Upper Middlebrow

Upper Middlebrow


Episode 44: “Faintly Dickensian?” or Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, Part I

February 12, 2024

Chris and Jesse are thrown into Paul Beatty's 2015 Man Booker Prize Winner The Sellout, because this novel seems to try to take the upper hand with its reader. Our two heroes agree that it's beautiful, but is it a mess or not? We marvel at Beatty's prose, quickly sum up all of epic poetry, and finish with trivia about child actors from The Little Rascals and ovoid/cuboid watermelons.