Imagine reading a difficult book. You are moved. You are disturbed. You want to go back to it again. Then you are told you have to sit across the author of said book and ask intelligent questions. And then, the interview ends with him telling you, “You have jinxed me, I’m never gonna write again!” Well, he also said, “I’m teasing, sweetheart,” but when the man in front of you is Paul Beatty, you don’t quite know when he’s being serious and when you’re being had. 
The writer of The Sellout, which won the Man Booker Prize in October 2016, was in Calcutta as part of Tata Steel Kolkata Literary Meet (Kalam), held with The Telegraph from January 25 to 29. t2onSunday caught up with the 54-year-old American writer over coffee and Coke at Taj Bengal. 

SATIRE? ER...

Now, a chat on The Sellout gets tricky right from the cover. Guardian called it “The most lacerating American satire in years” and the publisher promptly put it on the cover. 

But Beatty does not like the word “satire”. 

“It’s not a word that I am very comfortable using. You can just hide behind that word... I avoid it. Also once you have written satire, or something that somebody perceives as satire, it’s hard to do anything else. So I am trying not to let anyone put me in that box.”

In very simple terms, in this book, the narrator is a black man living in an agrarian suburb of Los Angeles and he owns a slave and tries to reintroduce racial segregation in the local school, for which he ends up on trial in the Supreme Court. 
Yes, it’s easier to say “satire” rather than acknowledge that slavery and racism still exist in our world. “It’s not like we’ve eradicated slavery. It’s still there, we just don’t hear about it often,” Beatty says.

 

A SAD PERSON 

At Kalam, readers in the audience suggested words like “humour” and “wit” in place of “satire”. So, I ask Beatty, are you a funny person?

“In real life? No, not really. Every now and then, may be.” 

I prod a little more. 

Behind the humour in the book, there’s so much sadness. Are you a sad person? “Yeeah,” he drawls. “I guess so.

Fundamentally I’m probably a sad person.” 

Why? I poke my nose into his personal business a little more. “I have no idea. That’s a good question. I feel like I am in therapy now! I don’t know what to tell you, I can’t be too honest with that one. I tend to carry my memories around for a long time…. And in some ways it keeps me from being complacent. I’m kind of pessimistic and cynical, not very trusting sometimes…. I tend to go to the worst possible scenario.”

Drawing upon what he had said about Donald Trump’s swearing-in reminding him of the 1930s Marx Brothers movie,

Duck Soup, where there’s a “crazy country called Freedonia”, I ask, hasn’t the “worst possible scenario” already happened?

“Yeah. But it can get worse. Trump could die and (Mike) Pence could be president.” I have no comeback, so I go back to my prepared questionnaire. 

 

REJECTED 18 TIMES

Like all important books — Gone With The Wind to Harry Potter — 

The Sellout, too, was rejected multiple times before it found a publisher in the UK. Eighteen times to be precise. But Beatty only got to know of the rejections five minutes before getting the Booker Prize. He has a very good agent, he said. “She believes in me. It’s nice when somebody believes in you.”

She believed in you even when you wanted to get back slavery and segregation? “She didn’t know anything about that!

She never saw the book till it was finished. I told one person that in my book the guy has a slave and he made a face, and I was like, ‘Okay, I’m not going to say anything to anybody,’” he laughs. 

 

I LOVE MOVIES, BUT...

The Oscar nominations have just come out and it’s #NotSoWhite, I mention. 

“I haven’t noticed. I don’t pay attention,” he says. “I love movies. But I can’t remember the last time I went to the movies. I mean, I watch a ton of old movies but I don’t see many new movies.... I’m just disappointed. The movies are, and I’m gonna say this about stuff I haven’t seen, but they’re all the same (laughs). The same tone, the same 
message, doesn’t matter where it’s set… American movies are so similar... they just don’t excite me the way they used to.” 

So, what kind of movies do excite him? (Look right)

He is intrigued to learn that Indian-origin actor Dev Patel has secured an Oscar nomination (for Lion). He’s even more intrigued to know that this is the young actor from Slumdog Millionaire. “Oh him?! I haven’t seen him since then! I hated that movie. Was that movie popular here?” he asks.

I admit many of us didn’t quite care for it. He looks happy. “Yeah, I hated that movie. He was good, though, that kid. Americans 

l-o-v-e-d that movie! I thought it was a mean, mean movie. And I am glad to hear you say you didn’t like it either. I felt so bad about hating it.”

JAMES BOND

A few minutes on, we are discussing the possibility of a black James Bond and — of all things — Bengali adaptations of Shakespare’s plays! Beatty thinks a black Bond is possible. Also a woman as Bond. 

“Wasn’t Idris Elba supposed to play him? He’d be good as James Bond. Do you think there will ever be a female James Bond? I think it’s possible. Do you watch Shakespeare plays here? Do you wonder at non-British actors playing people in ancient Rome or whatever? You don’t, because it’s universal. So, if you can do it with Shakespeare, why not with James Bond? It takes time, but it’s possible.” 

SHE’S ALL OVER THE BOOK

Beatty is here with his wife, Althea Amrik Wasow, a doctoral student of film history at Berkeley. They married just two months back, though they have dated off and on for the past 10 years and known each other for even longer.
“When I was writing the book we weren’t together but she was in the back of my head… I was not writing it to her… but she was just kind of looking over my shoulder a bit.” 

Were you writing it to impress her? “No, I don’t think so. But there’s a lot of stuff in there that’s personal between me and her… Althea’s really funny, so some jokes I just stole from her. She’s all over the book.” 

YOU HAVE JINXED ME

Arundhati Roy, who won the Booker for The God of Small Things in 1997, is coming out with her next novel only now, after 20 years. Will we have to wait long for a book from you, given that you’ve said previously that you “hate writing”?
He laughs and says there are some things in his head. “Unless you’ve jinxed me, and I’m never gonna write again!” 
As I look crestfallen, he breaks into a grin. “I’m teasing, sweetheart, I’m teasing.”