![]() ![]() Jess Row, the author of last year’s disquieting thriller about racial plastic surgery, Your Face in Mine, can understand. It felt as if the audience was afraid to laugh, unsure of if whether or not they could laugh, or that it was OK to. ![]() The crowd murmured as Beatty read, with the sound of one man chuckling puncturing the room. It responds to America’s tortured relationship with race in the past and the present with the mockery it deserves, sprinkling jokes steeped in tragedy throughout. The result is the most lacerating American satire in years, fearless in the way that it takes apart our sacred cows and shared delusions. His assistant in all this lunacy is his octogenarian friend, Hominy Jenkins, the last living Little Rascal, who made his name mugging his way through the real-life silent-film era of short comic films featuring a gang of local kids acting wacky. The narrator is high at his own hearing and convinced he’s on trial because he has “whispered ‘racism’ in a post-racial world”. The resulting case is called Me v the United States. Impossible to describe in a succinct fashion, the absurdist comedy concerns a gentleman farmer narrator with the last name Me, who is brought in front of the supreme court for reinstating slavery and segregation in his hometown, the “agrarian ghetto” of the town of Dickens, around Los Angeles. ![]() Both a comic set piece and a slow-motion tragedy, this section embodies the contradictions built into The Sellout, a masterful work that establishes Beatty as the funniest writer in America. ![]()
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