Review: Erasure

Erasure by Percival Everett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"'I make up shit for a living and I couldn't have come up with that.'"

Just over two decades have passed since Percival Everett's book came out, and now it's been adapted into this year's five-time Oscar-nominee American Fiction, and the sharp satire of race in publishing still hits as hard today as it did then. Even more so, I'd say, now that a lot of writers in particular are more attuned to the systemic issues that plague the industry, an industry that isn't exactly sending its best to the table if this book and the movie are anything to go by. I mean, between this book and R.F. Kuang's Yellowface, you can't imagine that there are people in publishing so monumentally boneheaded as to completely fail to understand when they're being punked. But when Thelonious "Monk" Ellison polishes off a satirical parody of the sort of ghetto fiction that white influencers hold up as the paragon of the Black literary experience, is it really any surprise that the same influencers bend over backwards to give him all the money for it? And with his mother's illness requiring constant care, and his brother Bill unable or unwilling to lend a hand, there lies the source of the conflict that drives Monk.

The movie does place a greater emphasis on the family drama aspect, which isn't all that surprising since the book is prone to experimental tangents of the sort of stories which Monk would no doubt rather be writing. They're all pretty spot on satires in and of themselves, especially the segment that plays out like a weird game show in a proto-"Harrison Bergeron" universe, and the book does portray the entire text of Stagg R. Leigh's My Pafology as Monk writes it. But most of these would, let's be honest, not translate well into film (the movie's version of showing Monk in the process of writing My Pafology is simply him imagining two characters having a fight, and the characters ask him what their motivations are, and one of them is played by Keith David in a memorable cameo.)

It's also fun to spot a lot of the small changes in the book as opposed to the movie. For instance, Monk's brother, the recently out of the closet plastic surgeon who's become a major league hedonist enticing younger men to trade cocaine for ass, is Bill from Scottsdale in the book, and Cliff from Tucson in the movie (writer-director Cord Jefferson being originally from Tucson, I suspect that was a deliberate in-joke). Monk's mama lives in DC in the book, instead of Boston in the movie, and so there's a lot less opportunity for beach house misadventures in the book. Monk's on again, off again girlfriend Linda becomes Coraline, a more or less steady girlfriend who gets a meet cute with him outside her own Boston beach house. Real life publishing houses like Random House are name dropped in the book, while the movie uses the fictional publishing house "Thompson Watt" instead. We's Lives in da Ghetto author Juanita Mae Jenkins becomes Sintara Golden in the movie, and she's also on the Literary Award judging panel with Monk, so her movie self is more fleshed out (and also helps highlight the hypocrisy of their fellow white panelists even more when they ignore both Golden and Monk to give plaudits to Stagg R. Leigh.)

Everett deliberately writes this one with a dense and inaccessible style, as Monk himself is described in the course of the book. Normally that's an immediate no for me, but as one of this book's many thematic and humorous layers, it absolutely works well. This book is timeless, and thanks to the movie adaptation's acclaim, I really hope that more people read it now like I did.

View all my reviews