Beatty's reliance on so many textured backstories and secondary characterizations feels both revelatory and absolutely intentional ... The Sellout while riding beneath terrifying waves of American racial terror and heteropatriarchy, is among the most important and difficult American novels written in the 21st century ... It is a bruising novel that readers will likely never forget.
...[a] howl-a-page assault on the pieties of race debates in America ... [an] outrageous, hilarious and profound novel ... No writer since Tom Wolfe in his Bonfire of the Vanities years has such an eye for social farce ... Beatty plays for very high stakes — but he wins ... [a] beautiful and weirdly poignant book.
The first 100 pages The Sellout are the most caustic and the most badass first 100 pages of an American novel I’ve read in at least a decade...like the most concussive monologues and interviews of Chris Rock, Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle wrapped in a satirical yet surprisingly delicate literary and historical sensibility ... Broad satirical vistas are not so hard for a novelist to sketch. What’s hard is the close-up work, the bolt-by-bolt driving home of your thoughts and your sensibility. This is where Mr. Beatty shines ... The Sellout I am sad to say, falls into a holding pattern in its final two-thirds. Mr. Beatty still writes vividly, and you’re already up there at 30,000 feet. But the sense of upward thrust is mostly absent.
Beatty’s wicked wit is the book’s chief source of momentum. And though he avoids the traps of plotless modernism, Beatty’s constant barrage of asides and routines eventually does take precedence over the supreme court plot, for example ... It’s [the] deliberate subversion of harmful cultural assumptions that makes this daring and abrasive novel a joy to read – the furthest thing imaginable from a selling out of anyone.
...[an] audacious, diabolical trickster-god of a novel ... this damn-near-instant classic of African American satiric fiction keeps asking impertinent questions to the end, arousing those open to its subversive agenda to wonder by the book's conclusion who's really on their worst behavior here: The Sellout's narrator and alleged 'sellout,' or the people in his world—and ours—who think they know better than he does how to go about getting Justice and Equality.
From its title on, The Sellout so clearly and gleefully means to offend that any offense taken suggests we aren’t as comfortable with race or ourselves as we wish to be .... Beatty’s novel breaks open the private jokes and secrets of blackness (one of which is that Being Black Is Fun) in a way that feels powerful and profane and that manages not to be escapist ... If not a classic, The Sellout is destined to be a really good cult jam. It’s a post-soul parody, trying to feel more like the skits between songs than the song itself.
...no one else could have written The Sellout but Paul Beatty. And readers should be ecstatic he did ... the riffs are so smart, so tough-minded and irreverent that the reader (at least this reader) doesn’t miss the charms of a more conventionally plotted novel ... If there’s a problem in The Sellout it’s that there are so many of these moments, and the moments are so rhetorically and referentially antic, that it’s perhaps tempting to overlook or undervalue the incredible sadness and seriousness at the heart of this terrific novel ... the first person narrator’s quest to find out who he is is a classic trope of the modern American novel, but rarely has it been it executed as thrillingly as it is in The Sellout.”
Bit for bit, Beatty is among the funniest authors writing today ... Beatty’s voice is as appealing, erudite, and entertaining as any since Alexander Portnoy’s. It is a lacerating, learned, witty, and vulgar voice — definitely not pejorative-free — brash and vulnerable and self-righteous in its jeremiad against self-righteousness of any kind.
....[a] whirlwind of a satire ... there is a problem when in-jokes become jokes for everyone, which left me not knowing what to make of the book...With Beatty’s satire punching not just up, but all over the place, I’m not sure who the book is for ... If The Sellout does anything, it successfully points not only to the problem, but all the complexities and nuances of the problem, proving that it’s not as simple as (I hate myself for this) black and white. This book doesn’t shy away from anything.
The Sellout isn't just one of the most hilarious American novels in years, it also might be the first truly great satirical novel of the century ... while there is plenty of real sadness in The Sellout, it's tempered by Beatty's outrageously hilarious mockery of politics, entertainment, and pretty much everything else. It's a risky book unconcerned about offending readers, which is a rare thing indeed in today's easily outraged culture ... The Sellout is a comic masterpiece, but it's much more than just that — it's one of the smartest and most honest reflections on race and identity in America in a very long time.
...on the whole, Beatty’s relentless humor carries along a stream of important observations about so-called post-racial America ... The Sellout is a hilarious, pop-culture-packed satire about race in America. Beatty writes energetically, providing insight as often as he elicits laughs.
The Sellout does with race what Flannery O’Connor did with religion in books like Wiseblood. It magnifies problems until they’re absurd and hilarious ... Buy the book. Buy it in extra large print. Laugh at it in front of people. Try to explain why.
