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Fiction. African American Fiction. Literature. Percival Everett's blistering satire about race and writing Thelonious "Monk" Ellison's writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been "critically acclaimed." He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of We's Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited "some show more relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Meanwhile, Monk struggles with real family tragedies-his aged mother is fast succumbing to Alzheimer's, and he still grapples with the reverberations of his father's suicide seven years before. In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off a novel meant to be an indictment of Juanita Mae Jenkins's bestseller. He doesn't intend for My Pafology to be published, let alone taken seriously, but it is-under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh-and soon it becomes the Next Big Thing. How Monk deals with the personal and professional fallout galvanizes this audacious, hysterical, and quietly devastating novel. show less

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nessreader Both about race, appropriation, writing, and publishing
aprille Many resonances including the ventriloquism of presenting texts authored by different characters, an archive discovered after death that reveals family secrets, the humorous critique of academia while sincerely embracing literature and art, the focus on the power and money that popular attention brings, and an exploration of gaps, silences and erasures in a story.

Member Reviews

65 reviews
Percival Everett's Erasure tells the story of Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a brilliant but exasperated Black writer and academic whose literary works, steeped in complex classical narratives, are consistently overlooked by the mainstream. Monk’s frustration boils over as publishers reject his latest manuscript, deeming it "not Black enough." Meanwhile, a crudely stereotypical novel by a first-time author reaches the top of the bestseller lists and is lauded by critics for its authenticity. As Monk grapples with personal upheaval—his sister’s sudden death, his mother’s declining health, and his brother’s estrangement—he channels his exasperation into producing a biting parody of the “ghetto literature” genre, intending it show more as a scathing critique of the publishing industry's narrow expectations for Black writers. Under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, he writes My Pafology (later retitled Fuck to make sure people get the point), a deliberately hackneyed novel that becomes a literary sensation, forcing Monk to confront uncomfortable truths about his own intellectual elitism and the racial expectations imposed by both the publishing industry and society at large.

Erasure is a highly intelligent, fiercely satirical, and darkly funny indictment of the cultural forces that reduce Black experience into a collection of marketable clichés. Throughout the story, Everett’s prose is razor-sharp, teeming with wit and righteous anger, yet also layered with emotional subtlety and philosophical depth. The novel’s metafictional structure, including the full inclusion of My Pafology/Fuck in a clever book-within-a-book construction, demonstrates the author’s technical mastery and reinforces the book’s central message. Everett skewers not only the publishing industry’s commodification of Blackness but also the broader societal desire for reductive narratives, all while rendering Monk’s family relationships with genuine warmth and complexity. In fact, it is in the first part of the book where Monk’s connections to his siblings and his parents are established that the author’s compassionate voice really comes through. By contrast, the ending of the story felt quite rushed and a little unsatisfying, particularly given the painstaking buildup that preceded it. Nevertheless, I found this to be a thought-provoking and highly rewarding book to read and one that is very easy to recommend.
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God, writing about race as a white liberal is hard work. I just wish someone could put it all together for me in a nice readable narrative package so I can consume it and make the right evaluative noises and ultimately approve of the heinous effects of racism on us as humans. And I wish I could get a laugh at the same time, ironic, of course.

Race is re-ignited whenever someone has enough anger to either fight for it or against it. I, being deluded, thought it was fixed by Sesame Street and other such kindergarten TV shows well before rainbow thinking, diversity movements and anti-discrimination training in the workplace.

I thought James Baldwin solved all the problems of our perceptions of race twenty years before that. I was naïve at show more each point I observed and read about questions of race. But then racism was never fixed. It lurks in dark corners waiting. This probably led me to Percival Everett when this book first came out twenty years ago.

The perfect place to start thinking about race is our own understanding of it. Everett starts there too (as a middle class academic writer) with the most common racism he encounters - the white liberal, polite society racism with a twist of literary academia cant. Categorisation isn’t easy in this book.

Race is a perception. The world I grew up in categorised everything by shades of difference. That’s why I read James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X. They were far away, but they explained the world for me. I stopped believing in Sesame Street and rainbows probably because of those books, Everett, too, confirmed it.

Monk Ellison, our protagonist, hates being the recipient of feel-good, well-intentioned thoughts from liberals who say racism is bad. It’s bad according to them because it forces blacks to live in ghettos, and all that accompanies it: misogyny, crime, poverty, crime and victims of violence. But Monk is the son of a doctor, his two siblings are doctors, he's not like ghetto blacks. He has his own views on the world of literature too, he writes a kind of pure intellectual prose, untroubled by poverty, violence, misogyny, crime.

Monk hates these liberal unconscious racists as much as he hates bad writing. And when race and bad writing come together, he gets really mad. He sees behind the veil of polite, empty rhetorical praise when the novel by a black woman written in a vernacular believed to be an authentic representation of ‘the hood’ wins fame, awards, film rights and wealth. Monk is getting nowhere with his own intellectual fiction. Perhaps this is all sour grapes because no one wants to publish his latest unreadable book.

There are plot twists in this novel. So I’ll avoid comments on the action. Monk is failing and flailing and then comes back home to look after his mother with dementia. He experiences tragedy, just like you’d expect in a black American story.

Books rarely make me laugh. But around 11pm one night, I started laughing and couldn’t stop myself. Laughter is a defence mechanism. At first I laughed because Everett, having built up his comedy show routine, finally delivered a punchline. I can’t tell you about it because you need to read the whole spiel. Part way through my uncontrolled laughter, I realised I was also laughing at the irony, the painful, crux of an ironic joke in which a racist idea is expressed so poignantly. And then I just kept laughing, because if I didn’t, I would cry. Laughter cries away the tears.

Everett plays with text. Just like writer-protagonist Monk. At one level, there are these little interludes, no more than a paragraph or two into which Monk enters like a private mental state like meditation, a place where he is free. One is the world of fishing, where he enjoys the technical beauty of lures. And then there’s the emotional and joyous interior zone of wood-working. Both crafts, both deeply satisfying expressions of joy that inject themselves into the story as the character of Monk.

At another level, there is a novel within a novel. If this novel within a novel wasn’t so absurd, no one would believe it. The novel within the novel story goes terribly wrong. And yet, faced with choices about money, family, art, Monk makes an unsavoury decision. A kind of character inside his character emerges making his choices for him. Clever, huh. The comic moments from there build to keep the absurdity of racial matters alive. Twenty years after publication, the absurdity is less obvious. In 2020, these issues felt like they sit on a knife edge. It’s so hard to write about race. I wanted to say so much, thump so many tables with so many words. This is excruciating. Thankfully, I laughed so hard, my defences split.

How do you review a book about race? You don’t talk about it. There’s a joke there but you have to read the book.

____
Addit Apr 2024
Apparently this has now been turned into a TV show called American Fiction. It's all there already in the novel. So it makes sense.
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Monk Ellison is a professor and novelist with career and family problems. His deceased (suicide) father had a secret, his mother has dementia, his family-man doctor brother is coming out as gay, his doctor sister is in danger from anti-abortion activists. Monk is black, and takes great exception when a simplistic novel of black life shoots to the top of the best-seller lists. He dashes off his own version of urban black life under a pseudonym, and of course it's wildly successful.

There's a subtly hilarious passage where Ellison meets with a movie producer as his pseudonymous writer - Stagg Leigh - and drops enough hints that he's not the ex-con he's purported to be, which go ignored.
½
Thelonious "Monk" Ellison is an author of literary fiction whose works are often considered not "black" enough. When family circumstances bring him unexpectedly caring for his aging mother, he decides to pen an urban fiction title and ultimately publishes "My Pafology" under a pseudonym. But things begin to spin out of control when the novel - meant as a joke and a parody, and not something Monk is proud of in the least - becomes a best seller.

Erasure is a satire with a unique format, written as Monk's journal, in which he includes story ideas and the ten-chapter "My Pafology" as a whole. It skewers publishing for both dictating what stories authors of a particular genre can write, and which ones get celebrated and by whom. Monk is show more struggling to be a good son and brother as his mother's cognitive decline becomes worse and worse, and he ponders his own identity and feeling different than the person he was expected by society to be. show less
½
I came to Everett through my desire to read a book by a person of color that wasn’t all about how hard it is to be brown. Alas there are very few because, as Everett so pointedly illustrates in this book, publishing only wants books about how hard it is to be brown from people who are. They cannot write what they want, the stories they have to tell, in the way they want to tell them; no, they must illustrate their “otherness” no matter how little it might exist or interest them. It’s another form of racism and prejudice that publishing still puts people through and then calls it “diversity”.

The trouble is, it isn’t diverse. Here we have a lit prof who, like a multitude of others, has a hard time finding an audience for his show more erudite and somewhat impenetrable books. A thing that probably stems from Everett’s own experience. So through one thing and another the man finds himself in need of money to care for his ageing mother. Despite self-loathing and the worst kind of racial pandering, he writes a dirty little novel about a dirty little punk leading a dirty little life. He does it by reflex and through countless hours absorbing how “black life” is portrayed in films, TV and books. He hates himself for it, but knows it will work and it does.

It is the beginning of his erasure and a continuation of the erasure of hundreds and thousands of black people who are thought “not black enough”. Traitors to their race because they like fly fishing and obscure classical texts and woodworking. Oh the irony would be lovely if it weren’t so painful.

Truthfully, I think a lot of this book went over my head. I’m just flat not educated enough to pick up on things that he was trying to do. For example, the book itself is a parody (pastiche?) of Native Son by Richard Wright, a book I’ve heard of, but not read. And then there was the paper Monk delivered - indecipherable, but funny (I think) if you’re a literary critic or professor. The character’s names are riffs and tropes (Ellison anyone? And, of course, Monk himself.) Oh and let’s not forget Monk’s novel - included entirely within the larger text - an amazing feat, but it points out how “easy” it is to write something so exploitative and taken as the norm; the way black life is, the way black life always is. So tiring and insulting I couldn’t finish it. Sorry Mr. Everett. I completely sympathize with the plight of POC authors and I’m afraid it’s spreading to other “minority” communities as well. Oh when will people just be able to tell a story they way they want to?
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½
College professor Thelonius “Monk” Ellison has written a string of experimental postmodern novels reworking themes from angling, woodworking and Greek drama, largely unread except by other professors who write experimental novels. His agent keeps urging him to “write something more Black,” but Monk comes from a family of doctors in Washington DC and can’t even play basketball.

Eventually, though, he gets so riled up by the success of a cheesy Black-suffering-novel that he is provoked into writing a savage parody of the kind of racist ghetto-fiction middle-class white readers expect from African-American writers, a dreadful and foul-mouthed first-person narrative that drags in every negative stereotype about self-destructive show more young Black men. Of course, when he gets his agent to send it off to a few publishers as a joke to see what will happen (under a nom-de-plume), they miss the point entirely and turn it into the next big bestseller. Monk needs the money to support his ageing mother, so the runaway success comes at a good moment for him, but it becomes increasingly hard to live with the artistic betrayal of pretending to be the ex-con novelist Stagg R Leigh, author of Fuck: a novel, a book that is being hailed on all sides for its “authenticity”.

The parodies, mercilessly sustained long beyond the point at which they would be merely funny, are brilliant and very telling, as are the bizarre interposed dialogues between Great Modernists, and there are some hilariously awful sex scenes, but this is also a tender and sensitive novel about families and identity and the pain of watching a parent being taken from you (and from themselves) by the cruel work of dementia.
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Brainy novel that's all about the slipperiness of identity (Alzheimers, closetedness, general fish-out-of-waterhood), self-identification vs attribution, the identity or otherwise of the author with his/her work, the double-edged nature of parody — how the parodist also wounds himself, and, can something be accidentally parodic? — but with its braininess (mostly) tethered to lived, emotional, experience. It ends with the author being subsumed into or consumed by his hideous, lurching, all-conquering creation, a tale as old as Frankenstein.

I was thinking, can a parody be any good if its parodic intent is universally missed? And not only that, but it's taken as a prime example of the thing it parodies? Is there a kind of circular show more continuum of parody, where a parody can be too good for its own good and "flip over" into or be consumed by its target? And, of more relevance now than when this was published, if you're rich and stupid enough (today's super-rich as parodied unsuccessfully in stuff like Triangle of Sadness), or just stupid enough (Monk's fellow prize judges) for parody to be beyond you, can you in fact be beyond parody? Doesn't parody depend on a shared understanding of art, and aren't we in danger of losing that?

As someone who dislikes the identification of author and work, of the author with the work, I sympathized with Monk Ellison. But you can't have it both ways. Write novels about fly fishing and carpentry if you like, indulge in poststructuralist tosspottery if you like, but don't expect to get rich doing so. Unhip, pretentious Monk is a realistically, endearingly awkward individual who feels guiltier than he ought to. Refreshing to read a satirical novel that is actually funny.
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ThingScore 100
Ecriture simple et attentive, sens des dialogues, ce roman veut croire qu'il y a encore une vie hors du clinquant médiatique. Et que toute parcelle d'humanité n'est pas encore effacée.
Pierre Sorgue, Télérama
Mar 27, 2004
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Author Information

Picture of author.
45+ Works 13,043 Members
Percival Everett is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Some Editions

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Common Knowledge

Canonical title
Erasure
Original publication date
2001
People/Characters
Thelonius Monk Ellison; Van Go Jenkins; Stagg R leigh; Lisa
Important places*
Columbia, South Carolina, Verenigde Staten; South Carolina, Verenigde Staten
Related movies
American Fiction (2023 | IMDb)
Epigraph
I could never tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.
Mark Twain, Following the Equator
Dedication
For my best friend, my lover, my life, Chessie
First words
My journal is a private affair, but as I cannot know the time of my coming death, and since I am not disposed, however unfortunately, to the serious consideration of self-termination, I am afraid that others will see these pa... (show all)ges. Since however I will be dead, it should not much matter to me who sees what or when. My name is Thelonious Ellison. And I am a writer of fiction. This admission pains me only at the thought of my story being found and read, as I have always been severely put off by any story which had as its main character a writer. So I will claim to be something else, if not instead, then in addition, and that shall be a son, a brother, a fisherman, an art lover, a woodworker. If for no other reason, I choose this last, callous-building occupation because of the shame it caused my mother, who for years called my pickup truck a station wagon. I am Thelonious Ellison. Call me Monk.
Quotations
It is incredible that a sentence is ever understood.
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)I said, 'Egads, I'm on television.'
Blurbers
Newland, Courttia; Lezard, Nicholas; Pinckney,Darryl; Marcus, Greil
Canonical DDC/MDS
813.54
Canonical LCC
PS3555.V34
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.

Classifications

Genres
General Fiction, Fiction and Literature
DDC/MDS
813.54Literature & rhetoricAmerican literature in EnglishAmerican fiction in English1900-19991945-1999
LCC
PS3555 .V34Language and LiteratureAmerican literatureAmerican literatureIndividual authors1961-
BISAC

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Reviews
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ISBNs
27
ASINs
12