Erasure (2001)

Why this one?

This is another product of my recent run through the 2022 Booker Prize shortlist. The book that I loved the most, and would have most wanted to see take the Prize, was Percival Everett’s The Trees, which wrapped up powerful themes around race in America in seductively simple murder-mystery / detective novel packaging and layers of the darkest of dark humour. I couldn’t resist diving deeper into Everett’s extensive back catalogue, starting here with 2001’s Erasure.

To recap, Percival Everett (1956- ; active 1983- ) was born in Fort Gordon, Georgia, US.  He studied at Brown university, where he wrote his first novel Suder (1983). Since then he’s published relatively prolifically in the US, though many of his books have been hard to get hold of in the UK. 

Some of his better known novels deal satirically with racism and issues facing Black people in the US and in general, including this one, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009). He has won numerous prizes over the years, and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer for 2020’s Telephone. The Trees (2022) was his first Booker nomination, though. He lives in LA and is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. 

Thoughts, etc.

Erasure focuses on the author Thelonius “Monk” Ellison. In the mid-1990s, we find him in a rut with his writing, tired of being told by those around him in the publishing industry that he’s “not black enough". He’s an academic and his work reflects his own interests, such as modern retellings of Greek satires, and pissing off those around him with provocations that are of deeply niche interest - such at his lecture which parodies Barthes’ S/Z in the style of Barthes’ S/Z (a provocation to the average reader of Erasure, too, when this lecture is reproduced in exhaustive detail early in the book!) Outside of his writing, he’s dealing with everyday realities of life: a mother succumbing to Alzheimers, a brother who comes out of the closet - destroying his marriage, and a sister who pays the ultimate price for her work at an abortion clinic. He enjoys fishing and woodworking.

Everything begins to change for Monk when he encounters the publishing success story of the moment, a novel called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto by Juanita Mae Jenkins, a novel written in a self-conscious Black / lower class dialect that inspires visceral hate from Monk. It’s presented as the absolute contrast to Monk’s own work - a novel that dials up every cliche of the Black experience and seems to Monk to be pandering to an industry and media that demands a kind of one-dimensional, performative Blackness from its authors. At the same time, we notice Monk developing a perverse fascination for its astonishing commercial success. Soon, he writes what he claims is a parody of Jenkins’ novel, in a similar style, which he titles initially My Pafology (when media attention beckons, he changes the title to FUCK). He refuses to attach his own name to this book, but agrees to its publication under the pen name Stagg R. Leigh. As it becomes a runaway success, he faces first the industry and then the media in disguise, as Stagg, before his election to a judging panel (as Ellison) brings about a denouement that feels inevitable, with Ellison forced to reveal himself as Stagg.

It’s taken me a little while to get around to writing about this one. I’m still struggling a little now. I know that I loved it, perhaps even more than The Trees (more layers, more to unpick, more nuance) in spite of it not being as straightforwardly “enjoyable” (I repeat that that’s still a highly weird thing to keep saying about a book that’s about a subject like lynching, but it remains annoyingly true). This one works on so many levels though, much like Everett’s most recent work.

First up, it’s similarly packed with humour. Rarely a paragraph passes without a genuine laugh - often uncomfortable, occasionally bleak, but always seriously punchy. The extended parody My Pafology / FUCK that dominates the middle of the novel is a virtuoso performance, brilliantly capturing the disgust Monk feels for his own creation at every turn, while remaining oddly captivating in its own right. Fragments that sit throughout the rest of the novel, from one-liner ideas to the gameshow concept that is weighted against its genius Black participant, astonish and entertain in equal measure - the way Everett casually tosses out these amazing little fragments reminded me time and again of Vonnegut.

Beyond that, there’s a central character who’s presented as a multi-layered but in many ways ordinary middle-class human, who finds himself slowly becoming Stagg, his own reductive ex-con creation. Within that, the surface-level focus of the story, in which it’s easy to straightforwardly read Monk as a proxy for Everett, a genius writer operating on the margins, disgusted by the popular fiction that purports to represent ‘him’ and his race.

Behind all of that, though, are yet more interesting layers, more nuanced again. When you think a little harder, it’s clear that Monk’s own character is both another extreme to Stagg, almost totally absorbed by the petty and unbearably niche concerns of the academic literary establishment and perhaps subtly craving a way out of that particular box - and a way of eventually giving the ultimate provocation (or FUCK you) to his irritating peers - a successful populist novel that represents the exact opposite of what they’d expect from him. And simultaneously, there’s Monk’s evident fascination with the financial appeal of this kind of ‘selling out’ - first when observing Jenkins and later when he starts being visited by success after success for his supposedly hated novel. Within all of this, there’s a pleasing swirl of contradictions and challenges that keeps the whole thing fascinating over and beyond its seemingly straightforward premise. By the end of the novel, Ellison seems to be almost comfortable to walk into the light and ‘become’ his hated creation: but there the novel ends, in satisfying ambiguity.

Score

9.5

An awesome read, which just makes me want to read everything Everett. Would have been a 10 if not for me nearly giving up on it during the Barthes-inspired lecture. Petty? Sorry.

Next up

My Women’s Prize for Fiction journey reaches 2008 with Rose Tremain’s The Road Home.