The narrator of The Sellout had a peculiar childhood. Raised by his father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject of some racially charged and controversial studies. He always believed, that the pioneering work that his father was doing would someday lead to fame and fortune, allowing them to escape from the lower middle class “agrarian ghetto” of Dickens, California where they lived. But fame and fortune never arrived, and when his father died in a police shooting incident, our narrator learns that it was all just an empty promise.

Realizing that he will never be able to leave the town he grew up in, our narrator throws himself into making changes and fixing the problems in his hometown. To that end he asks for help from the town’s most famous resident, the last living Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins. Starting with trying to get the city of Dickens back on the official map of California and moving on to rectifying the woeful conditions at the local high school, our narrator tackles these problems in unique and controversial ways, first by reinstating slavery and then by segregating the local high school! Needless to say his tactics land him in legal trouble and eventually in the Supreme Court.

Provocative, thoughtful and at times difficult to read, Beatty challenges almost everything we hold sacred from the Constitution and the civil rights movement to sociology as a field of scientific study and the uniqueness of the father-son relationship. Biting and discomfiting, Beatty strains the reader’s credulity almost to the breaking point, and yet manages somehow to never break the trust he has created between narrator and reader. Winner of the Man Booker prize, this is truly one of the most difficult but rewarding books I have read in sometime.

Brenda’s Rating: *****(5 Out of 5 Stars)

Recommend this book to: Marian, Keith and Ken

Book Study Worthy? YES!

Read in ebook format.