Erasure by Percival Everett
Erasure is a tableaux of many delicate interconnected parts. Ostensibly though, it’s a book about books, a novel about writing. An overpopulated genre perhaps, but Percival Everett’s jack-in-a-box of a novel offers something fresh and quite unique. His narrator and protagonist Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a professor of English literature, is “a writer of fiction” whose obtuse books are regularly criticised for saying nothing about the “African American experience”. He is so incensed by the runaway success of We’s Lives In Da Ghetto–a novel that purports to represent contemporary black life but which Ellison describes as akin to finding “a display of watermelon-eating, banjo-playing darkie carvings” in an antiques mall–that he knocks off an expletive-riddled hood yarn of his own. Circulated to publishers under the pseudonym Stagg R Leigh, his pastiche, initially titled My Pafology later shortened to just Fuck, instantly draws a six-figure advance and Hollywood interest. The critics are equally fulsome in their praise: “Dazzling, raw and simply honest” emotes a New York Times reviewer. Monk, who has to meet agents and interviewers disguised as the monosyllabic Stagg, even finds his literary Frankenstein’s monster nominated for a prize that he is judging.
An absolutely outstanding book this from the ever-creative and prolific Everett. Having seen the movie, American Fiction, which is based on this novel, and hugely enjoyed it, I was really looking forward to reading this. And it did not disappoint. It is a really clever premise with lots of different layers which offers a good deal more in the way of subtlety than the film. It’s both amusing and darkly clever and is certainly worth reading.
Prole Art Threat 