Paul Beatty’s novel “The Sellout,” a blistering satire about race in America, won the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday, marking the first time an American writer has won the award.
The five Booker judges, who were unanimous in their decision, cited the novel’s inventive comic approach to the thorny issues of racial identity and injustice.
With its outrageous premise and unabashed skewering of racial stereotypes, “The Sellout” is an audacious choice for the judges, who oversee one of the most prestigious awards in literature.
“The truth is rarely pretty, and this is a book that nails the reader to the cross with cheerful abandon,” Amanda Foreman, the head of the judging panel, said at a press briefing in London before the winner was announced. “It plunges into the heart of contemporary American society.”
At a ceremony in London, Mr. Beatty said that writing “The Sellout” had taken an emotional toll.
“It was a hard book for me to write; I know it’s hard to read,” he said. “I’m just trying to create space for myself. And hopefully that can create space for others.”
A raucous tragicomedy that explores the legacy of slavery and racial and economic inequality in America, the novel felt deeply resonant at a moment when police violence against African-Americans has incited protests around the country and forced Americans to confront the country’s history of racism.
In a review in The New York Times, Dwight Garner wrote that the novel’s first 100 pages read like “the most concussive monologues and interviews of Chris Rock, Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle wrapped in a satirical yet surprisingly delicate literary and historical sensibility.”
Other critics gently warned that Mr. Beatty’s scathing comic style might not appeal to everyone. “Readers turned off by excessive use of the N-word or those who are easily offended by stereotypes may find the book tough going,” a critic for Kirkus Reviews wrote in a largely positive review.
The novel’s narrator is an African-American urban farmer and pot smoker who lives in a small town on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Brought up by a single father, a sociologist, the narrator grew up taking part in psychological studies about race. After his father is killed by the police during a traffic stop, the protagonist embarks on a controversial social experiment of his own, and ends up before the Supreme Court.
He becomes a slave owner to a willing volunteer, an elderly man named Hominy Jenkins who once played understudy to Buckwheat on “The Little Rascals,” and seeks to reinstate segregation in a local school.
In his acceptance speech, Mr. Beatty waded into the raging debate about cultural appropriation. “Anybody can write what they want,” he said. “Cultural appropriation goes every direction.’’
The competition for the Booker, which was first awarded in 1969, has been even more intense in recent years after the prize was opened to any novel written in English and published in Britain. Until 2014, the prize was restricted to novels written by authors from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth nations. Previous winners include Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Peter Carey and Michael Ondaatje.
The expansion of the prize set off some criticism from writers who were concerned that the Booker would lose its distinctly British flavor and that emerging writers would be overlooked in favor of literary heavyweights.
This year’s finalists included “His Bloody Project,” a historical thriller by the Scottish writer Graeme Macrae Burnet; “Do Not Say We Have Nothing” by the Canadian author Madeleine Thien, which explores the legacy of China’s Cultural Revolution; the Canadian-British author David Szalay’s “All That Man Is,” a collection of linked short stories about nine men in different phases of life; “Eileen,” by Ottessa Moshfegh, which centers on a self-loathing young woman who works in a juvenile prison in New England; and “Hot Milk,” a coming-of-age story by Deborah Levy.
Last year, the Booker was awarded to the Jamaican novelist Marlon James for his novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” about the attempted assassination of Bob Marley.
Mr. Beatty, 54, grew up in Southern California and was raised by his mother, a nurse and painter who exposed him and his two sisters to novels by Saul Bellow and Joseph Heller. He began writing hip-hop-inflected poetry as a young adult in his mid-20s. In 1990, he became the Grand Slam Champion of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, which led to his first book deal.
A fan of George Orwell and Kurt Vonnegut, he began writing fiction, and published his debut novel, “The White Boy Shuffle,” about a black surfer in Los Angeles, in 1996. He published two more novels, “Tuff” in 2000 and “Slumberland” in 2008, and edited “Hokum,” an anthology of African-American comic writing. Much of his writing explores recurring themes: human psychology, racial identity and our inability to escape the lingering effects of history.
In “The Sellout,” Mr. Beatty, who lives in New York, amplified those themes and took gleefully irreverent stances by poking fun at the civil rights movement and Black History Month. In the acknowledgments, he says he drew inspiration from the work of the psychologist William Cross, in particular his paper “The Negro to Black Conversion Experience,” which was published in 1971.
Using scathing humor to address serious themes came naturally to Mr. Beatty, who has said in interviews that he finds everything funny on some level. Still, he’s reluctant to call himself a satirist.
“In my head it would limit what I could do, how I could write about something,” he said in an interview published in The Paris Review. “I’m surprised that everybody keeps calling this a comic novel.”
Christopher D. Shea contributed reporting.
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