I've never read a book that wasn't about race: famed author Paul Beatty

In 2016, Paul Beatty became the first American to win the prestigious Man Booker prize with his fourth novel, The Sellout, an excoriating and hilarious rollercoaster ride through a "post-racial" California.

The novel was rejected 18 times before a publisher was bold enough to take a chance with it, and the reason for this reluctance is perhaps immediately apparent in The Sellout's opening sentences:

"This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I've never stolen anything. Never cheated on my taxes or at cards. Never snuck into the movies or failed to give back the extra change to a drugstore cashier indifferent to the ways of mercantilism and minimum-wage expectations. I've never burgled a house. Held up a liquor store. Never boarded a crowded bus or subway car, sat in a seat reserved for the elderly, pulled out my gigantic penis and masturbated to satisfaction with a perverted, yet crestfallen, look on my face."

So begins the first of the 100 funniest pages of fiction that I can remember in years, and it is clear that Beatty, one of the highlights of Cape Town's Open Books festival, which opens tomorrow, has a bit more than the customary stereotypes in his sights.

Beatty is appearing on three panel discussions but, he says, he hasn't given the festival much thought.

"I try not to pay too much attention," he tells me. "I'm just gonna see what happens. I met a woman in Johannesburg, and I think we're on the same panel, 'collective memory', about shared trauma, or something ."

Which is what he rails against in new novel The Sellout?

"Absolutely, absolutely! You know, yesterday somebody called me a black academic! I just started cracking up ."

Though it was first published in 2015, way before the US presidential campaign started, The Sellout reads very much like the first great novel of the Donald Trump era, full of rage and bitter comedy.

Beatty often gets asked about Trump's America, and he has made it clear it's been around for a while.

In January, shortly after the inauguration, he told The Guardian, "When people go, I don't recognise this place. And I'm like, where have you been? That's the part that bothers me. With the police violence - people are like, Oh I didn't know. And it's like people have been putting this in your face for ages and all of a sudden now ... why now?"

It is police violence that sets in motion the events in The Sellout. The narrator's father, a sociologist known as "the Nigger Whisperer", who conducted the most bizarre racial psychological experiments on his son, is gunned down in a shoot-out with cops on the streets of Dickens, an "agrarian ghetto" on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Then the town itself is erased from the maps of southern California...

The book riffs with jaw-dropping profanity on pop psychology, African-American literature and political smugness. The late Richard Pryor comes to mind. In her assessment of the novel, the 2016 Man Booker chair, Amanda Foreman, praised Beatty for his "savage wit of the kind I haven't seen since Swift or Twain".

But, as I discover when we meet, Beatty is not too comfortable with the categorisation or the frequent description of his work as "satire", a label that he describes as "overused".

"I don't even know what it means anymore," he says. "But if you use that word then, well ... everybody's who's ever had a liberal arts education is going to go to Swift, that's where they know to go, know what I mean?

"It's the easy way out, in a weird kind of way. Or the easy way in."

Still, that's the conventional tag for a novel that pokes fun at convention: satire.

"I'm not against labels necessarily, but it's not like, uh ... I don't see the book as some screed, you know? I don't want to use the word 'railing', but it's a comment on how labels are applied, when are they applied, whether they're short cuts, it's about that.

"I'm not against labels. Labels are part of communication, and it's not like saying things should be done some other way."

While on the subject, he swiftly puts paid to the "novel about race" label, too.

"I've never read a book that wasn't about race, you know? Ulysses? That's about race, to me. All the books are about fucking race, they are. It's also about perspectives, what perspectives we're allowed to read from."

The labels, he adds, don't necessarily upset him, but he does admit to being surprised by those who have approached his work from outside the racial dichotomy.

The father of one his students, he says, has described him as "the last great Jewish writer". Some critics, certainly, have described Beatty as his generation's answer to Philip Roth.

Some labels he doesn't mind.

• For more details on the Open Book Festival, see openbookfestival.co.za

• This article was originally published in The Times.