Erasure: now a major motion picture 'American Fiction'

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The sharp satire on American publishers and American readers that Everett puts forward is delicious. He’s done so in everything from Erasure to I Am Not Sidney Poitier (an intraracial parody of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner) to the severely underrated A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond (as good a novel as any to help understand the weird, ahistorical cynicism of the MAGA movement) to The Trees, Everett’s recent award-winning dark comedy of lynching and Emmett Till, set in my home state of Mississippi). The “novel” within this novel is rendered completely, like the one in Irving’s The World According to Garp. The depiction of the family’s struggle with looking after their mother makes for some of the most touching scenes in the film, and they hit important points, including the gendered labor of parental care, where daughters are too often expected to carry the load.

Amusing, perhaps, only to an academic with a sense of humor, but I’d like to have five dollars for every befuddled intellectual who put shoulder to the wheel and tried to make sense of the nonsense. I highly recommend this one for readers that are up for a challenge and won't give up because they don't understand everything.

Can an intellectual ever really love and live with someone who has remedial taste in books without holding them in contempt of art? The protagonist, Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a professor of English literature, is in a rut with his writing. I believe there are people who will shoot me or hang me or cheat me and try to stop me because they do believe in race, because of my brown skin, curly hair, wide nose and slave ancestors.

If preferences were a function of values, they can be exercised freely and without fanfare in most modern societies.The book's success rankles all the more as Monk's own most recent novel has just notched its seventh rejection. That just unfolding hope makes a striking contrast to the world Everett's prickly protagonist, Monk, was navigating in the 2001 novel. The agent hates the book, but agrees to send it to a few publishers using a pen name and fake biography for Monk. But really, with all the terrific books there already are to read, why spend money and eyeblinks on an almost-good one? E tutto quanto è scritto con ironia a tratti esilarante, con intelligenza, ed eleganza, profondità, e potenza, tocca il grottesco ma lo fa, mi viene da dire, con poesia, con finezza.

The massiveness of his being is awe-inspiringly intimidating, unless you truly believe that you are as great as you would have others believe. Black people cannot escape from the impact and consequences of racism, because they form part of the shared language and culture. In one brilliant scene, they find themselves alone in a conference room and have it out over her book. The story weaves his youth as a black man in America with his professional family in a most skilful and interesting way. His contempt for all things disingenuous, including himself, at times, has alienated him from his colleagues and his readers, whomever they might be.Of course, there’s no indication in American Fiction that My Pafology has anything to do with Richard Wright’s Native Son, whereas in Erasure, the novel-within-the novel is a direct parody of it; the character Van Go Jenkins is the Bigger Thomas figure, and the Daltons are recast as a wealthy Black family. She is now declining through Alzheimer's, and when Monk's sister is killed by an abortion protester at her women's health clinic, Monk leaves his high-minded California life of fishing, sawing wood, and writing dense novels to look after his mother. American Fiction is easily one of my favorite depictions of book-to-film adaptation since Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation delightfully mangled Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief. Even after I first heard of Percival Everett, and saw friends gush, I stayed away, thinking he would be just another angry, divisive voice. E poi c’è il romanzaccio condito di turpiloquio e annaffiato di volgarità che sbanca il botteghino: Percival Everett lo riporta tutto, versione integrale.

The title perhaps answers any question before it is raised, making it in some sense an anti-title, but a title nonetheless, thus offering the suggestion of negation.This book, Monk, our guy, does show some of that, though he sees this phenomenon as part and parcel as a kind of drooling lusty slavering over his masquerade of put-on blackness**. At the same time, Monk is becoming a real caretaker to his family, the shenanigans sharing space with realistic domestic trials. He doesn't want to be defined by the construct of 'race' (his issues are, frankly, the issues of many a non-Black protagonist in many a novel about family and failing novelists), but society and the publishing industry think differently.