{"id":10703,"date":"2025-03-31T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-31T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10703"},"modified":"2025-03-30T21:01:06","modified_gmt":"2025-03-31T01:01:06","slug":"erasure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/31\/erasure\/","title":{"rendered":"Erasure."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Erasure<\/a> <\/em>was Percival Everett\u2019s breakthrough novel, the twelfth one he published but the first to gain widespread acclaim and attention \u2013 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\u2019s Oscar-winning film American Fiction<\/em>, Erasure<\/em> is a masterpiece of biting, humorous satire, a work that holds up twenty years later in a world that hasn\u2019t actually changed that much from the one in which it\u2019s set.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thelonious Ellison, known to friends and acquaintances as Monk, is a professor of literature and an author of inscrutable, dense novels that don\u2019t 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\u2019s favorite in their telling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Monk is appalled to find that a novel called We\u2019s Lives in Da Ghetto<\/em>, written by a Black woman named Juanita Mae Jenkins, has become a critical and commercial success by pandering to white people\u2019s sterotypes of Black America \u2013 even though Jenkins herself grew up privileged and the stories within the book aren\u2019t hers. In his indignation over Jenkins\u2019s 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<\/em>, submitting it under the pseudonym Stagg R. Lee. To his surprise, and his agent\u2019s, the book sells immediately, and suddenly Monk has a Springtime for Hitler<\/em>-like smash on his hands \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Erasure<\/em> is a masterpiece. It\u2019s bursting with different themes and potential interpretations; Monk is a wonderfully complex and three-dimensional character; Everett balances his protagonist\u2019s difficult personal life against the madness of his commercial breakthrough. It\u2019s a satire of the publishing industry, sure, but Everett\u2019s 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<\/em>, which Monk later retitles to something else I won\u2019t 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\u2019s heads \u2026 but Monk is appalled to find that there\u2019s a Black audience for the book as well, with an Oprah-like TV host also praising both his book and Jenkins\u2019s for their realism and authenticity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everett\u2019s 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\u2019t think any publisher would want it \u2013 and his agent refuses at first to even submit it to publishers \u2013 provides a natural \u201cand of course that happened next\u201d subtext that\u2019s 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\u2019s point \u2013 if anything, he predicted this shift towards awarding fiction that critics think is Very Important, which isn\u2019t to say they\u2019re picking the wrong books but that the\u2019ve gone from one type of bias in the selection process to another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n