"Company Town" by Madeline Ashby

Company Town is the kind of novel I should like--a sci-fi dystopian, an independent female protagonist.

The novel follows Hwa, who lives on rigs (of some sort--truthfully the setting itself was confusing for me) now owned by the Lynch corporation. She's a body guard for the legalized and unionized prostitutes who work there. When Lynch officially moves in, she's hired as bodyguard/trainer for Lynch's son and heir, Joel. But then many of her old prostitute friends are dying, and someone's after Joel, and also she's feeling all squishy for Daniel, her boss at Lynch.

As may already be apparent, somehow the novel never came together for me. First, there's Hwa herself, who had too many past traumas for any of them to feel real. She has a large (port-wine-type?) stain over her body, and thus is "ugly" in a society where most people are medically augmented. Her mother, a famous singer/prostitute, hates her and didn't want to have her. Her idolized older brother died in a rig accident several years back. Oh, and she also has a weird seizure disorder! But all of these traumas weave in and out without a clear trajectory or purpose, and I couldn't even really see what her mother, brother, and seizures had to do with the book.

Then there's the love interest, Daniel, whom I was supposed to swoon for but instead hated on the spot. Because he is: the most perfect man alive. The most caring, most thoughtful, most in-tune, most whatever idealized romantic figure you can imagine. Never angry, mean, or selfish. Totally in love with Hwa. But why? I couldn't understand how their relationship developed--he was just suddenly completely committed. Also, he has some weird backstory--he only has 10 years of memory because Lynch sort of "recreated" him after some accident (?). But apparently that doesn't really matter because we never learn about his past.

And let's not forget the serial murders of Hwa's prostitute friends, described in graphic, grisly detail. Apparently they couldn't just be killed--they had to be butchered in Saw 16 fashion. For no reason! I mean, at the end we're given a reason why they were killed, but no reason why it needed to be so grotesque.

Truthfully, I felt like I was in a fog most of the novel, always feeling like I was missing some key point/characterization. But even once everything was "revealed" in the end, and I had no further plot-comprehension questions, I still felt lost.

In the end, it's probably the characterization that most did Company Town in for me. An over-loaded hodgepodge protagonist and  Ken-doll love interest just aren't my thing.

"The Sellout" by Paul Beatty

I began Beatty's The Sellout awhile ago, but never got hooked and eventually put it down. I returned to it recently after running out of things to read and learning that Beatty became the first American ever to win Britain's Man Booker Prize.

So, I finished The Sellout, but I'm truthfully still unsure what to say about it. It's clearly a biting commentary on race in modern America, and I get that, but while reading I constantly felt like I wasn't getting the novel itself. I felt perhaps like my students do when we read Huck Finn: I know there's satire there, but it's too over my head to talk about it.

And that realization makes me wonder how insulated I am from racial politics in America. I read and listen to the news, and I consider myself a generally thoughtful liberal educator, but am I only giving serious racial issues lip service?

Regardless, I'll cover what I did get. The key point is that the narrator, Bonbon, seeks to address racial issues in his town of Dickens by re-instituting discriminatory practices: segregating public busing and schooling, even taking on a slave (albeit an unwanted volunteer slave). As a result, his black community of Dickens actually improves.

Here's what I got from it: racism and discriminatory practices still exist today, but they're much less blatant than they were in the past. After all, we're no longer legally barring African American children from attending all-white schools or shouting racial epithets in the street. Because we've abolished much of the most overt racism, there's often a sense that we've "solved" racism--that it's no longer an issue. But it's still present and harmful. What Bonbon's action do, then, is make overt what's become covert, and it's that bringing out to the surface that allows change to happen.

In skimming over some of the Amazon reviews, I noticed that many compare Beatty's structure to a stand-up comedian's routine, and thinking about the novel like that, rather than a traditional literary narrative, probably would help a reader enjoy it more. The opening section, in which Bonbon philosophizes as he waits for his case to be heard before the Supreme Court, can be draining on readers expecting plot and characters.

Ultimately, I'm not left with a good verdict about The Sellout. I think it's a book best enjoyed in small chunks followed by discussion, rather than an "absorb yourself in a read" kind of way. I missed too much, though ultimately I blame myself rather than Beatty.