I’m surprised that everybody keeps calling this a comic novel.” His publishers apparently didn’t get the memo: the cover of my fresh Man-Booker-stamped copy has a Guardian quote calling the work a “lacerating American satire”, and the blurb adds that it is “biting satire” that shows off Beatty’s “comic genius”. In the same interview, Beatty was asked if he was a satirist, to which he replied, “No, not at all. With Hominy’s help, he starts segregating Marpessa’s bus and works his way up to local education. The narrator wants to resegregate his city, and ultimately all of America. In the place of “plot”, there is at least an “idea”, a selling point.
The unnamed narrator, subject in childhood to an experimenting psychoanalyst father, meanders around his life as an inner-city farmer in present-day Dickens-a kind of fictional Compton-accompanied by Hominy, a washed-up actor who insists on being his slave and encountering Marpessa, his ex who now drives buses. Fortuitously, plotting doesn’t seem important to The Sellout, his latest novel and recently-announced winner of the Man Booker. Talking to The Paris Review last year, Paul Beatty said he thinks plot is a “very subjective” element.
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