Publisher after publisher reckoned Paul Beatty’s satire The Sellout was too hot to handle. Was it the segregation? The slavery? Or just that he wrung so much humour out of it? He’s having the last laugh now. The Man Booker winner tells all

Paul Beatty may be the first American to win the Man Booker prize, after a rule change three years ago that made authors of any nationality eligible for the £50,000 award, so long as they were writing in English and published in the UK. But he very nearly wasn’t published in Britain at all. Beatty calls his fourth novel “a hard sell” for UK publishers. His rumbustious, lyrically poetic novel was turned down, his agent confirms, by no fewer than 18 publishers. And then, finally, a small independent called Oneworld – founded by a husband-and-wife team in 1986 – took it up. The company is celebrating the unusual achievement of a second consecutive Man Booker win, because it also published Marlon James’s A History of Seven Killings.

The Sellout rips up rulebook for what award-winning fiction looks like Read more

“It’s weird for me,” says Beatty, who is 54. The morning after the night before, the New York-based, Los Angeles-born writer is slightly dazed, somewhat short of sleep and good-naturedly overcoming his reluctance to talk about his work. “I think it’s a good book. I was like, ‘Why? What’s all that about?’ I would be uncomfortable guessing [why I couldn’t get a publishing deal]. I would hurt myself. It would be like, ‘Really? Still?’ I guess they thought the book wouldn’t sell.” He won’t be drawn, but the implication is that he suspects publishers may have found the material too harsh, too unconventional, too unfamiliar – and, conceivably, beneath all that, in some undefinable way too black. It is certainly a book in which one gasps frequently – amid deeply uncomfortable laughter and, at times, tears. Nothing is sacred in The Sellout, in which the book’s narrator (surname Me) decides to reinstate segregated schools and reluctantly takes on a slave in his home district of Dickens, Los Angeles. All things, no matter how piously regarded, up to and including the US civil rights movement, are there to be punctured by Beatty’s fierce and fizzing wit.



“I get hurt when I meet editors who tell me about books they really liked but couldn’t publish. I don’t know what that means,” he says. “Sometimes I romanticise – I go back even to the Harlem renaissance, when people would say, ‘This book isn’t going to sell but I believe in you.’ I think there’s still some of that in publishing. I hope there’s still some of that.”



I learned early on ​​that you can do anything on the page. It’s a novel, but there’s a bunch of other crap in there

He quotes, admiringly, the New York novelist Colson Whitehead, who, asked in a TV interview what he was writing, answered: “I am just trying to give myself space to fail.” Beatty says: “I was so envious when he said that. Damn, that was smart. He was giving himself the chance to change. To not meet what someone else wants him to do.” Certainly Beatty is utterly uninterested in meeting the expectations of the publishing industry: you feel he is always nudging the boundaries of what it is possible (or permissible). The poetry of the sentences, too, bounces with a vigour born of rigorous self-scrutiny. He teaches creative writing at Columbia University, and in his work with his students he draws, he says, on his early experience studying psychology in Boston. One skill he picked up was how to “listen to yourself listen. Not listen to yourself thinking, or listen to yourself speaking, but to listen to yourself listening. To think about what gets in and what doesn’t: what you missed, how you heard it.” It’s a way, he says, of reading one’s own work critically. “Beyond that, it helps me interpret the world.” In class, he doesn’t like students to talk about other works. “It doesn’t do anyone any favours to compare them to Gabriel García Márquez … I tell them, ‘Try to be unique.’”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I think it’s a good book’ … Beatty at the Booker ceremony. Photograph: Hannah Mckay/EPA

Discomfort – for the reader, and, one suspects, for the writer – runs through The Sellout. The novel starts with the image of an uncomfortable chair in which the narrator is sitting as he awaits trial in the supreme court. Beatty, just now, as we speak, looks uncomfortable in his own chair. “That’s where I start the whole time – I am rarely comfortable. It’s a little sad but true.” He is inclined also to reject the comfort of generic labels. The book is described, often, as a satire – which can be a way of disguising, he says, “how sad the book is, or the sense of futility in it”. He just about accepts it is a novel, though he laughs at the way, especially in the US, books often have the label A NOVEL written beneath the title. “I learned early on that you can do anything on the page. It’s a novel, but there’s a bunch of other crap in there. There’s some poetry in it – some poems I stole from myself. And places where I take time out and carve out a little essay to get some stuff off my chest. I think of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities – that book popped into my head while I was writing.”

Paul Beatty talks to Claire Armitstead on the Guardian books podcast

We discuss Lionel Shriver’s recent speech on cultural appropriation – not a phrase Beatty is comfortable using – in which she asserted the author’s right to take stories from everyone, everywhere. She argued that the current climate of offence easily taken, safe spaces sought and identities fiercely guarded was in danger of meaning that “the kind of fiction we are ‘allowed’ to write is in danger of becoming so hedged, so circumscribed, so tippy-toe, that we’d indeed be better off not writing the anodyne drivel to begin with”. Beatty’s response is: “I agree – you can write what you want.” But what concerned him about Shriver’s speech was that “all the examples she cites are white writers appropriating other cultures. And it’s not just a top-down thing. It goes in other directions. That’s the thing that I find really hurtful about her perspective: the notion of who’s allowed to take what from whom.”

He recalls a reading he gave once, at which he was asked about “the influence thing”. He talked of his love of Russian and Japanese literature. (His mother, a nurse, was a great fan of Asian culture.) The questioner said: “‘That’s weird for an African-American writer to be influenced by Japanese literature. I would think that you’re opposites.’ I just went, ‘Er, next.’ Afterwards, I was not upset, but I was like, ‘Man, how do you think of people being culturally opposite? What does that even mean?’” He mentions a class he once took with beat poet Gregory Corso. A fellow student read her work, and Corso responded: “Where’s your universality?” he laughs bleakly at the so-called universality of white male experience. “I remember realising that his purview was so myopic. He thought that whatever he said was applicable to everyone.”

Beatty admires artists like Kurt Vonnegut and Kenji Mizoguchi and talks about the moment of being “thunderstruck” by something. Influence, he says, is not about wanting to be like someone, but that “they charged something in you”. “I like people who just don’t care: who kind of go pedal to the metal. My mom always teased me that I liked films where nothing is going on. Sword-fight movies without any sword fighting. When nothing is going on, something is always going on. I like awkward silence.”

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