Erasure: now a major motion picture 'American Fiction'

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if I had been in her office (looking the part), she would have been tearing off her blouse and crawling across her desk toward me, perhaps not literally, but at least literarily. Monk also finds a mystery to solve: among his father's private papers are clues to the identity of a sister Monk never knew he had, the child of his father's love affair with a German woman in the 1950s. American Fiction is valuable as a representation of Black people that deconstructs the perils of representation.

Do Black Zoomers—or really any audience members—know anything about Staggolee (Stack Lee) as a mythological character? Moreover, these moments of interiority show that race really isn’t all that important to the Ellisons when they’re alone together and relate to one another as family members, not as Black people burdened with representing the race in public in front of prying white eyes, as they do in a galling scene showing them scattering Lisa’s ashes on the beach; a white male neighbor interrupts the moment to grill them about whether they have a permit to do so. And what hurts even more is that the book is being hailed as the “voice of the African-American experience.The protagonist of I Am Not Sydney Poitier finds himself swept along by events into a similar erasure of his real self. Maybe that quality of the satiric wit is just plain that rare or maybe television has eaten up all the talent.

We are told by sociologists that these behaviours are in some sense ‘normal’ because we have a natural human preference for those who are like ourselves. Of course, everyone wants to meet the infamous Stagg, further complicating Monk's plan and forcing him into an even greater charade. I listen to Mahler, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Parker and Ry Cooder on vinyl records and compact discs. He then finds himself on an award committee that gives the prize to the novel he insisted on renaming Fuck, just to make life hard for his publishers.

Ultimately, what appears at first to be fragmentary coheres into a highly intelligent, humorous and self-aware work of fiction. This skilful, extended parody of ghetto novels such as Sapphire's Push will no doubt get Erasure talked about. While in college I was a member of the Black Panther Party, defunct as it was, mainly because I felt I had to prove I was black enough.

But what's even better, when you read this book, you can see glimmering there behind the prose the shape of the intelligence that made it, and going by the results, Percival Everett is one hell of a smart guy. It’s the story of Van Go Jenkins, tough-talking, 19-year-old father of four babies by four different mothers. The first is the satirization of the publishing industry; the second is Monk’s relationship with his family. His most recent manuscript has just received its 17th rejection, and by the time he watches Jenkins on a talk show whose black woman host has chosen the novel for her book club, he's at breaking point. Of course, he submits it to his agent and the book gets attention, raves and an obscenely large advance.I have dark brown skin, curly hair, a broad nose, some of my ancestors were slaves and I have been detained by pasty white policemen in New Hampshire, Arizona and Georgia, so the society in which I live tells me I am Black; that is my race. An argument ensues with a white student, who walks out in protest when Ellison keeps the troublesome word on the board. It's gotten very good reviews, but I think I'll reread the book at some point, rather than seeing the film. Monk is close with his elderly mother who refers to him as "Monksie", as well as his sister Lisa, an abortion clinic doctor, but distant with his brother due to sexual identity issues.