[This novel, ‘now a major motion picture,’ is in four sections. So far, I have written about the first two, and I will write about the rest after I’ve finished reading it. 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.
Do I need to tell you the details of what happens My Pafology? Probably not, beyond saying that every last bit of it is a cliché or a trope. Van Go Ellison—fine surname he has—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…
…things become weird. Are his fantasies real after all? 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 rich admirer to his own neighbourhood for a fix of drugs and poverty porn. Back at the big house, he does what he always does, raping the drunk and drugged daughter and getting out of there. But the day after that, he gets his come-uppance. He realises he’s not been invited on to daytime TV to meet somebody who has a crush on him—the joke being that every woman he ever meets, according to him, has a crush on him—but something different. ‘“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 been tricked into appearing on a sensationalist accuse-and-deny show, and he has nowhere to hide.
But hold on a minute. This mouthy kid who talks like a sweary fourteen-year-old really is the father of four children by different women, like he said? This is Everett’s game. This loser of a kid has got far enough with four women to father four children, take it or leave it. He can’t deny it despite trying, swears too much, and the police are backstage waiting to arrest him for the rape of the lawyer’s daughter. And what, he escapes, just like that? He now has a gun—I can’t remember where from, but so what?—and robs and kills the Korean. And two chapters later the ‘novel,’ really no more than a 60-page farrago of nonsense, ends with him as a sad parody of Jimmy Cagney in White Heat. He’s not going out in a (literal) blaze of glory, but under arrest following another trick. A murderer facing a shoot-out, he takes a hostage—but is stunned by the modified airbag in the escape car he’s demanded blows up in his face. Held by the cops, his arm twisted so far up his back he thinks it’s broken, he’s in his element now. ‘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.”’
At the beginning of the next chapter—I peeked—Monk’s editor wonders what on earth he’s supposed to do with it, 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. And Monk’s own universe—he’s a first-person narrator too—is another construct by an author with an agenda. 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.
We can read it for you wholesale 