The Sellout is ultimately a virulent denunciation of the lure of Obama’s post-racial America. The book almost reads like a collection of anecdotes, with each chapter bringing in a different plot, a different angle, a new character, all contributing to the author’s vision of the society he depicts.

The quirkiness of Me’s adventures is reminiscent of some of the 20 th-century’s greats – Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces and its grotesque protagonist, or Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and its outsiders. The father who uses his son as his subject for his social experiments – and who represents the town’s intellect – the ageing actor repurposing himself as a slave, the pregnant bus driver who is Hominy’s on/off girlfriend but married to another, the schoolteacher who accepts to segregate the school for the sake of education and the new head of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, an academic who rewrites Huckleberry Finn replacing the “n-word’” with “warrior”, and “slave” with “dark-skinned volunteer” and renames classics, such as “The Great Blacksby”. Me’s peregrinations take us through the life of a black California and introduce us to an array of characters, each as quirky as the next. Aside from re-instigating slavery, Bonbon also decides to resuscitate Dickens after it was removed from the map and re-segregate the local school in a bid to get the levels to improve. Reconciled with life, Hominy volunteers as Bonbon’s slave. Peer pressured to follow in his father’s footsteps as the whisperer, he saves Hominy, an ageing child actor who attempts suicide as he can’t get over his loss of fame, can’t forget the outrageously racist “Little Rascals” movies in which he used to star and can’t bear being the cast’s only survivor. He dies a few years later – shot by the police – and Bonbon, finally freed to make his own decisions, starts a new life as a farmer, producing the best fruit and vegetable in town as well as a large amount of weed.

When the professor of psychology is not busy using his son as a pawn in his research, he moonlights as the town’s ‘whisperer’, talking its suicidal members back into a cheerier vision of life and is also the respected host to the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, which rallies over stale donuts and has heated conversations about the place of African-Americans in today’s America. The Sellout tells of the adventure of its African-American main protagonist – “Bonbon” for his on-off girlfriend and acquaintances, “Sellout” for some members of his community not approving of his life choices – or “Me”, which is his last name, for the state of California that is suing him at the time of the book’s opening.īonbon grows up in Dickens, a ghetto on the outskirts of Los Angeles, the subject of his father’s social experiments.

The sellout book review