→ September 11, 2025
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Glyph.

Glyph was Percival Everett’s tenth novel, published in 1999, at a point when Everett was earning critical acclaim but not much commercial attention. It’s a much more academic work than any of his later novels I’ve read, satirizing post-structuralism and some of its leading lights, but you can see more than a few glimpses of Everett’s humor, foreshadowing his more broadly successful later work.

Glyph is narrated by Ralph, a very precocious baby who is able to read and write at the level of a graduate student before he turns one, shocking his parents – whom he calls Inflato (father) and Mo (Mother) – and eventually leading to unfortunate interest from a series of would-be evildoers who plan to use him for their own nefarious purposes. Ralph communicates via written notes, which, of course, people don’t believe he wrote at first, but after his parents accept that Ralph is indeed a genius, they take him to a psychologist for evaluation, only for the psychologist to decide that Ralph is her ticket to research fame and to kidnap him – which works until the government shows up.

The plot itself takes up maybe half of the book, with the remainder split between Ralph’s musings and various interstitials, like imagined conversations between important personages from history, including literary theorist Roland Barthes, one of the major figures of structuralism and post-structuralism – and thus a prime target for Everett’s satire. Inflato is a failing professor of literary theory, and at one point he has Barthes over for dinner, only for the French philosopher to leer at Mo and eventually admit he’s never read Inflato’s work.

Other literary theorists and thinkers in related fields like semiotics and philosophy come in for further satire or just outright mockery, whether directly in the text or in any of the many asides, like constructed dialogues between two such figures from different times in history. Every chapter is divided further with subheadings that almost seem drawn from a hat filled with terms from lit-crit movements of the latter half of the 20th century, including structuralism and post-structuralism, deconstruction, and post-modernism. Everett wrote the book while he was a professor of creative writing at UC Riverside, but had moved on to become chair of the English department at USC by the time it was published, which at least makes me wonder if he was mocking some of his by then former colleagues at UCR for their adherence to these philosophies – not least because he has said many times since that Ralph is the closest of all of his protagonists to his own character.

Glyph also has plenty of lowbrow humor, including a slew of potty – well, first diaper, then potty – jokes, bad puns, and Airplane!-esque gags, which softens some of the more abstruse material here for readers who, like me, don’t care for these distinctly anti-literary schools of thought. Yes, academics can certainly spend their time on textual analysis or examining the relationship between a work and its broader context. I’d probably do just that if I were a professor of literature somewhere, or if my livelihood otherwise depended on it. I read for pleasure, however, and I can’t read books in that way at all. If a book doesn’t grab me with its plot, or its protagonist, or its prose, I’m not going to like it or appreciate it. Glyph skewers some of the same ideas I disdain for their desire to strip literature down to the studs and ignore the trappings of great fiction, but it also does so with a strong and funny central character, Everett’s acerbic wit, and a ridiculous plot that just barely holds together for the novel’s 200 pages.

Related: This 2024 profile of Everett in the New Yorker, written by Maya Binyam, is outstanding.

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→ June 24, 2025
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A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond.

A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond lives up to the absurdity of its name, although I’m not sure if it reaches whatever the goals of its authors, Percival Everett and his colleague James Kincaid, may have had in writing it. It’s an epistolary satire, written entirely in the form of letters and emails between those two, a foppish dandy named Barton Wilkes who works in Sen. Thurmond’s office, an editor at Simon & Schuster and his assistant, and others, as the plot to write the book of the title becomes increasingly convoluted and the behavior of several people involved becomes unhinged.

The aide to Sen. Thurmond, Barton Wilkes, is positively nuts, as I think is clear from the first few pages. He proposes the book to Simon & Schuster, arguing that Sen. Thurmond is uniquely qualified to opine on the subject of Black people in the United States since Civil War, in part because he was alive for pretty much all of that period. Somehow, he gets an editor, Martin Snell, interested in this preposterous proposal, possibly through some acquaintance with Snell’s assistant Juniper, and the project progresses far enough that Everett and Kincaid come in as ghost-writers. The plan is that Wilkes will send them the Senator’s notes and they’ll turn it all into a book somehow. Of course, the Senator’s actual involvement in or awareness of the project becomes an open question, Wilkes and Snell both appear to be perverts, Everett and Kincaid can’t stop sniping at each other, there’s a possibly mobbed-up rival editor at S&S, and somehow Juniper’s sister ends up part of the story, too.

The obvious target of the satire is Thurmond, who was Senator for about 120 years and spent most of that time pushing white nationalist ideas, particularly anything related to segregation. He split off from the Democrats after World War II, running for President in 1948 as a “States Rights Democratic” candidate and carrying four states. (Since then, only one third-party candidate has earned any electoral votes, another racist windbag, George Wallace, in 1968.) The Thurmond in this book is well aware that he’s about to die and wants to both set the record “straight” on his legacy and possibly grease his path into some sort of afterlife. Everett and Kincaid don’t want any part of whitewashing (pun intended) the Senator’s grim history, and it’s not like they’re getting much money from the project either, although it seems to offer some professional benefits to Kincaid within the story. (I wondered if he was even a real person, but he is, and his specialty is on the sexualization of children in Victorian literature and culture.) Thurmond’s an easy target and the two take him down rather efficiently, although they could obviously have spent even more time lampooning him as a sort of Foghorn Leghorn in Nazi garb and discussing the legacy of his legislative initiatives.

What I didn’t understand was all of the frippery around that part. Snell and Wilkes both seem to be sexual predators of a sort, and Juniper spends most of the novel trying not to become the victim of either of them. Juniper then finds himself farmed out to Vendetti, the editor who definitely does not have mob ties, a switch which ends up putting two people in the hospital. It’s not homophobic, and I’m not sure either Snell or Wilkes is ever identified as gay, but the authors seem to play these two men both trying to sleep with another young man for some kind of humor I didn’t exactly get.

In the end, this book also didn’t land for me, just like American Desert, although that had the benefit of a more coherent narrative and more of Everett’s brilliant prose. This book is comical, and has plenty of laughs, but mostly it’s just so unrealistic that you’ll wonder what we’re doing here.

Next up: I just finished my friend Will Leitch’s newest novel, Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, and started the last of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalists, Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot.

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→ June 12, 2025
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American Desert.

I guess it was inevitable that I’d eventually find a Percival Everett novel I didn’t love. I wouldn’t say I hated or even disliked American Desert, but it is my least favorite of the nine Everett novels I’ve read so far, primarily because what happens between the shocking opening and the superb conclusion is so disjointed.

Ted Street is a professor at USC who is married with two kids, often unfaithful, and about to be denied tenure. On his way to walk into the ocean to kill himself, his car is hit by a UPS driver, and he is decapitated. In the middle of his funeral, three days later, he sits up in his coffin – his head reattached by a clumsy mortician – and starts talking. Chaos ensues, Ted becomes a media sensation, and he finds himself stalked by religious nuts and government operatives. He also begins to see his own life with much greater clarity, and discovers that by touching someone he can see into their memories, which becomes one of the main ways he navigates his way out of trouble … which is how he spends most of the novel, as he’s hounded by all of those groups and just wants to get back to his family.

The premise of American Desert isn’t entirely new, but it’s still a strong start: If someone appears to truly come back from the dead three days later, there’s going to be a huge public reaction to it, from fascination to terror, from religious fervor to scientific inquiry, and media there to try to make a buck off it. It opens up questions about mind-body dualism, life after death, the meaning (or lack thereof) of life, and more. You’d get people claiming he was the Second Coming, and probably people trying to kill him, and every scientist and crackpot in the world would want a look.

Everett hits all of those points, more or less, with varying degrees of success. The main problem with American Desert is that his focus on sending up his targets in religion, science, and the government subsumes and ultimately overwhelms Ted, who becomes more of a pawn within the story than he should be. His character is inherently interesting, but the story doesn’t get very deep into his character, particularly the question of what, if anything, this second chance at life means for him. He recognizes that his first life was a series of screw-ups, and now he has not just a fresh (okay, perhaps a poor choice of words for an animated corpse) start, but he also sees the world, including his own life, very differently.

This a mild spoiler, although the book is twenty years old so I’m not too concerned, but one of the most fundamental issues with the construction of American Desert is that Ted is barely with his family in the book – in fact, his wife and kids end up going to Catalina Island for a weekend after he’s been kidnapped, leading to a whole separate and very uninteresting subplot around the three of them and Ted’s sister-in-law. The dynamic of a man returned from the very, unequivocally dead to his family, with a literal new lease on life, where he is fully aware of the harm he’s perpetrated and ways in which he’s failed his wife, kids, and himself would be fascinating. In the process of satirizing various institutions, however, Everett largely skips this part entirely. It made for a book that moved quickly, with lots of plot, but without the depth that characterizes all of the other eight of his novels I’ve read so far.

Next up: Dr. Susan David’s Emotional Agility.

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→ June 4, 2025
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Assumption.

Percival Everett’s Assumption is a triptych of a novel, three neo-noir detective stories featuring the same character, Ogden Walker, a deputy in a small town in New Mexico who’s confronted with three murders in fairly short succession, each of which seems to revolve around at least one person who isn’t who they claim to be. The first two proceed almost traditionally, although Everett is still playing around within the confines of the genre; the third, however, slides into a hallucinatory haze where Walker’s reality is suddenly open to question.

Walker is a Black man in a town that’s largely not Black, with its share of white racists, but also plenty of Latino and indigenous residents, and as you might expect in a small-town mystery or detective story, he kind of knows everyone and has his usual haunts where everyone knows him. He’s got good enough relationships with his boss and his co-workers, even though it becomes clear that Walker is a reluctant cop, and is close to his mother, who lives in the same town and whose house he visits several times in each story.

The first case starts when the possibly-racist Mrs. Bickers turns up dead just a few minutes after Walker visits her to take away her gun, turning into a larger mystery when her estranged daughter shows up unannounced. The second involves a couple of sex workers who end up dead in not-so-rapid succession, again tapping into a bigger story as Walker investigates it. The third starts out innocuously enough, as Walker stumbles on a field & game warden catching a poacher, with Walker taking the poacher’s nephew – maybe – to try to find the kid’s home while the warden takes in the poacher. The warden turns up dead and the kid disappears, making Walker a suspect and causing him to question everything around him.

Everett can’t help but allude to some of the masters of the form, with a line about “the postman ringing only once,” paying homage to the greats even as he upends and inverts the very genre he’s mimicking. The first two stories read like great works from Cain, Chandler, and Thompson, with the same stoic tone and grim imagery, right down to the matter-of-fact descriptions of corpses and gunfights. The third is where Everett gets imaginative, as the story quickly turns into a fever dream of sorts, with Walker trying to solve the crime to keep himself out of jail, while a second strand follows the cops investigating him, and the two stories seem to diverge in impossible ways.

Walker is a typical Everett protagonist – a stolid Black man experiencing some existential doubts, in a job he doesn’t love, either a bachelor (as Walker is) or someone who has distant relationships with women. He’s an outsider in this town in multiple ways, even though he has cordial relationships with most of the locals; he doesn’t have close friends, and he is keenly aware of his status as one of the few Black people there. The pointlessness of the killings he sees wears on him, as he questions the utility of his job and the meaning of any of what’s happening in front of him, including the scourge of meth and the cycles of poverty and violence. What begins as a traditional detective novel – even the triptych format has a history in the genre, as Rex Stout authored several Nero Wolfe books that comprised three semi-related cases – ends up flipped on its head as a story of deep existential despair.

The contemporary review in the New York Times compared Assumption to the Inspector Maigret detective novels by the French writer Georges Simenon, which also have an existentialist bent, a clear line of descent from Sartre and Camus in style and substance. Maigret has more panache than Walker, though; he’s a gentleman detective in many ways, a French Roderick Alleyn, while Simenon’s stories end with far less bloodshed. The similarity is philosophical, rather than stylistic, although I appreciated the reference to another of my favorites.

Next up: I’m about three-quarters done with Lois McMaster Bujold’s Brothers in Arms.

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→ June 3, 2025
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The Unicorn Woman.

Gayl Jones was a major figure in 20th century Black literature, publishing her first novel, Corregidora, in 1975, and continuing to write novels and short stories until her husband, who was a fugitive from justice for over a decade, sent a bomb threat to a local hospital and then killed himself in a standoff with police. Jones then withdrew from public life and writing for 23 years before returning with the 2021 novel Palmares, which was one of the finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, losing to one of the worst winners in the award’s history (The Netanyahus).

Jones returned last year with a short novel, The Unicorn Woman, that also made the list of finalists for the Pulitzer, losing out this time to one of the best winners in the award’s history (Percival Everett’s James). The Unicorn Woman is a wisp of a tale that isn’t about the title character at all, if she even exists, but follows a Black WWII veteran named Buddy Ray Guy who becomes obsessed with the woman after seeing her at a carnival freak show, altering the course of his life.

Buddy can’t get the image of the woman, whom he finds unspeakably beautiful to the point of questioning not whether her horn is real, but whether she is a real person, out of his head, and spends much of his itinerant life afterwards chasing her, either literally or just metaphorically. His relationships with other women do not last, in large part because he is still obsessed with her – or the idea of her, of some sort of unrealistic, unattainable perfection that lodges in his mind and doesn’t leave enough room for a real romantic relationship. He repairs tractors as an irregular job, but moves around the country, sometimes chasing word that the Unicorn Woman is appearing in this city or that one, but more often seeming to move without purpose.

There’s just so little to this novel – aside from some dense prose that contradicts the wispiness of the story – that it lacks the tangible hooks to connect you to the story. There are side characters here and there, but none has much depth or even exposition time; there’s mention of one, a woman named Kate who worked on the tractors during the war but lost her job when the soldiers returned, and who refused to take a clerical or other lesser job. Her story might have made a better novel, and it certainly would have added some depth to this one.

Instead, it’s a work of metaphor and symbol more than it is a conventional novel, the sort of book that works better in a literature class than it does on your night stand, like Pedro Páramo or The Unconsoled, or maybe even The Vegetarian. The Unicorn Woman is on display to be seen, judged, and ogled by the world, but appears to have no agency or even an identity independent of her horn. Her value is what someone else can extract from her. She doesn’t exist as a character in the novel, so by default she must stand for something or someone; my interpretation is that she stands for all women, objectified, used, and discarded by the men in our society. Buddy doesn’t fare much better, though, as he’s returned from war to find a country that doesn’t have a place for him. Even is name is generic, as if Jones wanted to be sure we saw him as some sort of faceless everyman.

It’s probably clear that I wasn’t impressed by The Unicorn Woman, as it just seems like such a meager work to take the honor of one of the three (four) best American novels of its year. It’s possible this was just another way to honor Jones herself and her return to writing. I just don’t think of awards that way; this isn’t a lifetime achievement award, but an award for a specific book. There may be layers of meaning here I just didn’t get. The story itself wasn’t strong enough to sustain the rest of the book for me.

It’s still better than Mice 1961, though.

Next up: I’m reading one of the Miles Vorkosigan novels, Brothers in Arms, which I think is the only one I hadn’t read from the time period where his alter ego, Admiral Naismith, is part of the stories.

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→ May 26, 2025
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I Am Not Sidney Poitier.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier is the seventh of Percival Everett’s books that I’ve read, but the first for which I did some homework, watching four of Poitier’s movies to which I knew Everett alludes in the novel. This was hardly difficult, as only one of the movies (Lilies of the Field, for which Poitier won his sole non-honorary Academy Award) failed to hold up. I’m glad I went through the exercise, however, as it made reading Everett’s novel even more enjoyable. It’s a riot, and another incredible feat of imagination, and while it has its serious moments, it is Everett at his least serious among the books I’ve read.

The main character in I Am Not Sidney Poitier is named Not Sidney Poitier, which, as you may imagine, presents him with all manner of difficulties, including bullying in school. He is, however, quite rich, as his mother invested very early in shares of Ted Turner’s media company, making her one of its largest shareholders and, at her death, putting Not Sidney in Ted’s care, in a way. Turner himself becomes an amusing if caricatured side character, prone to rambling non sequiturs, but he makes for an entertaining conversationalist as Not Sidney tries to make his way through the world.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier proceeds into a sort of modern picaresque, as each chapter is a new adventure modeled after one or two of Poitier’s movies. Early in the book, for example, Not Sidney sets off for California in his car, choosing to avoid the interstates, and finds himself in a hick county in Georgia where he is arrested for the crime of being Black. He’s soon chained to a racist convict, and an accident gives them an opportunity to escape, which, if you haven’t seen it, is the plot of The Defiant Ones, which starred Poitier and Tony Curtis. Everett’s trick here is adhering very closely to the plots of several of these movies, often to the point of repeating key quotes (“They call me Not Sidney” might be the best), but then turning something inside out at the resolution.

Not Sidney drifts back and forth from his home on Ted Turner’s estates, including interactions with Jane Fonda, to these vignettes from films like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (but with a family of light-skinned Blacks prejudiced against darker-skinned people), In the Heat of the Night, and No Way Out, the last of which appears in a dream sequence.

Everett’s gift for comedy shows itself more in wordplay and in the humor he mines from absurd situations, rather than some of the more situational and highbrow humor in books like Dr. No. The protagonist’s name is obviously a source of repeated gags at his expense, and Everett creates all kinds of improbable interactions that allow him to poke fun at something, whether it’s the movies he’s referencing or Black literature or really anything that crosses his mind. Everett has referred to himself as “pathologically ironic,” and I have never felt that more in his writing than in his novel, even though I think it’s the least serious or thematic of any of the seven I’ve read.

I will say I think I enjoyed this novel the most of the seven, but that doesn’t make it the “best” or my favorite. It’s the funniest, it was probably the fastest to read, and it’s endlessly rewarding if you’ve seen any of the movies involved. I did notice that it was lighter in tone and subject, which isn’t a criticism, but it’s a change of pace from James or So Much Blue or Telephone. The guy still hasn’t missed for me, though, and there are very, very few authors about whom I could say that through even four books.

Next up: Another of this year’s Pulitzer finalists, The Unicorn Woman by Gayl Jones.

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→ May 5, 2025
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Telephone.

Percival Everett’s Telephone is the most serious of the six of his novels I’ve read so far, with the only humorous elements some of the smartass dialogue coming from his main character. A finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (which it lost to the inferior The Night Watchman), Telephone finds Everett exploring how people respond to grief and the search for meaning in a world that appears to have none at all.

Zach Wells, another author surrogate for Everett, is a geologist and college professor who lives with his wife and their one child, a daughter named Sarah, who is the apple of Zach’s eye like Bonnie Blue was in Rhett Butler’s. Sarah starts to have absence seizures and reports some other neurological symptoms, and when Zach and his wife take her to the doctor, they learn that she has a fatal neurodegenerative disorder called Batten disease that will kill her in a few years, and on her way to dying, she’ll lose her faculties and won’t even recognize her parents.

Meanwhile, Zach orders a piece of clothing off the internet and finds a note that just says “ayúdame” (“help me”) in one of its pockets. He orders another item from the same place, and gets a similar note. He’s stymied, but eventually decides he has to do something to figure out if there is someone in trouble wherever these garments are made or repackaged. And at work, he has a younger colleague who procrastinated for years on publishing her work and now may not get tenure as a result, but Zach finds that her work is good enough and embarks on a late push to save her.

In just about all of Everett’s books, at least the ones I’ve read, he’s asking important questions and only hints at the answers. Here, Zach is a tragic figure from the start – his father killed himself, his marriage has stalled, he doesn’t seem to particularly like his work – and the one facet of his life that seems to give him real joy is going to be taken from him in the cruelest possible fashion. When you can’t save the most important person in the world, do you turn to try to save someone else? A colleague you respect, not even a friend, just someone who you think deserves more than she’s getting? A complete stranger, or more than one, who may not even exist, and if they do it’s in another country and maybe you’ll get killed trying to do it? Would any of this matter in the grand scheme? Would it help you save yourself?

Where Telephone ends up was something of a surprise, as I’m used to Everett concluding his novels in uncertain fashion – at least three of the other five lacked concrete resolutions to their plots. Wells gets an ending in fact where the ambiguity is interior to his character. Has anything changed? When he goes back to his regular life, will he be altered by the experiences, or has he just pushed away the grief that will be waiting for him at his front door?

Wells is an Everett stand-in in the same vein as Kevin Pace, the protagonist of So Much Blue, as middle-aged men facing some kind of emotional crisis, although Pace’s was more of his own making and Wells’s definitely is not. They’re well-developed, flawed, and very realistic. They make mistakes, especially in their marriages. They do not talk easily or openly about their feelings. And they are ill-equipped for what hits them, a combination in both cases of how they were raised and the choices they’ve made as adults. Telephone is just another piece of evidence in the case for Everett as our greatest living novelist.

Next up: Congo Inc.: Bismarck’s Testament, a satirical novel by In Koli Jean Bofane, who appeared in the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.

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→ April 10, 2025
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Transcendent Kingdom.

I read Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel Homegoing a little over three years ago, because my daughter had been assigned it in her high school English class and said it was good but “grim.” I thought it was marvelous, and also grim, but beautifully crafted with a series of compelling characters through the time-shifting narrative.

Her second and still most recent novel, Transcendent Kingdom, has a far more conventional structure and is built around a single family of four, only two members of which, the daughter Gifty and her mother, are still around in the present day, although we don’t learn immediately where her brother Nana and father are or if they’re even still alive. Gifty is a graduate student in neuroscience at Stanford, while her mother, a Ghanaian immigrant, lives alone in Alabama; Gifty gets a call that her mother has taken to her bed in a severe bout of depression, so she brings her mother to California to take care of her. We learn that this isn’t her mother’s first such episode, and the recollection brings us the story of Gifty’s father, brother, and how Gifty turned away from the devout Christianity of her childhood and towards the science she hoped would explain everything that religion couldn’t answer.

This isn’t a huge spoiler, since it’s mentioned on the back of the book, but if you want to know nothing stop reading here … Nana died of a heroin overdose after a doctor gave him Oxycontin for an ankle injury Nana suffered playing basketball. Gifty wants to learn about the neuroscience of addiction, to understand why someone would be unable to stop when they know it’s hurting them, killing them, and hurting everyone who cares about them. She was about eight years younger than her brother, and watching him go from a lively, popular kid who seemed to be going places to a zonked-out addict, and a thief, and worse has shaped huge swaths of the last eighteen years of her life. It forced her to grow up and take more charge in the house than someone her age should have to do, it broke her faith in God (but not her mother’s), and it turned her inwards, especially when it came to talking to anyone outside of her family about her brother – or even that she had one.

As someone who grew up with religion, devout perhaps in my blind belief but not exactly in practice, but who is secular now, I found particular resonance in Gyasi’s descriptions of Gifty now, knowing something is gone and won’t return, but that there is no regaining it. Religion serves a purpose for many people, and often becomes a core part of one’s identity, but if you lose your faith, as Gifty does and as I did, you can’t simply go to the God store and buy a new one. Once you realize it’s not true, the spell is forever broken. That absence is real, and you may grieve for all that once was, from your belief in a benevolent God to the hope of an afterlife to the fact that so many adults told you these things were true when they’re not. (I recognize not everyone shares my nonbelief, of course.)

Beyond the question of religiosity, Transcendent Kingdom functions as a different sort of coming-of-age novel: The protagonist loses her innocence about the world, and then spends the next eighteen years following one narrow path that she believes will help her make sense of it. Her mother returning to the isolation of her bed and near-total silence bookends the period of Gifty’s quest for an answer to everything, from why Nana fell so quickly into addiction and death to why their mother is so prone to these severe depressive episodes. Faith couldn’t answer these questions, so why can’t science? This structure also allows Gyasi to retell parts of Gifty’s story that don’t involve Nana or their mother, including her time at a certain college in the Boston area and her tenuous relationships with people around her at Stanford. The novel puts Gifty together piece by piece in front of us, jumping back and forth in time to show how she got to this point of a sort of crisis of unfaith.

It’s hard to avoid judging Transcendent Kingdom by the standard of its predecessor, which was a completely different sort of book and wowed with its structure and scope. This is a small novel about a big character, and it doesn’t cast the same sort of spell that Homegoing did. It’s just different, but still has Gyasi’s easy, thoughtful voice, and shows her developing a single character to a much greater extent than she could possibly have done in Homegoing’s staccato stories.

Next up: About to finish Naomi Novik’s Uprooted.

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→ March 31, 2025
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Erasure.

Erasure was Percival Everett’s breakthrough novel, the twelfth one he published but the first to gain widespread acclaim and attention – ironic, in a small way, as it is in part a novel about the conflict between art and commerce, the need to create against the need to make a buck. Adapted into 2023’s Oscar-winning film American Fiction, Erasure is a masterpiece of biting, humorous satire, a work that holds up twenty years later in a world that hasn’t actually changed that much from the one in which it’s set.

Thelonious Ellison, known to friends and acquaintances as Monk, is a professor of literature and an author of inscrutable, dense novels that don’t sell. He lives in Los Angeles, far from his aging mother and sister Lisa, the latter of whom provides reproductive health services, including abortions, at her clinic in or outside D.C. Their brother Bill, who recently came out as gay, lives in Arizona; Bill and Lisa are close, but Monk is distant from both of them, and was their late father’s favorite in their telling.

Monk is appalled to find that a novel called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, written by a Black woman named Juanita Mae Jenkins, has become a critical and commercial success by pandering to white people’s sterotypes of Black America – even though Jenkins herself grew up privileged and the stories within the book aren’t hers. In his indignation over Jenkins’s success, and facing a sudden need to help pay for his mother to enter a memory-care facility, Monk writes a pandering novel of his own called My Pafology, submitting it under the pseudonym Stagg R. Lee. To his surprise, and his agent’s, the book sells immediately, and suddenly Monk has a Springtime for Hitler-like smash on his hands – and eventually ends up faced with the potential that he might win the Literary Award, a National Book Award-like honor for which Monk is also one of the judges.

Erasure is a masterpiece. It’s bursting with different themes and potential interpretations; Monk is a wonderfully complex and three-dimensional character; Everett balances his protagonist’s difficult personal life against the madness of his commercial breakthrough. It’s a satire of the publishing industry, sure, but Everett’s eye is much more on the white-savior racism of publishing and later Hollywood, and how Black creators are happy to contribute to it if it makes them rich. My Pafology, which Monk later retitles to something else I won’t spoil, has Black poverty, absentee fathers, guns, drugs, promiscuity, and the other requirements of white-published Black literature of the time, all written in a parody of AAVE that flies right over every white reader’s heads … but Monk is appalled to find that there’s a Black audience for the book as well, with an Oprah-like TV host also praising both his book and Jenkins’s for their realism and authenticity.

Everett’s biting wit and sense of irony are in top form here, with humor both from the repartee between Monk and some of the other characters and from the situations Monk encounters in the publishing side of the story. These characters are all intelligent, so the dialogue is sharp and often extremely funny, especially between Monk and Bill. The entire farcical plot line of the book becoming a sensation when Monk didn’t think any publisher would want it – and his agent refuses at first to even submit it to publishers – provides a natural “and of course that happened next” subtext that’s more facepalm-funny than the laugh-out-loud kind. The white critics on the Literary Award panel might seem a little overdrawn, but a look at the novels that have won the major U.S. literary prizes in the last fifteen or so years only underlines Everett’s point – if anything, he predicted this shift towards awarding fiction that critics think is Very Important, which isn’t to say they’re picking the wrong books but that the’ve gone from one type of bias in the selection process to another.

The farce of My Pafology is a stark contrast to the second story within Erasure, that of Monk’s family and his difficulty maintaining strong interpersonal relationships. He learns early in the book that his mother has Alzheimer’s, while there’s another death in the family around the same point in the story, both of which serve to push him to write the pandering novel, but also create new situations where he has to confront some of his past choices to remain separate from his family, which includes Lorraine, who has been the Ellisons’ housekeeper since Monk and his siblings were little. Everett also gives Monk a romantic subplot when he connects with someone who lives near their family beach house, but after the initial sparks cool off, Monk finds himself in familiar waters, erecting new boundaries and holding himself apart from – or perhaps just above – his new girlfriend. It might have felt leaden if it weren’t all set against a ridiculous parallel plot where Monk has fallen into a big pile of money and the potential for fame he doesn’t want.

This all has to come to a head at some point, and Everett lands in a perfect spot, avoiding the sentimental conclusion (which would be so unlike him) while also choosing not to give Monk some horrific Tony Last-style resolution. I imagine the end won’t satisfy everyone, but this is probably the best path out of the story Everett could have written.

Is this Everett’s best novel of the five I’ve read? I’ve been pondering that since I finished the book on Friday. Every one of those books has been so different than the others that comparisons seem foolish; James somehow seems like the strongest work because of the restrictions that come with writing within another person’s work, while Erasure is more precise in its construction, and has the benefit of humor.

As for the film, I’ll review that next.

Next up: T. Kingfisher’s A Sorceress Comes to Call, already nominated for this year’s Nebula Award.

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→ March 19, 2025
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So Much Blue.

So Much Blue may be one of Perceval Everett’s lesser-known novels, as it hasn’t received a film adaptation or any major awards, but I suspect also because it doesn’t have any of the speculative or fantastical elements of his more famous or popular works. His prose and characterization translate beautifully to the realist mode, which isn’t surprising, and in this pensive work about a middle-aged painter dealing with the weight of memories and past failings Everett gives the deepest exploration of a character I’ve seen in the four of his novels I’ve read.

Kevin Pace is a painter, married with two kids, living what would appear from the outside to be a comfortable upper-middle-class life with the usual problems you’d expect to find in a story about a suburban family. Everett intertwines that present-day narrative, which includes a secret painting that Pace won’t show anybody, not even his wife or his best friend, with two narratives from the past: one from 1979 where he joins his best friend on a dangerous trip to El Salvador to try to find and rescue the best friend’s ne’er-do-well brother, and one from ten years before the present day where Kevin had an affair with a French painter about twenty years his junior.

The 1979 narrative is by far the most compelling of the three, as it’s part thriller, part buddy comedy, and is driven by the uncertainty of how it’s going to turn out beyond knowing that Kevin and his best friend survived. Yet the depiction of the affair is the most interesting because Everett avoids the two typical ways of writing about that topic: he doesn’t judge Kevin’s actions, and he certainly doesn’t condone them, but lets the character’s words and behaviors speak for him and the reader to do the judging. Kevin knows he’s doing something terrible, but he does it anyway and has to live with the consequences.

Those consequences are the real theme of the novel – what happened in 1979, where a ridiculous, foolhardy endeavor that starts with good intentions and eccentric characters ends in violence, and what happened in Paris both weigh tremendously on Kevin, with their impact threatening to unravel his marriage and family and to stall his career. The present-day narrative also has a significant event that forces Kevin to make a choice, and he makes the wrong one, again, even though in that case it seems like the right decision at the time, after which he has several chances to set things right and can’t bring himself to do it, a subplot that especially resonated with me.

Everett’s development of Kevin as a character across three time periods, each of which sees him change and grow in some sense (even if it’s not always positive), shows a level of craft I at least hadn’t seen in the other three novels of his I’ve read. There’s a depth of understanding of Kevin as a person, as a man, as a middle-aged man, and as a very flawed man who is still reeling from events that happened thirty years earlier, that rivals the character development in just about any contemporary novel I can recall. Whether you agree with Kevin’s choices, including the decisions he makes to keep things secret, or his own assessment of those choices, Everett’s depiction of all of Kevin shows incredible insight into the character and how people think and feel about complex situations.

As you might expect from the title, color is a recurring motif and symbol in So Much Blue, with that particular color coming up repeatedly, as the secret painting in Kevin’s shed contains various shades of blue, and he refers more than once to the fact that traditional Chinese had just one word for blue and for green. Blue itself can carry multiple meanings in art, from the  most obvious one, depression (is Kevin depressed? Is he hiding his depression from his family?), to the way painters use blue to represent distance, using more blue to show that buildings or other objects are farther from the viewer. Blue is also the color we associate with the unattainable; the sky is blue from the ground, but when we ascend a mountain or a building, we don’t get any closer to the blue, as it remains beyond our reach. The ocean is blue from a distance, but when we’re in the water, it’s clear. Kevin expresses an ambivalent relationship with the color even as he fills his hidden painting with it; is that a representation of his unfulfilled desires, a depression he wants to keep locked away, or his attempt to create distance between himself and the things he doesn’t want to remember?

Everett is approaching Ann Patchett as my favorite living American writer. She crafts incredible stories with beautiful, lyrical prose, filling the pages with believable and three-dimensional characters, while he ranges from the wildly inventive to biting satire to compassionate character study. It’s hard to believe all four of the books of his I’ve read all came from the same mind. He’s some sort of wizard.

Next up: I just finished Cho Nam-ju’s Saha and started Antonio Padilla’s Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Journey to the End of Physics.

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