Paul Beatty, like Jonathan Swift before him with his Modest Proposal, is clearly not afraid to take the risk of raising a few hackles in this denunciation of complacency, from black and white people alike, in the face of structural racism in the US. He uses his hero (firstname: unknown, surname: Me, nickname: The Sellout) to drag racism from under the societal carpet, where so many are happy to brush it, and dangles it relentlessly into his readers' faces.

This satire is made up of a prologue, an intermission, and a short epilogue, woven around six parts divided in chapters. As would be expected, the writing is amusing, heavy on sarcasm, black(!) humour, and irony, and not without the occasional, and understandable, underlying current of anger. Beatty includes Latin quotes and words of US slang (not always understandable to overseas readers) to the prose of what reads like a memoir, peppered with a generous dose of trivia, rather than a novel. His own character would probably say that he "writes white." Having to wade through this deft verbosity is entertaining at first but becomes monotonous after a while. The story's momentum wanes considerably after about a third of the book, until, thankfully, it somehow picks up again in the last third.

In this experiment in reversed psychology, reactionary moves become somehow progressive, upending everything the reader knows about the race debate. Unfortunately, all those moral reversals and contractions make it difficult to quite know where to stand and create an unwelcome distanciation from the material. The reader becomes less and less engaged and is reduced to being a spectator for Beatty's linguistic virtuosity.

It is in the end not quite clear what point Beatty is trying to make, although he seems to be arguing for greater cultural visibility and for black people to claim a discrete space for themselves, rather than merging within the wider society; not unlike proponents of black separatism, I expect. His main attack seems to be against "post-racial" America, where racism can too often be wrongly seen as a solved problem that no longer exists.

As has to be expect from a satire, the book is not afraid to flip received wisdoms on their heads to try and make its point. Some aspects of it, however, in its profane embrace of condemned tropes, such as slavery, segregation, minstrelsy, or a generous use of the N-word, must make for very unpleasant reading for black readers, even more than for white ones.

Having said that and although it has gone mainstream, due in part to its winning the Booker Prize in 2016, it feels like the book is not directed at that mainstream but is rather a sort of in-joke for black people to enjoy away from white society and potential misunderstandings of its purport. Beatty principally references black American culture and there is after all only one, passing, white character in the whole book (in addition to a cameo by a few kids in one scene), and she has been paid to be there.

I think in the end the book suffers from a problem common to most satire, which is that the genre is rarely relatable. Race is an emotional subject and some perspective is often welcome when discussing it but novels work through empathy and emotions. This one, unfortunately, fails in that respect, in that it is not conducive of either and remains little more than an interesting, if entertaining, intellectual exercise.