[This novel, ‘now a major motion picture,’ is in three sections. I wrote about each section in turn before reading on. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
17 February 2024
Chapters 1-6, and My Pafology: by Stagg R Leigh
American Fiction is an Oscar-nominated film, which is why Erasure, the novel I’m writing about here, is suddenly famous. I’ll go and see the film as soon as I’ve finished reading the novel, but everybody knows by now what it’s about. A super-bright Black novelist—he’s a super-bright academic in his spare time—writes novels that are too difficult for most readers and get criticised all the time for not being ‘Black’ enough. So, to make a point, he writes a stupidly over-the-top novel that is full of all the tropes to do with the Black experience that everybody thinks they know about. He does it as an angry joke—and the publishers love it. What now?
I don’t know what now. So far, I’ve only read about how, before all this, his comfortable middle-class life is suddenly turned upside-down. In a kind of desperation, he writes the parody novel. This is My Pafology, written under the pen-name Stagg R Leigh, which makes up the second section of this novel. But this is Percival Everett writing, and nothing is ever simple with him. Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison is the novelist and academic, and he lives a life that would be a dream for many, no matter what their colour or ethnicity. He has tenure in a good university, has had some minor success as a novelist—the one he didn’t like writing sold quite well—and has the time to pursue his non-literary interests. He goes fishing, and he loves making useful things from wood.
He considers his Blackness to be an irrelevance, and is annoyed by the ‘not Black enough’ line. His particular interest is the French structuralists—nothing and nobody Black there—and regrets that a Black writer can’t just write about what he’s interested in, like white writers do. In fact, he’s so not defined by his Blackness it’s the USP that defines him. Everett needs him not only to have a life that is indistinguishable in every way from that of a white liberal arts professor, but stretches the point, quite deliberately, to its limits.
It’s important to say from the start that Everett is writing for a sophisticated readership, real or imagined. It doesn’t matter if the reader is left behind by some of Monk’s deep (or shallow) exploration of texts and meta-texts. I have only ever had one friend who would really get the joke at the centre of the academic paper Monk presents in Washington, and he went on to become chair of the English Faculty in a respected university. I don’t really get it, but I see where Monk is going with it, and why some of the audience at his presentation might assume he’s attacking them: he offers a metatextual re-working of Barthes’s S/Z, itself (he tells us) a metatextual reworking of Balzac’s Sarrasine. This isn’t navel-gazing so much as disappearing deep inside one’s own navel never to be seen again—and Everett knows it. I’m not sure about Monk, but he certainly doesn’t care about the paper, and tells us as much. He’s only accepted the gig for the paid flight and accommodation, so he can see his mother and sister in DC.
If I’m giving the impression that Monk has some difficulties in finding any meaning in his life, well, good. Because, if Monk doesn’t know it—he certainly does to at least some extent—the reader is left in no doubt. It’s not that he feels like a fraud, because he knows he does this stuff at least as well as anybody else. But so what? So what if he writes novels and academic papers he believes in? They’re only texts, after all, and as stated in one of the structuralist truisms that occasionally appear like interludes in the narrative, All propositions are of equal value. This comes not long before the hectic writing session when Monk turns out his cliché-ridden parody, and the reader is neither surprised nor mystified by what he churns out, My Pafology by one ‘Stagg R Leigh’. I’ll come back to that.
And Monk’s own universe—he’s a first-person narrator too—is another construct by an author with an agenda. But Everett’s isn’t as one-note as Monk’s, because he has much subtler points to make.
What points? And how does Everett make them? (Bearing in mind that I’m only half-way through the novel, so I don’t know where it’s leading yet.) They’re to do with much wider debates that are going on in the US about the presentation of Blackness. I’m neither Black nor an American, but I can read. Like the novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigerian but living in America at the time (Americanah, 2013), Colson Whitehead (The Underground Railroad, 2016), Tayari Jones (An American Marriage, 2018), Brit Bennett (The Vanishing Half, 2020) and Everett’s own The Trees (2022) are novels I’ve read recently. They were all written after Erasure, and deal with some of the same issues, and different ones.
Where does Erasure fit into all this? The narrator’s name is an obvious clue—not so much the old-school jazz nickname Thelonious ‘Monk,’ but the surname. Ralph Ellison was one of the first writers to deal with the growing Black consciousness in novel form. In 1952, the same year that James Baldwin published Go Tell It on the Mountain, Ellison published the groundbreaking Invisible Man. Invisibility a metaphor—every aspect of American culture being so white that the Blacks in the country might as well be invisible. And, half a century later, a different Black writer, Everett, has his main character discovering a different kind of invisibility. Like the Black couple in An American Marriage—no hint of Blackness in that title—Monk is able to live in a way which, he seems to have decided, makes his ethnicity and skin colour irrelevant. His life could just as easily be that of a successful white academic—what’s not to celebrate?
The problem is, it doesn’t work. The couple in An American Marriage are savagely brought down to earth by a racially motivated false accusation of sexual assault against the husband. Monk’s re-education follows a different trajectory, based on other, equally problematic aspects of American culture. For a start, the academic world is an absurd little bubble that no self-respecting thinker would have any part of. Monk tries to keep his distance—how often does he tell us he doesn’t care, and how many pages does he devote to interludes of not thinking at all beyond seeking out elusive trout or celebrating the properties of wood? But he can’t. His novels seem to satisfy him, but they don’t satisfy anybody else, as his editor keeps reminding him. (Did I mention that Monk hates the one that sold moderately well, probably because it actually dealt with a real aspect of Black experience?)
The rest of his life is just as unsatisfactory. His precocious intelligence as a child seems to have created a barrier up between him and everybody else at school. There’s a ridiculous moment when another player on the basketball court asks him what he’s thinking about, because it’s definitely not the shots he’s playing, and Monk replies, Hegel…. Meanwhile, his family relationships are little better. His sister and brother are both medics, but the distance between them all goes far beyond the geographic. His attempts to hug his sister are embarrassing, and he has to remind himself to ask her how things are after a recent difficult break-up. His brother—forget it. He’s a ‘butcher’ as far as the sister is concerned, going for the money option as a cosmetic surgeon.
So far, so non-Black-specific. It’s why I’ve been mentioning An American Marriage so often—the couple in it would recognise the lifestyle in every detail. It’s American middle-class life—which is why American Fiction is just as perfect a title as Erasure. Not that we have to believe that Monk’ de facto erasure of his own Black identity is a cynical ploy. In fact, as I’ve suggested, it seems more a matter of how an introspective personality tries to survive within white academia. But society, especially Black society, doesn’t like the perceived cloak of invisibility. OK. But American Fiction as a title addresses the fact that the issue is systemic in all American culture, not just Black. White America, even liberal white America, thinks it has got its head around the complex issues in Black culture. Unfortunately, it hasn’t even got its head around its own.
And these are what turn round to bite the Ellison siblings. American culture as a whole isn’t fit for purpose, as the death of Monk’s sister shows all too graphically. She’s a doctor in a women-only clinic, and her death at the hands of an anti-abortion fanatic is a marker of America’s brutality—and the culture’s blinkered inability to deal with non-hetero lifestyle choices is what brings his brother down. It’s no accident that neither of these has any direct reference to their colour or ethnicity. Barry, Monk’s brother, loses everything through having kept his sexual orientation from his wife, so that when he finally comes out as gay the divorce is bitter and, for him cripplingly costly.
Which means—plot twist alert—that he can contribute nothing to their mother’s care, as dementia makes her ever more forgetful and unable to look after herself. Monk has to put his job on hold and move back to Washington, with no jobs available except temporary, part-time, and far below his pay grade. How on earth is he going to…? etc. And to cap his mood of disgust at everything, the current talking point in Black fiction is a dreadful potboiler he could have written in his sleep. Maybe he could—but, in fact, he stays awake to put a sheet of paper into his dead father’s old manual typewriter. ‘I wrote this novel, a book on which I knew I could never put my name…’ And the next ten chapters—grotesquely enough, Won, Too, Free and the rest—are what ‘Stagg R Leigh’ comes up with.
My Pafology: by Stagg R Leigh
Do I need to tell you the details of what happens My Pafology? The producers of American Fiction reduced it to a short scene, in which Monk watches two of his characters, in the flesh and standing by his writing desk. A desperate-looking young Black man is taunting the local wino, who keeps asking him about his mother and telling him to mend his ways. He doesn’t like the way this old no-hoper pokes his nose into his business, but then the man drops a bombshell. ‘Look at my face. Look at my coal-black skin and then look at yown. Look at my black eyes and then look at yown. Look at my big black lips and then look at yown. I be your daddy whether you likes it or not.’ Well, what’s a bro supposed to do? He shoots the father who was never there for him—it’s always somebody else’s fault, obviously—in the gut.
This comes near the end of My Pafology, and every last bit of it has been a cliché or a trope. Van Go Jenkins—the surname is that of the woman author receiving plaudits for her Black experience novel—is the first-person narrator, and in his own mind he’s a big shot in the ‘hood. But, chapter by chapter, we come to realise just how much of a fantasist and loser he is. He’s all talk, telling how great he is with women and how he’s doesn’t like the way a Korean shopkeeper looked at him as if he was about to steal from him. (He was.) If he could afford a gun he’d show him—but he’s lost his crummy job through missing three days, his mother has had enough of his mouthiness and all-round uselessness, and…
…suddenly the setting changes. His mum has a friend who gets him a job as a houseboy for a rich Black lawyer. Which leads to a different set of cliché-ridden episodes, including the rich daughter having him drive her and her prissy boyfriend to his own neighbourhood for a fix of drugs and poverty porn. Back at the big house, Van Go does what he always does, pretending to himself that the drunk and drugged daughter wants sex with him before he rapes her and gets out of there.
It’s the next day that he gets his come-uppance. Monk takes a pop at a TV culture that makes a spectacle of the inevitable domestic failures of the lower classes. We’ve seen how Van Go, who seems to have the maturity of a thirteen-year-old, considers himself both a great lover and a good father. ‘I looks after my babies,’ he likes to say—by which he means, he likes to grace them with an occasional sentimental visit. (Not that this stops him referring to one of his own as a ‘big-head retard.’) The four women have conspired to get him on to a downmarket Jerry Springer-style talk show. ‘“Today’s show is called, You gave me the baby, Now where’s the money,” she say. “So, where is the money, Van Go? These four ladies say you have never given them any cash for their children.”’ He’s a fish in a barrel among an audience baying for blood. Worse, the police are backstage waiting to arrest him for the rape of the lawyer’s daughter.
Monk had needed his man to move from anti-social behaviour to outright criminality, because he’s working his way towards a White Heat-style final scene. Everything about Van Go’s roller-coaster journey from immature fantasist to murderer is laced with as many clichés as Monk can fit into ten short chapters. It’s a low-rent Black version of American Psycho, except that instead of satirising the arrogance and misogyny of white yuppies in the eighties, Monk satirises the arrogance and misogyny of the Black underclass.
Van Go manages to escape from the cops in the studio. He also manages to get the gun from one of his women who had wanted to use on him, and goes to rob the Korean shop. I’ll let you guess what happens—which is why Van Go ends up taking a hostage and demanding a car out of wherever it is he’s landed up. But he falls for a simple trick, is hauled from the car, and gets kicked to the ground. ‘I get kicked again while I’m bein pulled to my feet. But I dont care. The cameras is pointin at me. I be on the tv. The cameras be full of me. I on tv. I say, “Hey, Mama.” I say, “Hey, Baby Girl. Look at me. I on tv.”’
Chapters 7-18—to the end
Monk’s editor wonders what on earth he’s supposed to do with this farrago of a novel, but Monk tells him to send it out to publishers: ‘Look at the shit that’s published. I’m sick of it. This is an expression of my being sick of it.’ The editor doesn’t want to offend them, but Monk is defiant. ‘The idiots ought to be offended.’ As I wrote at the start, we all know what is going to happen next. And, as I’ve been writing, I’ve realised that Everett’s presentation of Monk’s universe is as full of narrative artifice as Van Go’s. Van Go’s story is a satire on the supposedly ‘real’ voice of an oppressed minority, Monk making it blindingly obvious that there’s no reality in it at all.
I’m really impressed by this novel. I realise now that even outside the pastiche of My Pafology (later renamed by Monk as Fuck, a Novel), Everett is telling two overlapping stories, in two different genres, at the same time. We have a serious recounting of Monk’s near breakdown, as his sense of identity and idea of his own self-worth are undermined by one realisation after another. While his family disintegrates around him we get flashbacks to his childhood, going some way towards explaining the family’s dysfunctionality and Monk’s unenviable place in it. Meanwhile the big takeaway, the one that has led to the making of the movie, is basically a farce. The story of the pastiche novel’s runaway success, and the series of absurd situations it forces Monk into, could easily have been a stand-alone comedy.
It’s typical of Ellison that he can run these two elements, plus plenty of other stuff—literary jokes and digs, imagined conversations between great artists of the past—into what becomes, for Monk, an ever more confusing ride into the unknown. By the end, wondering what on earth he should do to acknowledge the award received by his intended joke of a pastiche novel, he isn’t at all sure who he is any more. Is he Thelonious Ellison or Stagg R Leigh?
Wh,atever, as soon as Monk’s editor sends out My Pafology, a publisher is willing to pay a big advance for it. Monk demurs, briefly, but as soon as he agrees, everything quickly spins out of his control. He decides ‘Stagg R Leigh’ can’t possibly be identified as Thelonious Ellison, so he makes impromptu and sometimes bizarre decisions about how he’s going to handle the inevitable hullaballoo surrounding this unknown new genius. No, he won’t go and see the people from Random House, and his editor has to almost trick him into a phone conversation. Monk decides to go for taciturnity and his first step on what turns into a dangerous path for him. He hints at a back-story, that he’s an ex-con keen to tell—what, exactly? He keeps it vague, cuts the conversation short—and the publishers love it. He’s conspiring to perpetuate the mythologisation of the harsh, gritty Black experience he’s proudly been disowning. It isn’t his Black experience, he keeps telling everyone… except apparently, by default, it is now.
Meanwhile, deep cracks are appearing in his personal life. Or, rather, he starts to realise both how much he had always taken for granted and how wrong he had been. Their father, sardonically clever and witty, was the family hero—except he wasn’t. Monk had never realised, or had turned a blind eye to the fact, that only he had a close bond with his father. Monk, super-intelligent in his own way, was something new for their father, a wild card who wasn’t going to follow the family tradition of becoming a doctor. To Monk, as a child, this was no more than his due—but to his siblings it was proof of their father’s shortcomings. He, they felt, was no father at all to them, because everything was focused on the youngest, cleverest child. Monk had never understood his sister’s coolness towards him, and only in the few days of his visit to DC does he realise she had always she admires and likes him for being different. And then, this being the novel it is, she’s dead.
This is only the first of the narrative twists Evertett inflicts on the hapless Monk. The catalogue of unlucky personal calamities he faces is as headlong as his alter-ego’s unlooked-for rise to celebrity—the sudden fame of his literary farrago is a double irony, both an embarrassment and the single successful thing in his life. Everything happens at breakneck speed, because that’s what happens in farces—except that the important things in his life are nearer to tragedy than farce. Does Monk have the fatal flaws of a tragic hero? Let me count the ways… mostly based on his complete lack of self-knowledge. He understands neither how privileged he is, nor how he has brought about his own alienation both from the people he ought to be close to and from a Black identity that includes him and his colour-blind way of life life whether he understands it or not.
The truth he doesn’t recognise is that he’s been lucky to get away with it up to now. Job, albeit one he finds pretty meaningless. Occasional lover, although one he neither cares for nor respects. Academic respect, albeit grudging. A string of publications, including novels, albeit… what? Albeit, nothing in his life amounts to a hill of beans. So, has he been getting away with it after all? Somehow, there’s been little to show for all his intelligence and wit—and Everett is happy to provide a reckoning. His sister dead, his brother alienated by Monk’s apparent indifference to the ongoing shitshow of his life, his mother often lapsing into total confusion, recognising nobody—her fast-track dementia represents another loss for him. There’s only one person left, Lorraine the help—not that this right-on Black family ever calls her that—and then there isn’t. Lorraine always been there, but against all the odds (no, really) she receives a proposal of marriage. An old neighbour at the summer house that Monk and Lorraine take his mother to has always liked her, and the most stressful time in Monk’s life seems like a good time for the old man to tell her.
Everything is going wrong—and the stress of the parody novel only adds to the stress. A film producer is interested in it, and so there’s one of those periodic farcical interludes when Monk has to go into his Stagg R Leigh act. It’s a scene from that stand-alone comedy I was imagining earlier, as his awkwardness and the dark glasses he’s worn as an afterthought give the impression of resentful ex-con menace. The producer’s arm-candy PA is wowed by the danger she thinks she’s in.
But then he’s back to the other plot, the not-quite tragedy. He realises he is going to have to pay for his mother’s care, because his brother keeps talking up his financial hardship and his sister isn’t there any more. Luckily—not luckily at all, because Everett is just playing with him—Monk meets a woman who, at last, ticks all the boxes for him. She’s a lawyer in a socially caring practice, she’s coming to the end of a worn-out relationship—there’s a hint that she’s making sure it ends so she can see more of Monk—and she’s read some of Monk’s books. You couldn’t make it up—but Everett has, and he only supplies the gift, on a plate, so he can take it back. Or, rather, so that Monk can throw it away in a moment that could come straight from Frasier. They are making love when, by the bed, he sees the ‘Black experience’ novel he hates, the one that prompted him to write My Pafology. He asks her about it, and goes on from spoiling the moment to trashing it beyond repair. He argues that he can’t respect anybody who can’t see what a travesty it is, and when he leaves they both know he won’t be going back.
The two genres continue side by side. Despite his money worries, perhaps to prove to himself that he is above selling himself for something he doesn’t believe in, he tries to make the novel unsellable. Stagg R Leigh insists—and we all know that he doesn’t play games—that the novel has a new title, Fuck. That should kill it off, he thinks… and perhaps, in the other universe Monk lives in, it really would be dead. But not in this one. Now even an Oprah-style TV host wants to meet Stagg Leigh, and he is forced to do his thing, a shadowy figure behind a curtain. What’s a principled man to do? Whatever it might be, Monk doesn’t do it. He goes through with the charade and, no doubt, wonders what he will have to do next.
Back in the real world, Monk is a mess. He’s messed up his one chance of having a real relationship—there’s an ugly and rather sad little scene where the occasional lover calls him up and they meet for the sole purpose of having sex. And Monk can’t do it. His mother is almost permanently a stranger to everyone, in a care home he’s paying a fortune for—until Everett takes even that tiny connection away. Only a few months after she goes there, she’s dead. Just as the brain-dead literati are feting his pastiche as the authentic voice of Black experience, there are no ties left. The reader somehow shares Monk’s dizzying sense of becoming unmoored from any certainties he might have imagined he could rely on.
And Everett is planning one more farcical twist to the knife. By the end of it, every narrative is unreliable for Monk, including anything he tells himself about who he is. His various working strategies for getting through his life have collapsed him. He’s unfulfilled, has gone from being at odds with every member of his family to losing them all, and—a truth I’m not convinced he recognises even now—he’s cripplingly lonely. Soon, there will be the denouement of the literary awards ceremony…
…but there are going to be a lot of Frasier-like bumps along the way. First, despite himself, Monk is flattered to be invited on to the prize panel. They are going to have to read a lot of books, which gives Everett the chance to satirise the publishing scene. The other judges, all stock types—naturally, he’s the token Black, and lets them know he isn’t fooled by any denials—are a commentary on the early 21st Century scene. It’s a bore for him, and he gives us a flavour.
‘It was the season of the absent or lazy editor. So many of the novels were needlessly fat. Six were more than nine hundred pages …’ then, following a list of typical novels from individual writers known for that kind of novel, ‘a shelf of first novels about fatherly abuse and motherly alcoholism (and the reverse), a mid-list author’s new (but dreadfully old) take on the academic novel, twenty-eight middle America, domestic, where-will-the-children-live novels, forty coming-of-age novels, thirty-five new-life-after-the-wrecked-marriage novels, thirty crime novels, forty so-called adventure novels…’ He’s only saying what Everett knows we’re all thinking, and have thought for a very long time. But then, out of the blue (only joking, it was always going to happen), Fuck gets an unprecedented late nomination. We witness Monk’s hapless efforts to trash his own work, wishing he could tell them exactly why he knows it should not be taken seriously. But… well, the outcome is inevitable. What’s he going to do this time?
Will he make a stand at last? The final scene at the awards ceremony is a bravura set piece, beginning when he and the other judges sit at their tables at the gala event. The chair of the judges announces the winner and… nothing. Monk really, really doesn’t know what he will do, if anything and neither do we. Then he rises from his seat, and the chair of the panel looks nervous. But Everett makes it end not with a bang—we will never know what the blowback will be when people realise he’s the author of a book he’s been trying to deride while it sells so well—but a whimper. It ends with a sad little joke that isn’t a joke at all, a parody of a parody. Van Go’s bathetic final line is ‘Hey, Mama. … Hey, Baby Girl. Look at me. I on tv.’ What Monk comes out with, as though to deny any vestige of identification with Stagg—he hadn’t been sure for a while—is ‘Egads, I’m on television.’ Which is how the novel ends. It’s exactly the sort of thing he might say, containing a knowing subtext of clever self-mockery. But Stagg? No. Monk has chosen it because it’s the opposite of anything his alter-ego could come out with. At last, perhaps, through this self-parodying joke, he knows who he is. And—we know this because he’s told his editor—he’s decided he wants to face the consequences.
Blackness really isn’t what defines Monk, and the presentation of Blackness isn’t what defines this novel. Monk’s lifelong determination to behave as though it isn’t an issue is a part of his flawed humanity, not his ethnicity. He always tries to deal with difficulties in his life by ignoring them, withdrawing to his safe place just to get through the day. We see how successful that is through his arms’-length relationships with his family in the early chapters, his brazen contempt for any fellow-academics who aren’t as bright as he is, his non-relationship, bordering on contempt, with his occasional lover. None of it is fit for purpose, and he’s lonely because he’s put himself out of reach of any human connection.
Perhaps to bring out some kind of redemption (how should I know?), Everett has put his man through the mill so thoroughly that something has to give. And meanwhile he, Everett, has written a novel that fizzes with ideas, flashbacks that offer context to Monk’s family’s dysfunctionality, imaginary conversations between dead artists or thinkers, and an ongoing satire on the world of publishing. Monk’s disaffection with the received opinions on Blackness is just another thread. He’s a poor, bare, forked animal, like the rest of us.
We can read it for you wholesale 