The Sellout

It's not easy to be funny for 300 pages, but Paul Beatty pulls it off in this topsy-turvy, never-know-which-way-is-up satire, which leaves you no comfortable ground on which to rest, least of all the territory of Dickens, California, a former L.A. suburb that Beatty's hero tries, with a desperate gallows humor, to resurrect as a "Colored Only" segregated enclave with the help of its most famous resident, the ex-Little Rascal Hominy Jenkins, who insists on calling him "massa." With nimble and knowing gags that rope in everyone from Mary McLeod Bethune to Shonen Knife, The Sellout is a scorched-earth send-up in the fine tradition of Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo and Melville's trickster masterpiece, The Confidence-Man.