The last time I read a Booker Prize-winning novel was when Midnight’s Children came out in paperback. It wasn’t the best reading fun—or the most edifying, come to that. This time it’s happened by accident, when I heard the author interviewed on Radio 4. If this is the man, I thought, I may like his book.
I did, from the first sentence of the Prologue on:
This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything. Never cheated on my taxes or at cards. Never snuck into the movies or failed to give back the extra change to a drugstore cashier indifferent to the ways of mercantilism and minimum-wage expectations. I’ve never burgled a house. Held up a liquor store. Never boarded a crowded bus or subway car, sat in a seat reserved for the elderly, pulled out my gigantic penis and masturbated to satisfaction with a perverted, yet somewhat crestfallen, look on my face.
Sorry about the last bit. I included it for the masterly epithet “somewhat crestfallen”. K & I agreed that after a few pages we found the prose rather “much”, almost falling over itself in the density of its satirical flourishes, or “over-egged” as we say over here, referring to a home-baked cake. That was when it was read out loud. In any case it gets better. I confess I’ve only reached page 17 of the Prologue. This is not meant as a review. Just a pointer, the dropping of a name.
The other day, in passing, I questioned the point of a Nobel Peace Prize. Every year they have to find someone upon whom to bestow the honour, regardless. What a conundrum. Peace, I would suggest, is the achievement of those myriads of humans and other species who just get on and mind their own business. As for the others, the movers and shakers, we can never be quite sure, even looking back at ancient history, which side they were on, whether they helped or hindered peace.
What would make sense, I thought is a Nobel Prize for Public Service, that is, service to people in general, the whole shebang. Not administration, or doing the job one is paid for, or pleasing the powerful: but something that changes the way we see, in a good way, that breaks down the warring factions.
But then, on second thoughts, the existing Peace Prize would do as well, or better, in some future year, to be granted to someone who’s able to speak to all Americans and non-Americans; to make us laugh at the stereotyped thoughts we’ve allowed to shackle & oppress us, whether we are white, black or other.
As Beatty says, in his acceptance speech, clearly overcome: “I love being lost. It’s the only way I get anywhere.” I think he has got somewhere. He has done something, all with words. And having stuck my neck out prematurely, I better get on and read his book. I like the way he knows Latin, too.
As in my previous post, I continue to brood upon my own intent. What am I to do, to serve the whole shebang? I feel like a living fossil, to be discovered by some archaeologist, when the world has got even worse. It’s changing so fast, it lacks the time or means to recall its own past. That’s where I could step in, with memories of my own lifetime, interwoven with the passed-on memories and behaviours of my own grandparents, stepfathers and teachers. Collectively they handed down traditions, sayings and anecdotes going back indefinitely: stuff that comes with warning labels today or is edited out as dated, offensive and frightening to children.
One needs the right touch. Meet Paul Beatty.
Another excerpt from the book is given below, as 6th comment.
a wayfarer’s notes 
About a week before the Booker prizewinner was announced I read – I think it was in the Guardian – a description of each of the books on the shortlist. The only one that interested me was Beatty’s ‘The Sellout’ and I had a hunch that he would be the winner. So I’m both surprised and pleased, even though I haven’t read the book, but I saw an interview with him on TV and I like the man, his unpretentiousness and that he doesn’t seem overly impressed with winning. Glad that you’ve focused on him, Vincent.
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I think “crestfallen” has something to add to the sentence, and so I think it’s earned its right to be there. I think he’s trying to convey how he imagines himself, or rather the hypothetical way that he imagines that someone imagines him in that scene, and he’s trying to capture that moment of shame would creep in after someone has “finished” and the excitement of the moment has passed, so to speak. There’s a sense of foreshortening about it, because he combines the “perverted” and “crestfallen” into a single look, even though it would.probably be two succeeding looks.
And actually, I’d probably take more issue with “perverted.” “Crestfallen” brings an image to mind, a slump of the shoulders, a glow fading from the face, that resigned sign of someone who finds themselves caught once again in that escapable cycle of indulging their weakness. “Perverted” on the other hand … What exactly is a “perverted” look? What precise configuration of facial features am I to picture? “Perverted” is an idea, a judgment really, but it doesn’t SHOW me this imaginary person.
At least, that’s my take on it. I’m sure I’ve made sloppier errors, myself. It’s easier to put someone else’s prose under a microscope.
I am intrigued by that opening. Please let us know your thoughts on the book as you get further along. Seems to me, we haven’t often heard fiction recommendations from you. I could be wrong about that, though.
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Looking again, I see that you weren’t offering “somewhat crestfallen” as an example of a passage where the prose was “rather much.”
My mistake.
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Um, looking at it all from a somewhat white (prefer pink and mottled), non committed, almost Jeshuan Antipodean —
remain fascinated.
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As to fiction recommendations, I’ve spoken about several of Conrad’s novels, Martin Amis’s Money, recommended to Cindy The Secret Life of Bees in a comment, quoted extensively from Women in Love, a bit from Zorba the Greek etc, but you’re right, never before anything newly published.
It’ll be fun to give a running commentary as I go through The Sellout. Now 22% through the Kindle book. The narrator is telling about the place he grew up, somewhere in the outskirts of Los Angeles: I imagine somewhere like Watts, because I once took a local train from Long Beach to central LA that passed through, & formed an impression of the place.
I’m ready to compare Sellout favourably with Ulysses, as a big step forward in the modern novel, and for its masterly technique which I can imagine people not quickly adjusting to. People say it doesn’t have a straightforward plot, but this is because it conveys more than events or ideas in the minds of the protagonist and the people he encounters. It conveys the whole of American society, seen from a vantage point which transcends “the black experience”, if there is such a thing (he mocks the idea endlessly). Is he describing events or attitudes and prejudices? Both because they are inextricable in real life. Sometimes you think he’s trying to tell five jokes in a single sentence. That’s when you might think it “much”, over-rich, but they are not jokes so much as surprises, in which you see something, familiar or otherwise, from a different angle. The consummate skill of his writing, I’m beginning to see, is that it works not only for those like myself who are strangers to much of what he describes, catching many allusions by hearsay only, but I think for those in the thick of it themselves, affected by it—on whichever side they find themselves.
I can best illustrate this with an extraordinary scene in which the narrator reminisces about his father’s death, this father who was an academic in social psychology and used his son for cruel experiments. The son finds his body in the street, he’s been gunned down by the police. But the author doesn’t tell it chronologically at all, and it’s funny and makes you see how these things happen & what a grim kind of game it is, when you strip away the stock reactions we’re so used to. Give me a minute and I’ll paste in a long quote.
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OK, here it is:
Foy, flat broke and embarrassed, called to ask my dad to nigger-whisper him out of his suicidal funk, my father maintained patient-doctor confidentiality. Kept silent about the night sweats, the voices, the narcissistic personality disorder diagnosis, and the three-week psychiatric hospitalization. And the night my devoutly atheist father died, Foy prayed and spoke over him, hugged his lifeless body to his chest, and then acted as if the blood on his sparkling white Hugo Boss shirt was his own. You could see in his face that, despite his speech and poignant words about my father’s death symbolizing black injustice, deep down he was happy my dad was gone. Because, with my dad’s death, his secrets were safe, and maybe his grandiose Robespierre pipe dreams about the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals being the black equivalent to the Jacobins might come true.
As the Dum Dums debated how to mete out a measure of revenge, I adjourned the meeting early by dragging my dad’s body past the drink cooler and placing his corpse on the rear end of my horse, facedown on the rump, like in the cowboy movies, his arms and legs dangling in the air. At first the members tried to stop me. Because how dare I remove the martyr before they had an opportunity for a photo op. Then the police took their turn, blocking the streets with their cars so that I couldn’t pass. I cried and cursed. Circled my mount in the intersection and threatened anyone who came near me with a horseshoe kick to the forehead. Eventually the call went out for the Nigger Whisperer, but the Nigger Whisperer was dead.
The crisis negotiator, Police Captain Murray Flores, was a man my dad had worked with on many a nigger-whispering. He knew his job well enough not to soft-soap the situation. And after raising my father’s head up to look him in face, he spat on the ground in disgust and said, “What can I say?”
“You can tell me how it happened.”
“It was ‘accidental.’ ”
“And ‘accidental’ means?”
“Off the record, it means your dad pulled up behind plainclothes officers Orosco and Medina, who were stopped at a traffic light, talking to a homeless woman. After the light changed from green to red a couple of times, your dad zipped around them and, while making a louie *, yelled something, whereupon Officer Orosco issued a traffic ticket and a stern warning. Your father said . . .”
“ ‘Either give me the ticket or the lecture, but you can’t give me both.’ He stole that from Bill Russell.”
“Exactly. You know your father. The officers took exception, pulled their guns, your dad ran like any sensible person would, they fired four shots into his back and left him for dead in the intersection. So now you know. You just have to allow me to do my job. You have to let the system hold the men responsible for this accountable. So just give me the body.”
I asked Captain Flores a question my father had asked me many times: “In the history of the Los Angeles Police Department, do you know how many officers have been convicted of murder while in the line of duty?”
“No.”
“The answer is none, so there is no accountability. I’m taking him.”
“Where?”
“I’m going to bury him in the backyard. You do what you have to do.”
—————
To “hang a louie”: make a left turn (Urban Dictionary)
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Yes, I think I have a better sense of the kind of writing that you’re talking about. I think I’ve encountered this sort of thing before, usually in other humorous, literary writing, where the writer kind of blurs the line between a straightforward account of the facts and a blend of … I’m not sure if you’d call it metaphor, hyperbole, or what, exactly. I’m sure there’s a word for it. The horse, for instance. I’m doubting there’s an actual horse there. He seems to be drawing off of western imagery while poking fun at it, but there’s no distinction made at all. Likewise, I’m guessing that Foy doesn’t see himself as a “Jacobin”; rather, this is how the more educated narrator sees how Foy sees himself. He’s interpreting the situation through levels of historical context, but again, purposely not making clear distinctions.
It’s a colorful way of writing and it adds color to the character, but it can leave the reader feeling a tad lost, especially reading a passage like this out of context. I’m sure it would make more sense to me if I read the whole book. As it is, I’m not even sure if I’m sorting the facts from the … whatevers … properly.
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Yes, you must read the whole book, this is what I hope, and then you will see that the horse is not hyperbolic but integral and every way validated, consistently from the beginning. Don’t be confused by those who complain of deficiencies of plot or whatever, he has a consistent world that stacks up, not in the sense of “based on a true story” but one that is made up from life as a patchwork quilt is made up from actual leftover pieces of fabric, but in this case not at all random.
He has a horse because his father bought a farm, this is California, even among the endless dreary suburbs there is designated farmland, even where the owners have let it grow derelict. And as you might expect in a page close to the excerpt he riffs about how his father had now bought the farm in more ways than one. And so there are horses, chickens, goats and especially his father made sure he could ride etc.
It is the authenticity of the book’s structure that makes me authentically praise it to a level that appears hyperbolic.
Buy and read. I will refund you if you are disappointed, as the world is my witness.
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Progress report, 39% through the Kindle version: the narrator continues to delight, subvert and stop short of the preposterous. We can guess now why he’s up before the Supreme Court, and his detailed progression into becoming a slave owner, thus discovering the downsides of this intense relationship as well as the seductive moments. I quote:
“Slavery must have been profitable as hell for anybody to deal with all the mental anguish, but sometimes after a hot day of dehorning the goats and stringing barbed-wire fences, I’d be kicking back on the porch, watching the dusk scatter the smog red and heavy across the downtown sky, and Hominy would come outside with a pitcher of cold lemonade. There’d be something so satisfying about watching the condensation form and drip down the sides of the Tupperware as he slowly filled my glass, plop by painstaking ice cube plop, then fanned the horseflies and the heat from my face. In the cool air and ambient car stereo Tupac, I felt a refreshing hint of the dominion the landed Confederacy must have felt. Shit, if Hominy had always been so cooperative, I’d have fired on Fort Sumter, too.”
In such ways and so many more, the author, overriding every fearful taboo that forces our thought into stereotyped grooves, penetrates the mystery of how our forebears behaved, whether slaves or slave-masters, to see how they colluded and made it workable, allowing the imaginative reader to walk a mile in both men’s moccasins. I won’t tell you more, only that Hominy has demanded to be enslaved. Buy the book, I refuse to satisfy your curiosity any further (addressing the world as I speak).
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Great stuff, thanks for introducing me to a new author !
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Hello Vincent,
I too, heard the interview. Like you, I was impressed with the interviewee. Unlike you, I decided that for me, it was best to leave the opus alone, thereby, retaining the positive feelings I had been gifted by the discussion. I believe I received a great deal of insight to the author’s approach to this particular work and, I like to think, his psyche. I really did not want to spoil it by risking being disappointed, as I have been in the past with the hype surrounding other Booker prize winning books. The ones I have enjoyed most are those bought years after their claim to fame, with no preconceived thoughts to relate to.
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Good ploy, ZACL, and these days you can pick up used best-sellers for a penny after a while via Amazon plus a standard postage thus at little risk.
Meanwhile, I’m 75% through and glad to say he remains on the case, sharp as ever. I was particularly tickled by this:
“Knowing I was never coming back to the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, Foy gave me the same sorrowful look the missionaries must’ve given the jungle heathen. A look that said, It doesn’t matter if you’re too stupid to understand God’s love. He loves you regardless, just hand over the women, the distance runners, and the natural resources.”
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