The Sellout
A Black man from a fictional Los Angeles neighborhood attempts to reinstate slavery and segregation. Beatty's satire is the most ferocious comic novel of the decade; it won the 2016 Man Booker Prize and proved that American racial absurdity requires absurdist literature.
Beatty stacks jokes so densely that the courtroom frame keeps disappearing under them; a critic wrote that the “constant barrage of asides and routines eventually does take precedence” over the plot it's supposed to serve. Readers who bounced off it call the pattern “repetitive to a fault” and complain about “sifting through a bunch of nonsense” to find the story underneath. A critic agreed, writing that the book “falls into a holding pattern in its final two-thirds” before it finds its footing again. The pop culture and Los Angeles references pile up fast enough that a reader outside that context can lose the thread entirely, left wondering, as one critic put it, who the book is even for.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
