by his father to Mississippi to engage in some "reckless eyeballing" in an attempt to expose him to direct racism. "Thanks to years of my father's black vernacular pop quizzes and an Ishmael Reed book he kept on top of the toilet for years, I knew that 'reckless eyeballing' was the act of a black male deigning to look at a southern white female."
I had to read an excerpt from Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down for a class I took in 1999 (a portion of the book is reprinted in the Norton Anthology, Postmodern American Fiction, which was our text book). I remember liking the excerpt, but not much else. Several years later I found a used copy of the full book and picked it up. Like The Sellout, it has sat on my shelves since, waiting to be read. A certain logic told me I should have read Yellow Back Radio first: Ishmael Reed is a generation older than Paul Beatty and Yellow Back Radio was written nearly 50 years earlier. It's also a work of satire, an absurdist send up of the old west, among other things, with some supernaturalism and modern technology mixed in. A quick and entertaining read.
