I’m glad to have read The White Boy Shuffle, but I found it slightly hard going.

I thought The Sellout was simply brilliant. This, Paul Beatty’s first novel, has many of the same qualities: his use of language is remarkable and often poetic, the insights into race, class and personal relationships are very sharp and very cleverly expressed as satire and he makes very important and valuable points about vital contemporary issues. However, even though it’s witty in places, there was to me a slightly worthy feel about it which made some of it a slightly turgid read. By the time he wrote The Sellout, Beatty had honed his style and technique rather more, so that book had all the qualities of insight and analysis of this, but was also hilariously funny and immensely readable – qualities which are a little harder to find here.

So, recommended overall but a bit of a struggle at times.

(My thanks to Oneworld Publications for an ARC via NetGalley.)

very well written, paced and plotted out book with as i thought a good view into the life of a black man in America.
I really enjoyed this book and am now really interested in reading the much better known and talked about Beatty book!

This was a revelation to me. I have never read anything quite like it. The book tells the story of Gunnar Kaufman, a young black man making his way through life as a poet, basketball player, terrible dancer and former beach bum. The writing is so sharp and funny and the observations that Beatty makes about Black America are so insightful that one feels you could cut yourself on the prose. The characters are wonderful. Each one is perfectly drawn and there is a real surrealist or absurdist quality to the situations. The book ramps up to a terrific finale, all the time becoming more biting, more shaming and more absurd and it is through this absurdist lens that the reader is shown the real experience of young black men in America. It is a really important book, but it never feels like an 'important' book - it's just an amazing portrait of a clever man. I look forward to reading Beatty's back list with glee and given the quality of this, his debut novel, it is no surprise to me that he won the Man Booker Prize last year. An exceptional book.