The narrator, called Me or Bonbon, is an urban farmer in Dickens, a fictional "agrarian ghetto" on the southern edge of Los Angeles, raised as the subject of his sociologist father's racially charged psychological experiments. After his father is killed in a police shoot-out and Dickens is literally removed from the map, he sets out to restore the town. Enlisting Hominy Jenkins, the last surviving Little Rascal, who insists on becoming his slave, he reinstates slavery and attempts to segregate the local school and a public bus — actions that bring him before the United States Supreme Court. Through relentless parody, invented scholarship, and pop-cultural riffing, Beatty attacks ideas of post-racial America, civil-rights pieties, constitutional ideals, and Black identity. The novel won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and, in 2016, the Booker Prize, making Beatty its first American winner.
Author: Paul Beatty · Original publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York), 2015
