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

“I’ve experienced direct discrimination based on race only once in my life. One day I foolishly said to my father that there was no racism in America. Only equal opportunity that black people kick aside because we don’t want to take responsibility for ourselves.”

So says Paul Beatty’s narrator Me, prompting his dad to take him on a road trip that involves the “reckless eyeballing” of white women in “a nameless Mississippi town that was nothing more than a dusty intersection of searing heat, crows, cotton fields and, judging by the excited look of anticipation on my father’s face, unadulterated racism.”

This episode midway through The Sellout reveals two things: firstly how very American it is in its setting, its imagery and its terms of reference. It’s the first US novel to win the Man Booker prize, and – as Me’s lecherous daddy might say – if you’re going for it you might as well push it all the way.

But more interesting than its nationality is how subversive the novel is in its satirical reversal of all the pieties of multiracial societies. Faced with the disappearance of his home district due to gentrification, Me reintroduces segregation of schools and enslaves a burnt-out vaudevillian as a way of restoring his self-respect.

The Man Booker prize has not historically been known for its sense of humour, cold-shouldering Martin Amis’s namemaking 1984 satire, Money, in favour of Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, and preferring well-mannered (or in the case of Marlon James’s 2015 winner A Brief History of Seven Killings, less well-mannered) historical epics to ball-breaking comedies.

But Beatty has achieved the rare feat of writing a novel that is recklessly, scabrously funny, politically of-the-moment and hugely erudite in its frame of reference and its playful invocation of both literary and popular culture.

Kafka and Tolstoy bob about in the background, as does Jean-Luc Godard, who is namechecked repeatedly and included alongside Richard Pryor, Frida Kahlo, Charlie Parker and the Wu-Tang Clan in a pantheon of “Unmitigated Blackness”.

“Unmitigated Blackness,” Me tells us, “is essays passing for fiction. It’s the realization that there are no absolutes, except when there are. It’s the acceptance of contradiction not being a sin and a crime but a human frailty like split ends and libertarianism. Unmitigated Blackness is coming to the realization that as fucked up and meaningless as it all is, sometimes it’s the nihilism that makes life worth living.”

As this passage implies, The Sellout is not an easy ride – its riffs are so baroque, its cusses so ripe, its energy so prodigious that it sometimes leaves you panting by the roadside.

But Beatty is an exhilarating addition to the Booker hall of heroes, and one who has ripped up the rulebook and forced forward our understanding of what qualifies, in the era of Donald Trump and Black Lives Matter, as award-winning literary fiction.