The Sellout - Paul Beatty (2015)

This is going to be a tough one to review.  I had never heard of Paul Beatty before hearing him as a guest on the WTF podcast.  That was how I first heard of The Sellout, though apparently it won the Man Booker Prize in 2016 (this was a pretty big deal as Beatty was the first American writer to win it, but George Saunders followed suit last year [Ed. Later I listened to a podcast that mentioned it was only opened up to Americans in 2014]).  An unfortunate result of winning such an award is the question on the minds of subsequent readers: did it deserve to win?  In the case of previous winners, Disgrace (J.M. Coetzee) and Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie), I thought so.  Remains of the Day (2017 Nobel winner Kazuo Ishiguro) is on my list of future reads.

I can't think of any books off the top of my head that were published in 2015 that I thought were better, but I hesitate to add it to the Best Books list for reasons that will no doubt be difficult to articulate.  Elements of the novel are great.  The writing is lyrical and casually profound.  However, this is not so much a novel as a manifesto.  The story is quite incidental to the ideas expressed therein.  There is kind of a good story involved though, but it is not really fleshed out.  The narrator (Me) notices that his hometown, Dickens (an enclave in south central L.A.), has been removed from the map.  He attempts to redraw the boundaries and put the city back on the map.  He achieves his goal, but the novel is barely about that.  It's more about how he takes on Hominy, who is a former member of the Little Rascals, as his slave.  Hominy is a caricature out of a minstrel show.  In fact, many of the same themes are explored in Bamboozled.  This is a better book than that was a movie, but great performances by Damon Wayans and Michael Rapaport.  I digress.

The novel opens with Me v. the United States of America, 09-2606 before oral argument at the Supreme Court.  It is immediately apparent that we are not in the real world when notice of his case arrives in a letter from the Court proclaiming, "Congratulations, you may already be a winner!" He is also smoking a bowl in the courtroom waiting for his case to be called.  He is basically charged with violating the 13th amendment.  This is one of the larger framing narratives, but I don't think it is really about that.

I would describe this book as incredibly poetic.  At times, it goes off for a dazzling page or two, or for a particularly gut-punching paragraph.  I don't really think it's noteworthy for the plot.  It's more the language, the cultural reference points, the whole mood of the presentation, that make it special.  It also becomes incredibly wacky and hilarious (Foy Cheshire's 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 other works).

I remembered this part bothering me though:

"And in ten years, through countless California cruelties and slights against the blacks, the poor, the people of color, like Propositions 8 and 187, the disappearance of social welfare, David Cronenberg's Crash, and Dave Eggers's do-gooder condescension, I hadn't spoken a single word." (95)

I mean, this just bothers me because he specifies that it's the Cronenberg Crash and not the Paul Haggis one about race relations in L.A. which seems a lot more appropriate but maybe I need to re-watch that movie about crashing cars and achieving climax.  And I'm not sure whether he is referring to AHWOSG or What is the What or Eggers in general.  Maybe I'm just being nitpicky.  He's referring to ten years passing of him going to the meetings of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, a group formerly spearheaded by his father before he meets his untimely end (this happens relatively early in the novel, so I don't think that's too much of a spoiler).  Foy Cheshire often speaks at the meetings.  These are usually great scenes.  There are vividly drawn, memorable characters, such as Foy, King Cuz, and Hominy (as outrageous as he seems).  This is one of the few narrative tropes that work.  However, I don't buy the climax.

Today, I typed out some notes to myself in an e-mail from my phone, over the course of about 30 minutes.  I am going to edit it and leave in the parts that deserve comment.

***

-Too many n-words.

Then again, this is kind of a "definitive" novel on racism, so may be justified.  

-Wins man Booker due to political bent. Not a good story.  Nothing feel good about it, nothing realistic...though it is super real.

This is hitting repeatedly on my theme of the storytelling element.  I don't mean that it's a bad story.  There is something feel good about it, it has a pretty happy ending.  

-Fantastic prose style though. Very talented writer with "controversial" ideas. Shock value important to book...moments of sensitivity are great, but the jarring juxtaposition detracts. Invisible Man sequel?

I don't know if shock value is important to the book, but sometimes the gags from Little Rascals episodes with Hominy feel like overkill.  I guess that is why it is labeled a satire.  I think this is the best phrase from my notes: jarring juxtaposition.  Sometimes these scenes are just so hardcore racist that when the novel pulls back and goes into one of its relatively rare moments of tenderness, it feels refreshing.  You can see I was being very critical in my notes.  Invisible Man sequel is interesting, because I never finished Invisible Man.  Perhaps I only made this comparison because of the nameless narrator but it feels like a spiritual forbear.

-Self evident truths and stereotypes, extremely self aware, self conscious. A lot to talk about. Good book club selection, not good for white people to discuss, no way to act like they know what they're talking about. 

This sort of speaks for itself, but I feel seriously awkward writing this review.  I've removed the comparison to Get Out.  That is something else entirely.  That is both a critical and commercial success.  The Sellout is a critical success, and arguably a commercial one, but not on the same level.  I would say that I enjoyed Get Out very much, but that I thought the story kind of ripped off Being John Malkovich.  I've also removed stuff about BLM, though I do think this could be a kind flagship novel for the movement.  Granted, you would want a novel that delves into the horror and tragedy of an unjustified killing, rather than the more farcical portrayal here.          

Little rascals stuff, apocryphal? Black history in film is often regrettable but book focuses overwhelmingly on negative, nothing about how society has progressed.

This was a weird element of it.  Like, Hominy is probably not based on an actual person, but there are a couple people he could be?  In any case, I don't think many people still watch The Little Rascals, though I could be completely wrong.  But it would be interesting to fact-check any of the re-tellings of episodes of the show and sight-gags from it.

Open mic/comedy connection and WTF, Beatty as stand up comic? Slam poetry like.  Confederacy of Dunces as predecessor along with IM? Baldwin...Coates.

This was basically a reference to the episode of WTF that introduced me to Beatty.  Unfortunately I wasn't able to re-listen to it, but I did listen to a couple other ones briefly that had interviews with Beatty.  I don't think he performed stand up comedy ever or necessarily at open mics except to read poetry.  I recently heard an episode with Ta-Nehisi Coates, and his book Between the World and Me has been something I've been meaning to pick up.  He talked a lot about James Baldwin.  I forget which writers Beatty referenced as influential but he seemed to have a pretty broad palate.  I mentioned Confederacy of Dunces because there is a lot in this novel that reminds me of that, in the way the climaxes occur.  And just in general the way they're both satires.  They're obviously about very different characters and very different themes, but the picaresque and absurd qualities to each seem related.  I definitely think The Sellout can be put in a similar category to Confederacy.  That is something that I didn't love as much as I thought I might, but would probably speak to me in a different way at my age and social position (lol).

Farming in LA? Race riot history. (Future reference: grade A-, best books are only A+) OJ, Obama, Condoleezza, Colin Powell, Cosby, Jazz (?), Gangs, black Chinese food.

Having a farm in L.A. isn't that weird except for the desert climate.  There are probably a couple references to the L.A. race riots, but I would imagine there to be a couple more, regarding Dickens actual situation in the city.  There is not the same discussion of Brentwood and OJ as in The Rise, The Fall and The Rise but it probably comes up once.  For future reference, only books considered an A+ will be named to the Best Books list.  This is probably an A-.  But see below.  

But also Kafka. Again jarring juxtaposition but craftsmanship undeniable. Ideas are muddled but seems to be about why society keeps black people in a box...and how it keeps all races in their own box (except white who are privileged tho they can't dance)

I would excerpt the reference to Letters to Milena (why not Letters to Felice?!) but I'm wary of this going on too long.  I hope nobody takes this last sentence too seriously.  

Recommended, glad I read, but not something I would say everyone has to read asap. Tide has shifted from BLM to metoo. What is the next social movement? Should focus on economy, new-occupy, COL too high, no way for us to survive. End discrimination/patriarchy/old guard powermongers, when do we hit end stage communism? Art is about bringing people together, deepening understanding, open up worldviews, teaching us to be kinder to each other. This book is both a success and failure, however, white people that read it will probably decrease net racism. Narrators identity is fragmented (hates himself in some ways), psychologist father experiments entertaining and silly but also make clearest point in novel about ingrained prejudice. Grew up in Winnetka, so white, so was HS, so was college [Ed. though both were diverse], only learned about AA in law school, always considered u of m to be backwards until understanding benefits of diversity (thinking from different angles on same project), society more "woke" (terrible word) but people too quick to judge and assume other viewpoints invalid (i.e. anyone that has nostalgia for past). The past is sordid and there is nothing truly pure or good or perfect about anything and it's naive for people to pretend that certain people are "good" or "bad" and we don't believe that people have the capacity to change. End result is society more egalitarian but when will we ever be able to say that the playing field has been leveled? The book does its own small part to make the world a better place and is not likely to be read by anyone that will take it the wrong way but it ends up being more divisive than necessary. Avoid pandering to white audience but book arguably would have been better with stronger narrative...legal aspect very interesting and segregation still rampant , see Chicago, so relevance is there and will likely still be there in 50 years. Integration is getting closer and hopefully will be realized. 50 years since MLK assassination, 2018 could be the year racist police practices are stopped. 2 times in my life i probably would have been arrested if not white--how do we ensure that people are treated fairly?

too many ideas in this review, which shows the value of the book.

Briefly, this social commentary may be unwanted.  It contains some personal history that is perhaps best not discussed in a review of this book, but some other time.  Basically talking here about where I grew up and the extent to which I've lived in "diverse" communities.  I don't think we're living in the same world as we did before, race and ethnicity are less the target of discrimination than social class and citizenship (given the current administration).  The community of Dickens is likely one that would be the target of discrimination (getting taken off the map is something that a lot of people would probably like to do for Englewood to transcend its reputation).  I don't really understand the whole prank the narrator pulls about a fancy "white" private school opening up in the area.  

Then I go into more vague stuff that is critical of the tone of the conversations surrounding popular culture. 

***

Yeah that was a pretty unhinged raw feeling there.  How about a passage from the book:

"Godard approached filmmaking as criticism, the same way Marpessa approached bus driving, but in any case, I thought Laura Jane had a point.  Whatever Jewish people supposedly look like, from Barbra Streisand to the nominally Jewish-ish Whoopie Goldberg, you never see people in commercials that look 'Jewish,' just as you never see black people that come off as 'urban' and hence 'scary,' or handsome Asian men, or dark-skinned Latinos.  I'm sure those groups spend a disproportionate amount of their incomes on shit they don't need.  And, of course, in the idyllic world of television advertisement, homosexuals are mythical beings, but you see more ads featuring unicorns and leprechauns than you do gay men and women.  And maybe nonthreatening African-American actors are overrepresented on television.  Their master's degrees from the Yale School of Drama and Shakespearean training having gone to waste, as they stand around barbecue pits delivering lines like 'Prithee, homeboy.  Forsooth, thou knowest that Budweiser is the King of Beers.  Uneasy lies the frothy head that wears the crown.'  But if you really think about it, the only thing you absolutely never see in car commercials isn't Jewish people, homosexuals, or urban Negroes, it's traffic." (139)

Boom.  Let me revise my grade from A- to A for this novel.  It's on the cusp of Best Books and I think it deserves to have won the Booker Prize (or at least to be nominated) even though I still feel the tone of the novel is kind of weird and is not really about the plot but more the passages like the above.  It's an incredible book and I recommend it with the caveat that it is likely to be a bumpy ride for most.

The Rise, The Fall and the Rise - Brix Smith-Start (2016)

I started listening to Turned Out a Punk, Damien Abraham's podcast, sometime this fall.  An entire post should be written about the podcast but suffice to say, Brix Smith was one of the first guests that I wanted to hear.  Her episode probably made me want to read this book.  I'm very glad that I did.  While it is not a perfect book and will not make the Best Books list, parts of it are so incredible that make it worthwhile.  I could not agree with Abraham that it was the best book I had read that year.  It was however, extremely entertaining and highly readable, at times.  As a huge fan of the Fall going back about 14 years, it was a totally amazing experience. On both the podcast, and in this book, Brix references being classmates with Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis at Bennington College in the early 80's.  She does not aim for the heights of The Goldfinch, but sometimes lapses into Ellis-styled prose.  That is, her life could be one of his novels, particularly with the ending in the fashion industry.  What she ends up doing is completely her own.  It may not generally be as artful, but I personally found that I could identify with Brix very closely.  We are all Brix Smith, or Brix Smith is all of us.

I re-listened to the episode today, and forgot the two other Bennington classmates she mentioned--Jonathan Lethem and Jill Eisenstadt.  Apart from that there is not much else to mention--you can listen to the podcast yourself.  I will note that Brix has one of most unique accents I have heard--British valley girl.  She was born in L.A. and spent her childhood there, and splitting time between there and Chicago in her teen years.  She now lives in England.

The stuff about Chicago is fantastic.  On the podcast, Brix mentions that her first concert was at this outdoor venue outside of Chicago, where people have picnics, Rav-en-ia, where she saw the Carpenters and Neil Sedaka on a double bill.  Having recently seen Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons with my family at Ravinia, I found it touching.

Most notably, there is the story of where and when she met Mark E. Smith:

"On Saturday 23 April 1983, Lisa and I paid the $6 ticket price and entered through the front doors of Cabaret Metro, 3730 North Clark Street." (144)

This was within a week of my birth, not very far away, so I have one more reason to feel connected to the band and this book.

Brix writes compelling stories through the first 75% of the book.  In truth I lost some interest after she left the Fall, and it was briefly exciting when she rejoined for a couple years in the mid-90's.  The opening of the book confused me--it's an account of her grandmother seemingly losing it behind the wheel and driving from the Disneyland parking lot through the main gates and into the park before plunging into the lagoon at the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride.  I thought it was real, but Brix later reveals it to be a dream.  I wonder how many other people have that reaction.  It seems like it could have happened, because so much of the rest of her life has been crazy that anything seems possible.  Her stories about her father are both hilarious and horrifying.  There are so many things I would excerpt from this book it's not even funny.  On that note, I should perhaps vault it into Best Books territory, but I think it is instructive to compare it to the other recent female rock musician memoirs that I've read.

If pressed, I have to say that it is better than both Kim Gordon's Girl in a Band and Carrie Brownstein's Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl.  Both are excellent books.  All three of these books are fantastic and totally worth reading, but Brix's is the heaviest.  To be sure, Kim Gordon's account of the dissolution of her relationship with her husband and bandmate, Thurston Moore, is the most powerful piece of writing in the bunch.  This is not to say that Carrie Brownstein's account of the dissolution of her romantic relationship with bandmate Corin Tucker is weak.  In fact, Brix's account of the dissolution of her relationship with husband and bandmate, Mark E. Smith, is the least evocative, in part due to the inscrutability of the man it involves.  Now I love Mark E. Smith but this book definitely sheds some light on him in an unflattering fashion.  It feels fair, though, because there are also moments of extreme vulnerability, humanity, and cuteness.

There are some parts of this book that are tough to read.  Yet even during the most atrocious moment, Brix offers some levity and resists victimization.  As I said, there are many quotable excerpts in this book, so I have to include one about Mark E. Smith that almost made me want to start crying:

"One night, a few months later, there was a knock at the front door of my apartment.  I opened the door to find Mark E. Smith standing there.  He was drunk and held a half-empty bottle of whiskey.  He begged me to let him in, and was in a state.  He told me he had made a mistake leaving me.  I let him in and tried to calm him down.  He asked if he could sleep over.  He was emotional.  I was torn.  Part of me was happy he'd come to his senses and realised what he'd lost in leaving me.  The other part of me was cold and shut down.  After having experienced the attentions and kindness of other men, I was no longer attracted to him.
But still, I felt connected to him.  That would never go away.  He had been my soulmate.  The songs we wrote together would forever be a testament to that.  I allowed him to sleep over, in my bed.  I made it patently clear he was not to touch me.  As he lay next to me, I felt sad.  The next morning, it would be years before I ever saw him again." (267-268)

The stories of the songs were surprising.  It always seems like the Fall are singing about conspiracies or manifestos but in truth are just slices of life.  For example, Brix writes about her sleeping problems and reliance on pills in "US 80s-90s":

"My mother's pills came in the prescription bottle with her name on it.  When we landed in Boston, immigration singled us out to be searched --this happened often, being in a rock group; when we came through carrying guitars and music gear we set off internal klaxons inside officials' heads; we practically had stickers on our foreheads saying 'Search me' -- and the customs officials were aggressively questioning us about the prescription pills not in our name.  This experience led us to write our version of a hip-hop track, 'US 80s-90s': 'Had a run-in with Boston immigration/to my name they had an aversion/Nervous droplets due to sleeping tablets....'  In the airport the signs would read, 'Welcome to the United States of America', but we would always get tormented by security and feel like we were entering a police state.  In the song Mark proclaims, 'I am the original white (big shot) rapper', and it's not hyperbole." (222)

She writes often about "Hotel Bloedel" and "LA."  She seems to consider these her best songs.  She wrote a lot of great songs with the band and I think most people consider the "Brix era" to be the second-greatest period in the Fall's catalog (behind the Hex Enduction Hour era).  Certainly she brought the band in a more accessible direction.  Other noteworthy song inspirations include "Carry Bag Man" (about how Mark E. Smith likes to carry around his stuff in plastic bags).  Actually, her causal dismissal of The Frenz Experiment (the last album she would record before re-joining the band as his ex-wife) is worth capture:

"'Carry Bag Man' is fine, and chugs along, but is a phoned-in effort from Mark, a song about how he likes to carry plastic bags.  'Get a Hotel' is just annoying.  'The Steak Place' is boring and conjures images of gross food, the kind of restaurant that might have photos of the food on their menu.  The most annoying song I ever had to play on was 'Oswald Defence Lawyer.'  I think it was the worst song we'd done since I'd joined the band.  It was interminable, and when we played it live I watched the audience switch off.  It makes me cringe today, just thinking about it.  I was expected to really belt it out, but it just sounds irritating and grating: 'Oswald Defense Lawyer embraces the scruffed corpse of Mark Twain.'  It was cool to name-check Twain, though." (238-239)

Brix writes a fair amount about her post-Fall band, Adult Net, and I was dismayed not to be able to find anything on Spotify or Amazon Music.  I would definitely have listened to The Honey Tangle if I could.  Maybe Brix realizes that streaming services will net her approximately zero and that her fans will seek out old copies of the album.  Or likely it's the record label's fault.

I don't want to give away too many details about the book but can say briefly that Brix's parents divorced when she was young and her mother moved to Chicago and she moved around in fairly fancy places with her father in L.A.  There is more than a fair share of celebrity name-dropping in this book.  It's not always totally necessary, but if I was writing my memoir, I would totally do the same thing.  It's the tangents that usually end up being memorable, such as the story of her professional soccer player friend who soils himself on the field and fakes an injury, or the friend at her bachelorette party with a crazy party trick. 

She goes back from her father in L.A. to her mother in Chicago multiple times through her teen years.  She does not have kind things to say about Chicago, but her account of working at Marshall Field's in the Loop was especially charming (sometimes I like to reflect on the significance of being in the same place as another person in recorded history).  She meets Mark E. Smith at Smart Bar after seeing the Fall in concert at the Metro.  What happens is the definition of a whirlwind romance and is completely insane and showcases the true spontaneity of Brix.  She quickly decides to move to England, move in with Mark, and get married.  She becomes a member of the Fall and stays with them for another four years.  This will be the highlight for the majority of readers.  However, Brix's life outside the Fall is arguably more interesting.  For example, her section about being an aspiring-actress-waitress in L.A after being left by Mark and effectively kicked out of the band is especially compelling.  She meets Nigel, a classical violinist, who is apparently quite a sensation, and is led into a different world, seemingly a little more refined but no less debaucherous.  In fact, I'm sorry, but I have to give a snippet of her encounter with Courtney Love, who invites her to audition for Hole:

"....But as I went to sleep, I had a sixth sense that something was wrong.  A bad feeling.  Something was burning.  I got up, out of bed and rushed to Courtney's room and pushed open the door to the master bedroom.  In her room, she had a selection of candles and incense burning.  Two sticks of incense had fallen over and caught fire.  The carpet was aflame and I caught it just in time.  Had I been five minutes later I dread to think what would have happened.  I put out the fire by smothering it with a blanket and stamping on it.  Courtney was in bed, slumped over her computer.  I fleetingly clocked that she had been mid-conversation with Billy Corgan, of The Smashing Pumpkins.
She said, 'Get into bed, sleep on Kurt's side.'  So I did.  It was really weird, but I felt honoured to be asked to sleep there, in her bed, on his side.  Courtney was warm and kind.  I feel she's often misunderstood.  She is a complex person, as we all are.  At times she has been her own worst enemy, but when you get down to it there is kindness and warmth to her, that is not often talked about." (362)

She then proceeds to talk about how Courtney turned her onto Rohypnol, in one of the more outrageous habits detailed in the book.  Later on, she rejoins the Fall briefly, and then meets her current husband, who then opens a fashion store with her in London.  She also co-stars briefly in a reality series, Gok's Fashion Fix, which sounds like it would be amazing to see.  She has an amazing kitchen and is in love with her pugs.

That is pretty much the whole story, but Brix's mysticism is also worth noting.  She seems to have some sort of otherworldly presence.  One could easily write off her ramblings as hippie-ish, vaguely drugged out, but the realities she has known are so insane that I am inclined to believe her if she says she believes in ghosts.  The precognitive powers of Mark E. Smith are also referenced poignantly, in a story I had read before, about the origins of the song, "Disney's Dream Debased."  The story is that she had taken Mark E. Smith with her to Disneyland and they got in line for the Matterhorn and while waiting he said he didn't like the ride, that it was evil, and that he didn't want to go on it.  They rode it anyways and left.  A few minutes later, there was a commotion in the area, and Disneyland employees came out from hidden elevators and Disney characters tried to distract parkgoers' attention from the Matterhorn.  It came out that a woman was killed when she fell out of her car at the unloading zone onto the track, and the next car could not be stopped from dismembering her.  It's a horrifying story and it would be interesting to know what became of the incident legally, whether Disney has publicly acknowledged that it occurred.

There is another truly insane story about Disneyworld (Brix always goes to Disneyland, but goes to Disneyworld for the first time in her late 20's or early 30's) and how Mickey Mouse may or may not be trying to ask her on a date or hook up with her.  This story appears to be in there solely to detail the breakdown of Brix's mind at the time (it is a weirdly hallucinogenic chapter), but she later brings it full circle when she becomes one of the very few to get Mickey Mouse to appear at an event for her fashion store.  Her comment on the usual gender of the person wearing the Mickey Mouse costume is poignant. 

I could go on a lot longer and pick out more passages, but I think I've said pretty much everything I wanted to say about this.  It's a great book, but it occasionally feels like Brix is going through the motions, telling the story because she has to and not necessarily because she wants to.  The grammar is correct and proper, but the writing is not especially complex and definitely devolves into purple prose at times.  However, I would want any friend of mine to read it, regardless of whether they liked the Fall or not.  I think it would make a great movie--"Scenes from Brix" or something, like Moonlight and three different periods in her life.  Not everyone wants to sell the movie rights to their life, but really, you would do it if you could, wouldn't you?