The plot, in so far as there is one, revolves around Me's refusal to accept the removal of his neighbourhood from the map of Los Angeles, and from history. That should give the flavour of the book, its bleakness woven with humour, provocation, and intellectuality, with absurdity piled on absurdity – but always to a purpose. The most troublesome bequest is his father's station as the neighbourhood's "nigger whisperer", expected to talk down any suicidal resident "who'd done lost they motherf-in' mind". His father, a demented black intellectual/activist, "to my knowledge, the sole practitioner of the field of Liberation Psychology", abuses him, and uses him as a Skinnerian guinea pig and farm hand, before dying an emblematic death, leaving Me a meagre inheritance. He has grown up in an agrarian ghetto in Los Angeles called Dickens. The narrator has no first name, and his surname is Me. The protagonist and narrator of Paul Beatty's Man Booker Prize-winning The Sellout welcomes your discomfiture: indeed it is an essential element of this rambling, rhetorical reductio ad absurdum of any argument anyone might make about being black in America. Well, there are more niggers in this book than you could shake a stick at.
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