A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality─the black Chinese restaurant.

Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens―on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles―the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake."

Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.

Fueled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident―the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins―he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme.


曼布克獎得主Paul Beatty在其小說《The Sellout》中充分展現了出色的幽默。本書內容辛辣諷刺，描述一名在成長過程受到孤立的年輕人，因進行種族實驗而遭最高法院審判。本書挑戰美國憲法的神聖原則、探討都市生活、民權運動、父子關係以及象徵種族平等的聖杯――黑人中餐廳。

本書敘事者出生在狄肯斯的「農業貧民區」，位於洛杉磯的南部郊區，他和中下階級的加州居民一樣認命地活著：「我死要死在從小居住的房間裡，望著灰泥天花板上 1968 年地震造成的裂痕死去。」

敘事者由父親獨自撫養長大。他的父親是個具有爭議性的社會學家，因此主角從小便是父親從事種族歧視心理研究的對象，他深信父親創新的做法終將集結成偉大的研究報告，並解決家中的財務困難。然而，他的父親卻慘遭警察開槍射殺，這時他才發現從來就沒有什麼研究報告，父親留下的，只有倉促辦完喪禮後留下來的帳單。

受到這場騙局和家鄉沒落的刺激，敘事者開始設法糾正另一項錯誤，原來狄肯斯在地圖上被徹底移除，好讓加州不再因此地蒙羞。敘事者想到了鎮上最知名的人物，霍明尼．詹金斯，也就是「小淘氣」尚存的最後一人。為了得到他的幫助，主角竟採取了眾人所能想到最離譜駭人的行動，重新實施了奴隸制度，並在當地高中實行種族隔離，這也使得他最終受到最高法院的審判。