背叛 – The Sellout by Paul Beatty

时间，当代美国；地点，洛杉矶狄更斯城，脏乱差贫民区、底层人民聚居地、暴力频发的危险之都；人物，一个土生土长的普通男孩、大学生农民，本名为Me，他的女友叫他棒棒，他的奴隶叫他主人，他的同胞叫他叛徒，他的国家叫他罪犯。

他在心理学家父亲一系列疯狂的精神实验中长大，迎来双重丧失的成人礼：父亲横死于警察手中，狄更斯城因有碍洛杉矶声名，在地图上悄然“被消失”。左手西瓜，右手喇叭，他构想出一个找回狄更斯城的奇异计划，却同时受到家乡人民的热烈欢迎和以死抗议……

A biting satire about a young man’s isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality―the black Chinese restaurant.

Born in the “agrarian ghetto” of Dickens―on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles―the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: “I’d die in the same bedroom I’d grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that’ve been there since ’68 quake.” Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father’s pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family’s financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that’s left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.

Fueled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town’s most famous resident―the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins―he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.

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