JAIPUR: Trying to get a straight answer out of Paul Beatty is an exercise in futility. Pose a query and he will dance around it with visible unease, before crafting a contradictory reply that questions traditional narratives and labels.
His Booker-winning novel, ‘The Sellout’, is perhaps the sum of all these idiosyncratic contradictions that defy all attempts to categorise.
Faced with the disappearance of his home district due to gentrification, Beatty’s protagonist, a black man, brings back racial segregation in a Los Angeles suburb, taking on another black man as a slave.
Several terms have been thrown around by fawning critics to describe the book — ‘audacious’, ‘lacerating’, ‘biting satire’ and somehow, even ‘comic novel’.
Beatty, however, agrees with none.
“People jump on something that they see. I just love it when someone says — ‘I have no idea how to categorise it’. When I see somebody else struggling to talk about it, it makes me happy. I don’t know why people label. It is perhaps laziness, but it is also an effort to be understood. The newspaper columns can only be so long,” he told PTI.
Here for the Jaipur Literature Festival, Beatty’s sessions have witnessed packed venues with audiences and journalists hungry for ‘tweet-friendly’ sound bites.
Apart from the intermittent digs at US President Donald Trump however, there really hasn’t been much forthcoming. Answers get lost in a maze of counter questions and ruminations, perhaps reflecting a continuous process of meditation with the self.
“I am very aware of that. The contradictions for me are very fundamental. It is a book about a lot of s***. The contradictory stuff, that is the stuff that is so much fun.
“That is the hard stuff. It is the stuff that makes things difficult to understand and interpret cause there is often no answer there,” he says.
It is these contradictions, he says, that Americans are so uncomfortable with trying to interpret.
“We, I think I speak for Americans here, we are so uncomfortable with contradictions. Even someone like Trump, he is so contradictory, no one has any idea what he is talking about.
“Other than the fact that he is loud. In a weird way it is not his tone that is contradictory. I think some people are comfortable with that,” he laughs.
The book comes at a time when police violence against the black community in America is at a peak, but Beatty vehemently disagrees, in typical fashion, that it is in any way reactionary.
“It is not reactionary…It is an observation and interpretation. And behaviour. And emotion, and frustration. It is a rendering…But not a reaction,” he says. (AGENCIES)
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