MattGrantĭid you laugh or cry at the experiments run by the narrator's psychologist/social scientist dad? Does your experience of the world support his three-stage Theory of Quintessential Blackness? There's the obvious example of Hominy and The. “If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That’s Always Passed Out on the Couch.”Īfter race, celebrity culture is a major target of Beatty's criticism in the novel.
Here are some of the comments posted about The Sellout. Please be aware that this discussion guide may contain spoilers! Founded in 1868, Dickens, like most California towns except for Irvine, which was established as a breeding ground for stupid, fat, ugly, white Republicans and. We lived in Dickens, a ghetto community on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles, and as odd as it might sound, I grew up on a farm in the inner city. I wasn't loved, but brought up in an atmosphere of calculated intimacy and intense levels of commitment. I wasn't punished, but broken of my unconditioned reflexes. I wasn't fed I was presented with lukewarm appetitive stimuli. Where I, his gangly, absentminded black lab rat was homeschooled in strict accordance with Piaget's theory of cognitive development. As the founder and, to my knowledge, sole practitioner of the field of Liberation Psychology, he liked to walk around the house, aka "the Skinner box," in a laboratory coat. My father was (Carl Jung, rest his soul) a social scientist of some renown.
I suppose that's exactly the problem-I wasn't raised to know any better. 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 Court. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.įuelled 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. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir.
He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. 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.
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