It was one of the regular readers of Susan’s Bookshelves who drew my attention to this 2001 novel. He wondered what I might think of it. Well thank you. You know who you are. I found it both unusual and interesting because it’s a satire about a satire.
I have read Percival Everett before. His James (2025) gives the narrative to Jim, the runaway slave in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And his is a persuasive and very intelligent voice. I thought it was masterly. Erasure, which predated it by nearly a quarter of a century, was new to me.
Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, who narrates, is the son of middle-class African Americans in Washington DC. His siblings are both doctors but he has “failed” to do anything worthwhile and is “merely” a novelist and university professor in Los Angeles. Sales of his novels are lacklustre because they are too abstruse and “literary” and we get lots of emboldened extracts and thoughts to demonstrate that. Moreover the perception is that he should be writing overt “black” fiction because of who and what he is. But he regards intense stories about the clichéd “black American experience” as trivialisingly one dimensional. So he’s professionally frustrated.
Alongside this is his own complicated family. His cosmetic surgeon brother is married with two children in intolerant Arizona but he’s a closet gay now coming out which is making problems. Monk’s sister Lisa works in women’s health in DC until tragedy strikes. But the issue isn’t her ethnicity – it’s her willingness to help women with unwanted pregnancies. Monk is summoned home to DC by Lisa, tight-lipped and brittle, because their widowed mother is showing signs of dementia – and her physical decline and mental zoning in and out are well observed. I suspect Everett has first hand experience of this. The live-in housekeeper Lorraine, her story and its unlikely fairy tale twist are less than plausible but it doesn’t matter much. The family home and the ambience in which Monk has grown up are nicely done. He becomes his mother’s carer, having put his day job on hold.
Ever more annoyed with himself and his life he sits down one day and within a week throws off an utterly absurd novella called My Pafology. It’s written in phonetic African American patois, is full of crude stereotypes and sends up everything he loathes about “black” fiction. Everett treats us to the whole of this, which personally I could have done without. A few pages would be enough to convey the flavour. Monk sends the manuscript to his incredulous agent who recognises it as satire at best and nonsensical rubbish at worst but reluctantly agrees to submit it to two publishers.
Then suddenly we’re plunged into hype territory half-way between Mel Brooks’s The Producers and Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes. Monk insists on changing the title to Fuck! almost in a bid to see how far he can go but it makes no difference. The escalating outcome is laugh aloud funny in places although it certainly poses some thoughtful questions about distorted perceptions in realism fiction.
Last year the film American Fiction was based on Erasure. I haven’t seen it but it’s hard to see how you could successfully convey the awfulness of Fuck! to drive the satire home. It’s a very bookish book about books. There’s a strong family story in there as well but that isn’t the point of the novel.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
