The Booker Prize Podcast, Episode 9: The Sellout - the first American novel to win the Booker Prize

In 2014, the Booker Prize broadened its submission rules to allow books from any nationality, as long as they were written in English and published in the UK. This change in eligibility led to worries around whether American novels would dominate the award’s nominations, but it wasn’t until 2016 when Paul Beatty scooped the prize with The Sellout that the prize went to an author from the States. The Sellout is a biting satire on race relations told through its protagonist, who is on trial for trying to reinstate slavery and segregation – and this week on the podcast, we’re revisiting the story.

The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty

Tuff by Paul Beatty

Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor edited Paul Beatty

Slumberland by Paul Beatty

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

1. Paul Beatty’s 2016 Booker Prize acceptance speech
2. Dear Britain, please take your Booker Prize back home by Ron Charles for The Washington Post

Transcripts of The Booker Prize Podcast are generated using both speech recognition software and human transcribers, and as a result, may contain errors.

—

Jo Hamya:

I’ve never not been able to get through a reading before. “One woman put me in a well-executed and, in retrospect…” I’m going to start again.

James Walton:

I’m enjoying you laughing, but I’ll take over if you want.

Jo Hamya:

Sorry.

James Walton:

Hello everybody, and welcome to the latest Booker Prize Podcast with me, James Walton.

Jo Hamya:

And me, Jo Hamya.

James Walton:

And we start today with a moment of raw emotion.

Paul Beatty:

I don’t want to get all dramatic, writing saved my life or anything like that, but writing’s given me a life. And I had all these things… Can I talk about the book for one second, I guess? And yeah, I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting this, I have to say. Give me a second, sorry.

James Walton:

That was Paul Beatty, receiving the 2016 Booker Prize for his novel, The Sellout, the first American to win the Booker Prize after the rules were changed in 2014, because before that, it had been a prize open to Britain, the Commonwealth, and the Republic of Ireland. Jo, do you want to say a bit about, maybe, that change, and also a bit about him, before we turn to the book itself?

Jo Hamya:

So, what is typically referred to in Booker history as the American question, or letting the Americans in, is a bit of a misnomer, because in fact, the rule change that happened in 2014, it’s true that the board of Booker trustees were considering setting up an alternate prize for American fiction, but ultimately felt that they risked watering down what’s called the main prize, the one that happens towards the end of the year, gets announced around November. And so they decided to integrate novels from any nationality that had essentially been written in English and published in the UK. And from my sense of it, this didn’t really start to be an issue until Americans started getting shortlisted. I’m not quite sure why Americans are the sore point. There’s that whole special relationship malarkey that got bandied round in the early 2010s. It didn’t seem to take with the book world.

In 2018, a group of publishers in the UK put together this draught letter. Their argument was that letting Americans in, but I take it that this applied globally as well, letting other nationalities into the prize watered down the integrity of the prize itself, because there are so few English, or indeed British, prizes which focus exclusively on our national literature, and that the prize used to be a really rare opportunity to showcase the best of British, if not best of the Commonwealth. Another argument was that having a prize for Commonwealth writers, and this depends how you feel about Queen Elizabeth, or late Queen Elizabeth, allowed novels from the Commonwealth to sort of speak to each other through the medium of a long list or a short list.

There are many Booker authors, I think the ones who have been vocal include Julian Barnes, and I think I read in the New York Times that are one point Zadie Smith as well, which I find quite surprising, I think probably she’s changed her mind by now, were fairly against broadening the Prize. But the argument for, that Booker made, was that essentially we now live in a globalised world, and it’s very narrow-minded and shortsighted to exclusively focus on our little island, or the Commonwealth. That, in fact, that could be seen as a form of colonialism and backwards thinking, to only want to keep the prize for us, a kind of cultural conservatism, I guess. I don’t know where I stand on that, to be honest. There’s also a theory, slightly salacious, that Booker broadened out the parameters for who got to be considered for the prize in response to the Rathbones Folio Prize being set up. Rathbones Folio was set up in response to a perceived lack of a global prize set in Britain.

James Walton:

That was my memory. I was sort of vaguely involved in that. So there was a year where a couple of Booker judges said, “We like a rattling good yarn.” Thereby causing smoke to emerge from the ears of the more high-minded critics of London who said, “Yeah, that’s not what the Booker Prize is at all. It should be for absolutely literary excellence. And so we’re going to set up one that does it properly, and call it the Folio Prize. So how are we going to be different from the Booker? Oh yeah, we’re going to open it to Americans as well.” And the year they set it up, Julian Barnes won the Booker with The Sense of an Ending. So I thought the Folio Prize was responding to sort of nothing, really.

And then in my reading of it, Booker slightly panicked and then said, “Okay, well, we’re going to do American.” I don’t think it could be a coincidence that it was the year after the Folio that Booker suddenly went American. I don’t think it’s just me being Little England, it’s partly there’s plenty of American prizes. But The Washington Post’s main literary critic, Ron Charles, I think he’s called, wrote an article headline, “Dear Britain, please take your Booker Prize home.” And I think his argument was, “We’ve got plenty of American prizes, you’ve got something completely unique and distinctive. Just hold onto it.” I think, again, from memory at the time, part of it was fear, a belief that, basically, Americans wrote better books than us and they’d always win. And the year before it was introduced, I think the winner had been Eleanor Catton for The Luminaries. And the idea was would a 20-something New Zealander ever stand a chance again once America came flooding in? And in fact, the results haven’t been as apocalyptic as people thought. But let’s go to where we… So let’s redo-

Jo Hamya:

So, all of that being said.

James Walton:

Yes, shall we do the actual subject of our podcast today? Paul Beatty, The Sellout, the first ever American winner, 2016. Black American winner as well. Do you want to say something about him, Jo?

Jo Hamya:

Beatty was born in Los Angeles in ‘62. Amazingly, I didn’t know this before I picked up The Sellout, but he has a graduate degree in psychology from Boston University, and he’s also got an MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College, where he was also taught by Allen Ginsberg.

James Walton:

Amazing, yeah.

Jo Hamya:

Can you imagine?

James Walton:

He’s very interesting on Ginsberg, if anybody wants to look up interviews.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, I know, but I just feel… Can you imagine?

James Walton:

Essentially, he seems to think Ginsberg was A, fantastic and influential, and B, an asshole.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, that sounds about right. But I’d be terrified to write anything if Allen Ginsberg was staring at my sheets of paper. Before that he was a poet, and he was part of Nuyorican Poets, who were a tradition of poets, writers, artists, and musicians whose work spoke to the social, political, and economic issues Puerto Ricans faced in New York City in the ’60s and ’70s. There’s now a cafe, I think in Harlem, or in Lower East Side New York, dedicated to them. And I think post-’70s Beatty would do spoken word and slam poetry there, which he eventually gave up because he said at the point where MTV began invading the cafe to film their slam poetry sessions, he started to get embarrassed, and he hated the way the word “integrity” was being bandied about.

James Walton:

We’ll come onto this and the influence on his book. He also, I think, he gave up poetry because he realised he was starting to give people what they liked, which is-

Jo Hamya:

Just sums it up, really.

James Walton:

It’s against everything he stands for, as we will see in a minute.

Jo Hamya:

So, The Sellout is his fourth novel, and in order they go White Boy Shuffle, Tuff in 2000, then he edited an anthology of African-American humour called Hokum, which apparently no one found funny, which is just, again, so much the vibe of The Sellout, and then Slumberland in 2008, before moving on to The Sellout.

James Walton:

I was going to say the other controversy about the book, apart from the fact, “Blimey, an American’s won”, might be actually the book itself, because it is quite unsparing. Even after eight years or so, or seven years, we do wonder if it’s “Could you write that now?” kind of a book. But anyway-

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, I think you could.

James Walton:

Good. I hope so. Anyway, so the first sentence sets the scene, I think, which is, “This may be hard to believe coming from a Black man, but I’ve never stolen anything.” So it’s sort of funny, sort of provocative, self-deprecating, angry, defiant, challenge to the liberal reader, possibly challenge to Black people. So basically, it’s already clear that we’re not in for a straightforward tale of Black, good; white, bad, or whatever. In fact, not a straightforward tale of anything. Which, for my money, I’ll put my cards on the table straight away, is what makes this book so great. But what you make of that sentence might indicate what you make of the book. So the prologue, which starts it, as prologues tend to do, he’s in the Supreme Court in a case called Mee versus the United States, which is a great thing. His surname happens to be Mee. We never quite know his first name, although his-

Jo Hamya:

He also goes by Bonbon.

James Walton:

Bonbon, which is a name his on-and-off girlfriend calls him. But he’s basically been charged with setting

back the cause of Black people, hence the title. And as far as he’s concerned, the allegations boil down to conspiracy to upset the apple cart, just when things were going so well.

Jo Hamya:

That’s a very euphemistic way to put it. He’s essentially charged with reinstating segregation.

James Walton:

We’ll come onto that, but when things were going so well, I think is a reference to the fact that it’s published in America in 2015. So Obama’s the president, I think that’s quite an important background to this book. So things are going so well. And, “Your Honour, I plead human.” He says. Then they flash back to the main story, and he was growing up, he grew up on a farm in inner city LA. So there were farms in inner city LA, more or less South Central, but a little city to itself called Dickens, where he was homeschooled by his father, who had very fixed ideas of what being Black means, which on the whole means you suffer from constant racism.

And just to make sure that he gets it, he does this sort of aversion therapy where, when Mee or Bonbon is very small, he’ll put a picture of Nixon and some pictures of police cars and some bottles of perhaps Blue Ribbon. We’ll talk about the obscureness of references to British, but I think perhaps Blue Ribbon, for want of a better word, is kind of a redneck sort of beer, really.

Jo Hamya:

Mm-hmm.

James Walton:

So he puts these things around his cot, and then starts firing the gun at the ceiling saying, “N-word, go back to Africa” except not N-word, but we may have to discuss whether-

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, I want to have a conversation about this.

James Walton:

Yeah, let’s come onto that.

Jo Hamya:

No, but I want to do it on the mic, because I think this is actually very core to the book.

James Walton:

No, it is. Except his dad doesn’t say “N-word”, yeah. But then there’s another very funny section, I think, which is very dark. Again, this might give you some indication of whether you’d enjoy the book or not. But at one point, he says to his dad that he’s never experienced out-and-out racism. So his dad drives him for three days, nonstop, to a Mississippi town that, quote, “was nothing more than a dusty intersection of searing heat, Crow’s cotton fields, and judging from the excited look of anticipation on my father’s face, unadulterated racism.” So then his father says to him, “See that woman coming out, that white woman coming out of the supermarket? Go and wolf whistle at her, will you?” Obviously recalling some of the great horrible cases of lynchings and things in the South.

Anyway, so he goes up to her, he realises he can’t wolf whistle, he just does this kind of vague… Of Ravel’s Bolero. So his dad says, “Look, out the way, I’ll show you how to wolf whistle.” Wolf whistles at the woman, and the woman immediately says, “Oh, yeah, okay.” And then goes off with the father. His dad is then shot by the police. Also, Dickens itself disappears, the whole town is just suddenly not there, which particularly affects a guy called Hominy Jenkins, who’s the most famous local person, whose fans used to come looking for him in Dickens. And Hominy Jenkins was a fictional, and minor, normally on the cutting room floor, actor, but in what was a real life series of shorts called Little Rascals, which is about little kids, Black and white, growing up together, where the Black kids are all, I think, racistly portrayed, which Hominy rather liked being. Mee is aware that he’s not a national living treasure, but a living national embarrassment, a mark of shame on the African-American legacy, stricken from the racial record.

Anyway, Hominy liked this subservient role, or he might just be mad. He volunteers, or in fact insists, on becoming Mee’s slave, and insists on being whipped, and he calls him massa and so on. Mee doesn’t really like doing this, so he outsources the whipping to a dominatrix who charges 200 bucks an hour plus racial incidentals. So you get, I think, the first three epithets are free. And then after that, you pay three bucks for every racial insult, except for the N-word, which is the big 10 bucks.

Meanwhile, he also brings Dickens back. He decides he’s going to bring Dickens back. He paints a line marking its border, also puts up signs on the freeway saying things like, “Watch out for falling home prices”, “Black on Black crime ahead”. Once he’s done that, he tries to find a sister city, but unfortunately he’s turned down by Kinshasa, Juarez, and Chernobyl, none of whom want to be associated with Dickens. So anyway, then Hominy asks, for his birthday, he says, “Just get me some racism.” And so the way he gets him some racism, he puts a sign up on the bus driven by his on-and-off girlfriend Marpessa saying some seating reserved for white people. So Hominy’s dying to give up a seat, or being ordered to give up a seat to a white person. Unfortunately, there aren’t really any white people on the bus, so they have to hire a semi-prostitute actress who insists on taking his seat.

But then in another… You can see how this book is, it does whack out in all possible directions, absolutely equal opportunities offender. Remember a bit in The Simpsons where Homer explains to Bart the way to get out of jury services is to be biassed against all races. And so this is what this sort of book is. So anyway, what he finds out is that having segregation cuts crime on the bus, that Black people start behaving much better, Marpessa reports, treating each other with new respect, partly maybe because of the discrimination they’re jointly facing.

Jo Hamya:

But the thing is, Dickens is basically almost completely Latino by this point.

James Walton:

Well, there’s that problem too. That’s the thing, is he sets off next to resegregate the local school, which is significantly named Chaff School, presumably the wheat and the chaff. Again, the problem is it’s segregated already and they’re not quite sure what… Yeah, because there’s Latinos. So he builds this building site, and with a fence around it, and has pictures of what’s going to be built, which is a new all-white school called Wheaton Academy. So it’s got white kids with state-of-the-art labs and everything.

And again, this causes the Black kids in Chaff to start behaving better, as if proving themselves against the whites. And house prices go up, and the whites now want to come to Chaff. So you got this kind of, again, rather savage reversal of all the scenes in the South in the late ’50s and ’60s of white kids insisting on being allowed into Chaff Academy, and Black people, headmistress, and so on at the door saying, “Not allowing them in.” And it’s at one of the demonstrations for this that the cops discover that he’s got a slave, and his slave’s got whip marks, and that he’s arrested, and that’s why he’s in the Supreme Court at the beginning. There we are. I’ll leave it there.

Jo Hamya:

I’m tired.

James Walton:

So, that’s all hilarious, isn’t it?

Jo Hamya:

Do you know what? I laughed a lot less than I expected to. I’ve been laughing all the way through your summary, but I’m not sure. I think the hardest cackle I gave, and this sounds like an indictment, but was on page 30, and it’s one of his father’s social experiments. I think it is worth reading out loud, because it’s a great laugh. So, his dad is replicating the Kitty Genovese case, which if you’ve done high school or A Level psychology, you get taught this as a basic standard. Kitty Genovese was a woman who, in 1964, was raped and stabbed to death in New York. As this was happening to her, she kept screaming for help. This initiated what was then called the bystander effect, i.e. the more people there are around to help, the less people actually help, they’ll just assume that someone else is going to help instead of them. And I think also that same case found that if she’d yelled fire instead, someone would’ve immediately helped.

So, Bonbon’s father wants to replicate this in a sort of race adjacent way, because he thinks that the bystander effect actually doesn’t apply to Black people, they’re a loving race whose survival has been dependent on uplifting each other and helping each other. So he takes his son to a busy intersection.

James Walton:

I know it’s coming, I think it is funny, but…

Jo Hamya:

We’re going to hell for laughing. He takes his son to a busy intersection, and he starts mugging and beating him. And I’m just going to read now, because I can’t do it justice. “He beat me down in front of a throng of bystanders who didn’t stand by for long. The mugging wasn’t two punches to the face old when the people came, not to my aid, but to my father’s. Assisting him in my arse kicking, they happily joined in with flying elbows and television wrestling throws.” I’ve never not been able to get through a reading before. “One woman put me in a well-executed, and in retrospect…” I’m going to start again.

James Walton:

I’m enjoying you laughing, but I’ll take over, if you want.

Jo Hamya:

Sorry. “One woman put me in a well-executed and, in retrospect, merciful, rear-naked chokehold. When I regained consciousness to see my father surveying her and the rest of my attackers, their faces still sweaty and chests still heaving from the efforts of their altruism, I imagine that, like mine, their ears were still ringing with my high-pitched screams and their frenzied laughter. On the way home, Pops put a consoling arm around my aching shoulders, and delivered an apologetic lecture about his failure to take into account the bandwagon effect.”

James Walton:

I think the book is full of… I suppose one question is, it just a series of riffs? Well, A, is it just a series of riffs? And B, if it is, does that matter?

Jo Hamya:

I can maybe see why you would say that, because the sentences, it’s something that’s really commonly said about this book, is that the sentences are so layered, they kind of pile on. They’re extremely rhythmic. This is maybe part of Beatty’s training as a poet. And also I think two of his previous novels, quite interestingly enough, revolve around a musician as a protagonist. I think Slumberland focuses around a DJ.

James Walton:

In Berlin, right?

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, and Tuff around a Black guy going for office who gets mistaken for a hip hop artist. And so there is this-

James Walton:

There’s definitely a podcast to be done, by the way, on authors who’d much rather have been rock stars.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, we’ll come onto that.

James Walton:

We will come on to that.

Jo Hamya:

But I think Beatty’s sentences build, there are layers to them. They’re extremely well constructed. So I guess that’s the closest I could think of when it comes to the idea of riffs. But honestly to me, and I’m not the only one to have said this, the longer I read this book, the bleaker I found it, the more nihilistic it became to me. And the laughter on my end sort of died out, because I kept finding myself going… You’re right, he does hit out in all directions.

James Walton:

One of the things he’s definitely got in his sights, I think, along with everything else in the entire world, is Black intellectuals.

Jo Hamya:

Yes. So he hits out this character of Foy Cheshire, who insists on rewriting the entire canon of American literature so that it’s Black appropriate. At some point, Foy renames Huckleberry Finn, The Pejorative-Free Adventures and Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of African-American Jim and His Young Protege, White Brother Huckleberry Finn, as They Go in Search of the Lost Black Family Unit. And then at another point, he rewrites The Great Gatsby, and I think he rewrites it as The Great Blackby? Hold on.

James Walton:

The Great Blacksby, he does this sort of parody of the first sentence, “In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.”

Jo Hamya:

Which Foy Cheshire rewrites as, “Real talk, when I was young, dumb, and full of cum, my omnipresent, good to my mother, non-stereotypical African-American Daddy dropped some knowledge on me that I’ve been tripping off ever since.”

James Walton:

Yeah.

Jo Hamya:

And do you know what? After that, Bonbon burns the book, which I don’t agree with book burning, but I would too. He does hit-

James Walton:

Some of those titles are great as well, of his rewrites, there’s Measured Expectations.

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

And also Middlemarch Middle of April, I’ll Have Your Money, I Swear.

Jo Hamya:

He does hit out in every single direction possible. And Beatty addresses this himself, maybe we’ll get onto this later.

James Walton:

In interviews, he’s always said if he has a mantra, it would be, “I don’t know”.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah.

James Walton:

Someone asks him, “How do you measure racial progress?” And he says, “I’ve no idea.” And in a way, that’s what the book’s about. But speaking to you in the build up you saw this, here comes a cunning set of words, not so much as a Sellout, but as a cop out. Do you think so?

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, no, I slightly regret that now.

James Walton:

Oh, do you? He does talk about it that, in a way, he wrote this book to make himself flinch. And I-

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, and he flinches often.

James Walton:

He flinches often. And I was reading, first I was thinking he’s really playing a game of how far can you go here with the reader, isn’t he? How much of this can you take? But actually it’s also, how much of it can he take? Because he has goes at Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, my God.

James Walton:

If Martin Luther King had only tasted how horrible the ice tea was in Southern cafes, he wouldn’t have bothered trying to get a seat there. And he talks a lot about Martin Luther King’s lack of sense of humour, I think.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, he does. I think-

James Walton:

But he’s obviously a civil rights fan-

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, I know-

James Walton:

But he’s just testing out his-

Jo Hamya:

He is. I think the thing that I find really difficult, so one of the most famous sections in this book comes towards the end. It’s at a comedy club that’s in Dickens, and there’s a Black comedian on stage, and he’s making a joke. And then I think some white people laugh at it and he turns around and he says-

James Walton:

A white couple.

Jo Hamya:

“This shit isn’t for you.” Which I guess is interesting, because I know quite a few people who would probably espouse that sentiment, who might read The Sellout and feel similarly; that the book needs to be safeguarded against a certain kind of readership, but then Beatty does one better, and he has Bonbon think, “Well then, who is it for?”

James Walton:

No, I think that’s absolutely, that’s it, yeah.

Jo Hamya:

But my problem with this book, because that’s a really admirable question, it’s a really worthwhile question. I don’t think many works of literature have actually credibly asked this. It’s not so much that Beatty doesn’t give an answer, it’s that he eviscerates all and any chance of ever finding an answer to that question.

James Walton:

That comedy club scene, a lot has happened by then, but that is sort of… Those people are sent out, and the comedian says, “Get the F out, this is our thing.” And Mee says, “I wish I’d stood up to the man and asked him a question, “So what exactly is our thing?”“

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

And, “What exactly is our thing?” Is the question that the book absolutely poses, and can’t answer.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, I think there are two-

James Walton:

I think authentically can’t answer, really.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, I think there are two… Well actually, do you know what? I think there are two strands to that. I think there’s one strand that does get answered and one that doesn’t. So the one that doesn’t, the “What is our thing?” Is the, I guess… This feels so icky, phrasing it like this, but it’s the race question. What is our thing? What is Blackness? This is a book that actually eviscerates a lot of the tenets of identity that particularly African Americans have used to sustain themselves. Whether it is a kind of self-immolating intellectualism, or whether it’s leaning hardcore into the kind of stereotypes of Black America in the way that Homily Jones does with his minstrelism, or whether it’s the kind of ambivalence that Bonbon feels. He just wants to grow weed and artisanal watermelon, and keep his head down, and eventually finds that he can’t.

James Walton:

And reintroduce segregation.

Jo Hamya:

And reintroduce segregation.

James Walton:

But yeah, I know what you mean.

Jo Hamya:

Or whether it’s his father, who has these sort of high-minded aspirations towards a higher Black self. These are all, in my very humble opinion, the only claim I have to this is that I used to live in Florida for three years. But even as-

James Walton:

Do you want to say a bit about that?

Jo Hamya:

I’m quite firm about saying that I’m mixed race. I’m mixed Black British. My mom’s Polish, my dad’s Ugandan, I was born in London. But I think that’s a really different kettle of fish. I didn’t realise how different it was until I got to America. In England, I’d been going to this school in a tiny village that was all white. There were maybe two other kids, one was like Bengali and the other one was Black, and everyone thought we were related. And everyone was like, “You’re Black, you’re Black.” And I got to America, and all the Black kids at my school in Florida kept going, “Well, you’re not Black, you’re white.” Which is just a complete reversal. I think that’s something-

James Walton:

How old were you, Jo, by the way?

Jo Hamya:

Oh, I was between 13 and 17, this was actually really formative.

James Walton:

Tough time, yeah.

Jo Hamya:

No, I had a great time. I loved going to high school in Florida. In a way, it was so much more egalitarian than going to school in England. But I think that is a question that shouldn’t be answered, that Beatty is right to leave unanswered. I think in another interview, something he points out that the question a lot of people ask him is, “What does racial progress look like? How can we get better?” And he keeps saying, “I don’t know.” But it’s not a cop out, because as he rightly says, a kind of racial utopia looks really different to everyone. That there is no one answer to that, and to hem yourself in in accordance with one answer is actually to create more barriers to your identity.

The second line of that question is actually a lot more intimate, and one that I find… Now, this is me being a cop out, but I find a lot more interesting to think about than the idea of this book as a satire on race relations in America. But it’s this idea of self-actualization and personal identity when you are in any kind of place that insists on moulding you into a socially acceptable version of yourself based on what you look like.

So Bonbon’s father, who is a sociologist of sorts, is also a figure who basically, when he’s needed, he’ll help talk people in Dickens down from suicide or manic episodes. And the way he does this is by asking them a question, and that question is, “Who am I, and how can I be that person?” And I think actually in a way, Beatty… Or Beatty, sorry, does answer that question throughout the book. And it is through an artist’s sense of ambivalence to everything that’s happening around you. And in fact, the happiest Bonbon ever was was when he was selling artisanal watermelon and beautiful satsumas to the good citizens of Dickens, and, on occasion, great weed. That’s when he felt peace and also when he delivered peace to other people. Regularly through the town, a kind of stench goes through, and the only thing that kills it is the smell of his satsuma tree. I find that really beautiful.

James Walton:

Yeah. I think the very last line of that question, of “Who am I, and how can I be it?” The very last line of the book is Obama. “I remember the day after the Black dude was inaugurated, Foy Cheshire, proud as punch, driving around the town in his coupe, honking his horn and waving an American flag. He said he felt like the country, the United States, had finally paid off its debts. “And what about the Native Americans?” I said, “What about the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mexicans, the poor, the forests? When do they collect?” I asked him. He just shook his head at me, said something to the effect that my father would be ashamed of me, and that I’d never understand. And he’s right. I never will.” Is the very final sentence of the book. “I will never understand it.”

Jo Hamya:

I don’t know.

James Walton:

Yeah, I don’t know. That seems…

Jo Hamya:

Beatty’s take on this is sort of, from what I understand, but I’m paraphrasing a quote of his here, but he says, “It was shit yesterday, it’s shit today, and it’ll be shit tomorrow.” And whilst these questions over how to build a community, how to establish a cogent sense of identity, how to persist in the face of suffering, while these are all questions worth asking, you cannot kill yourself in your life trying to answer them.

James Walton:

And I think probably we should not duck the N-word question, should we?

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, no, we shouldn’t.

James Walton:

Let’s finish with that. Obviously as good liberals, we’re not going to use it on this show, which I suspect would possibly amuse Beatty? Possibly make him slightly want to question our pious, liberal squeamishness, but we’re still not going to do it. But he does, as I say, when he outsources the whipping of his slave to the dominatrix, the N-word is 10 bucks extra. So he knows it has a certain power.

Jo Hamya:

He does.

James Walton:

He is funny with it, but he’s very against the euphemism of it, isn’t he? At one point, I think it’s pretty much him talking. Certainly he seems to reflect what’s in the book, that the use of the N-word, or trying to get rid of the N-word from Huckleberry Finn and so on. “Why blame Mark Twain because you don’t have the patience and courage to explain to your children that the,” quote, “”N-word” exists, and that during the course of their sheltered little lives, they may one day be called a actual N-word, or, even worse, deign to call someone else an actual N-word. No one will ever refer to them as “little Black euphemisms”, so welcome to the American Lexicon, N-word.”

I think there’s a serious point to this, because he says “the difference between most oppressed people of the world and American Blacks. They vow never to forget, and we want everything expunged from our record, sealed and filed away for eternity. We want someone like Foy Cheshire to present our case to the world with a set of instructions that the jury will disregard centuries of ridicule and stereotype…” And then I can’t read on without more swearing coming on, but yeah.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, it’s interesting, because while Beatty was doing his press tour post-Booker win around London, all the readings that I heard, I noticed that he omitted it. I don’t know whether he did that for British sensibility.James Walton:

I’m sure in America [inaudible].

Jo Hamya:

It’s so much more common to hear. And I was shocked when I lived in America how common it is to hear the N-word, and how flippantly it’s put out. It does sort of raise an interesting question about how this book is received by a Black British audience versus an African-American audience. This idea of what’s called the Black Atlantic, that these groups have a kind of cultural exchange, but actually, Reni Eddo-Lodge, who rather famously wrote Why I’m No Longer Talking to White people About Race a few years ago, was the person to review this for The Guardian. Actually kind of an obvious choice for the time. She found herself slightly unconvinced by the novel. Towards the end of the review, I think she says that fundamentally, its nihilism leaves it a little bit lost.

And I think that at least part of my… I wouldn’t want to say the N-word on this podcast either, partly because I know who our audience is, but also because I don’t use it in my personal life. That’s to do with a kind of cultural schooling. There is a massive difference between being Black in America and Black in the UK, I think.

James Walton:

I obviously want to ask you about that, but-

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, I told you!

James Walton:

… that’s another three hours of podcasting.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah.

James Walton:

So maybe we should call a halt to The Sellout now with our traditional question of who would you recommend it to?

Jo Hamya:

I want to know your answer first.

James Walton:

Sort of anyone who doesn’t mind a bit of a wrestle. When he says, actually, in that Booker speech that we heard, it’s quite a hard book and it’s quite a hard read, and it sort of is. We’ve said it barrels along, but it barrels along in quite a complicated, and as I say, full of slightly obscure references, loads and loads and loads of, I think, cracking jokes. I’d recommend it to any of my more bookish friends. I think you’d have to sort of know your way round an odd novel, properly. But once you did that, which I’m hoping is most of our listeners… In that case, I would recommend it to most of our listeners. You may find yourself outraged, but if you are, then you are responding to the book exactly as I think you’re meant to.

Jo Hamya:

It’s really interesting. I think if you are a person who wakes up and doomscrolls, or goes to bed and doomscrolls, it’s a really interesting kind of monolith, in a way, of a book to read through. It’s like a blast from the past, it hits you in the face. And for that, I would say that it’s not exactly like a popular novel, or a beach read, but it’s tremendously accessible just from the point of view of what it does to your sense of memory. So yeah, I would say I’d recommend this to either people who love Voltaire or DBC Pierre.

James Walton:

Okay, and I’d recommend it to all our listeners.

Jo Hamya:

And that’s it for this week. If you haven’t already followed the show, please do, and remember to leave a rating, hopefully five stars.

James Walton:

Yeah, [inaudible]. You know you want to. You can also find us at thebookerprizes.com and on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack, all at @TheBookerPrizes, all one word.

Jo Hamya:

And we’d love to hear what you think about the episode and The Sellout, so get in touch.

James Walton:

And until next time, goodbye.

Jo Hamya:

Bye.

James Walton:

The Booker Prize Podcast is hosted by Jo Hamya and me, James Walton. It’s produced and edited by Benjamin Sutton, and the executive producer is John Davenport. It’s a Daddy’s SuperYacht production for The Booker Prizes.