Quote:
Originally Posted by Rooksx
I might not have been in the right frame of mind, but I found Paul Beatty's The Sellout too rambling to be serious or funny. My mind kept wandering because the protagonist's own thoughts consistently seemed to go all over the place. May have to give it another try at some point.
I also found that I grew bored—it seemed a repetitious one-trick pony of a novel—and had to push myself to finish it (though I thought it ended strongly). I was struck by how many good readers have judged highly of the book, but later I found that three of the judges for that year's Tournament of Books expressed reservations similar to my own.
"it’s relentlessly, exhaustingly, exaggeratedly sardonic. It just hammers away: HELLO I AM BITING SATIRE. BITE BITE. There are funny lines galore—I bet Paul Beatty is great at Twitter. But I also bet I would mute him after a few weeks because Jesus Christ, dude, enough."
"A book can be an Objectively Good Book, winning all sorts of awards and getting every accolade, and you could still be like: Why am I finding this to be such a slog? Yes, that’s right: I found The Sellout to be a kind of “drink this, it’s good for you” book that I wanted so badly to like but [whispers] it just left me cold."
“unlike many readers, or at least many reviewers, I rarely found The Sellout funny. I found it sad, angry, and, until the last 50 or so pages, incredibly difficult to read—so arduous that I was shocked to find myself won over at the end.”