Here's a fun party game: Calculate all the Indian laws this year's Man Booker winner, Paul Beatty, would have broken had The Sellout been set in this country instead of in the agrarian ghetto of Dickens, Los Angeles. Offence to sensitive communities, classes, religions, possibly defamation, definitely sedition, and to make his crimes even worse, readers are guaranteed to laugh until their sides ache at each anti-national, un-US-Constitutional Beattific offence. Just as well that Mr Beatty, 54, a veteran of rejections by skittish publishers, lives and writes in New York City, where his right to be outrageously, blasphemously funny about race and a score of civilisational pieties, is more stringently upheld.
The Sellout is told by a narrator, Me, whose first name is never revealed, facing trial in Me v The United States of America for slave-holding and introducing re-segregation as a way of boosting Dickens' plunging fortunes. This was a particularly competitive Booker shortlist. Madeleine Thien was a strong contender. Her monumental, if conventionally told multi-generation saga, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, traverses a broad sweep from the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square to Vancouver. Graeme Macrae Burnett's stylish historical murder mystery, His Bloody Project, could have broken the long convention that crime fiction doesn't win literary prizes.
But Mr Beatty established his character's voice, and his own claim to the Booker, with the very first sentence of The Sellout: "This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I've never stolen anything." You feel a little sorry for the 18 editors who passed on this year's Booker winner, though his publishers, OneWorld, are on a winning streak - they also publish Marlon James, the 2015 winner.
Mr Beatty's deft voice has been sharpened over the years. He's done his time as a performing poet (Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce), living in New York in a basement with periodic roach infestations, and as a novelist whose brilliance was saluted by his peers, even as his books flew well under the radar. From 1996 to 2016 is a long time to spend waiting in the wings for the world to acknowledge your genius. Perhaps the mark of a certain kind of great writer is that he or she stubbornly continues to write, to hold on to grace and patience, despite the many frustrations in their path. "I can't tell you guys how long of a journey this has been for me," Mr Beatty said, when he became the first American in the Booker's history to win the Prize, since it was opened up to US writers in 2014.
Mr Beatty's America is not a comforting place. At his trial, Me sits in "a thickly padded chair that, much like this country, isn't as comfortable as it looks". And Me's view of race is as astringent as you'd expect: "Is it my fault that the only tangible benefit to come out of the civil rights movement is that black people aren't as afraid of dogs as they used to be?" Behind the sharp acid bite of Mr Beatty's humour is the sadness of an idealist who takes refuge in humour as he sees all kinds of dreams - about justice, and equality, and nationhood - corrode around him. The Sellout breaks a lot of unspoken rules, in the way it corrals its readers into discomfort and uneasy, unstoppable laughter. Mr Beatty may be the best argument yet in favour of leaving writers to be as over-the-top, even as offensive as they want to be. He takes no prisoners, leaves no sacred cows standing. But everything that Paul Beatty takes aim at, whether race or country, he knows intimately. He writes with familiarity, and lacerating wisdom, of everything his characters embrace, or target. Way back in 2000, he told Bomb magazine that a lot of things were high and low, that he didn't see why he had to make a choice between being street and being intellectual. "The idea that you have to be one or the other - what shit," he said. Sixteen years later, the Booker jury agrees.
