Set in the small town of Dickens in the state of California, Sellout is a tongue -in – cheek satire of the white culture in the United States. The pages of the book are strewn with wit and insights.
The author Paul Beatty, who has written Slumberland and The White Boy lives in New York. He has won many awards for his books among which is being short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The presentation was made by Sadhana Kumar who drew attention to the fact that the author who grew up on the outskirts of Los Angeles, cannot but give his version of the racially charged world that surrounded him.. His father was a sociologist and divorced. Hence the author grew up in a single parent home.
Paul Beatty tells it like it is : Founded in 1868, Dickens, like most Californian towns was established as a breeding ground for stupid, fat, ugly, white Republicans…. and East Asian refugees, started out as an agrarian community. The city’s original charter stipulated that “ Dickens shall remain free of Chinamen, Spanish, of all shades, dialects, and hats, Frenchmen, redheads, city slickers and unskilled Jews”
That sets the tone
Sadhana read out a section that defines the type of individual he would develop into : I‘d be the type of nigger who played pool at the titty bar and cheated on his wife with the blond cheese girl…….I‘d stop pestering my father about my missing mother, finally admitting to myself that motherhood ….. is over-rated. After a lifetime of beating myself for never having been breast- fed……I‘d die in the same bedroom I‘d grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling…….
Questions on the book were raised by Anil Kaul, Anshula Bakshi, Vandana, Abhishk Sethi, Mohit Mittal and Subhash Gorawaney. Dr Gautam Vohra drew attention to the author‘s tendency to speak to a narrow audience of friends and as such the reader did not always grasp his meaning.Take for instance the paragraph at the bottom of page 138: “ I led a jittery brown- eyed calf onto home plate of a baseball diamond backstopped with a rickety chain- link fence. Some of the braver children ignored their rumbling stomachs and vitamin deficiencies to break rank and approach the animal……”.
And there are paragraphs that capture the life of the blacks to an exactness that only the talents of Paul Beatty can. The opening sentence of chapter 21 reads : It used to be that to celebrate Hood Day King Cuz and his latest crew….. would roll into the territory of their arch enemies…… caravanning down Broadway Street, four cars and twenty fools deep, the sun at their backs, looking for action. Most of them, unless they were being carted off to jail, it was the one time during the year they left the neighbourhood.
The discussion centred on why such a book was selected. Some felt that it was too steeped in American culture, black American culture, to have wide enough appeal for the book club members. Others argued that that was precisely the appeal of the book, that it could provide an insight into a not widely known world and related with such penetrating insight.
The consensus was that more accessible books should be sought so that more book club members could participate . Others argued that in any case always a small group took up the discussion, whether the book was an easy read or not. And so the evening wore off.
