Black enough?

Thelonious Ellison is an academic and a writer of fiction. He is also black, and unfortunately, his books do not conform to the publishing industry’s idea of black writing. A typical response from a reviewer:

The novel is finely crafted, with fully developed characters, rich language, and subtle play with the plot, but one is lost to understand what this reworking of Aeschylus’ “The Persians” has to do with the African American experience.

In Percival Everett’s Erasure, Thelonious (whose full name is reflective of a great musician and a great author, and is known mostly as Monk) “hardly ever thinks about race”. However, regardless of his beliefs, the world around him does indeed care about race and skin colour. (The excellent film made from this book, American Fiction, starring the wonderful Jeffrey Wright, makes this point amusingly: Monk is on his cellphone, telling his agent he hardly thinks about race, when a Boston cabbie drives past his upraised arm and stops for a white passenger.)

Monk is in Washington for a conference (of the Nouveau Roman Society :-)) where his mother and sister live. His sister and brother are both doctors, following in the footsteps of their deceased father. His sister Lisa provides healthcare for poor women, including abortions if needed, which makes her a perpetual target of harassment and worse from the anti-abortion brigade. His brother Bill is a

high rolling plastic surgeon in Scottsdale, Arizona. Bill had a wife and two kids, but we all knew he was gay. Lisa didn’t dislike Bill because of his sexuality, but because he practiced medicine for no reason other than the accumulation of great wealth.

Their mother, it turns out, is developing Alzheimer’s, and Monk needs to move her to an expensive assisted living place. She has little money, and none of the siblings can afford the cost for various reasons. He could work as an adjunct professor, but it pays all of $4000 for a semester. Monk is bitter but also envious of the runaway success of a recent bestseller by Juanita Mae Jenkins, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, which receives reviews like ‘typical Black life’, ‘haunting verisimilitude’, and ‘The ghetto is painted in all its exotic wonder’. One night, Monk smashes out a novel:

My Pafology 
by Stagg R Leigh
[...] Tyelenola's mama be a crazy bitch and she done got herself a nine and I know she gone pop a cap in me if I shows my face cause I ain't give her no money, and she been asking fo' three monfs. [...]

(The entirety of My Pafology is reproduced in this novel.) His agent is aghast:

‘Are you serious […] I even admire the parody, but who’s going to publish this? The people who publish the stuff you hate are going to be offended, so they won’t take it. Hell, everybody’s going to be offended.’

You know what’s coming. The publishers love this novel (‘magnificiently raw and honest’), Stagg Leigh is invited on TV shows and a movie producer is interested. And Monk is now well off, although he may have sold his soul.

The news of the money came and I breathed an ironic and bitter sigh of relief. Maybe I felt a bit of vindication somewhere inside me. Certainly, I felt a great deal of hostility toward an industry so eager to seek out and sell such demeaning and soul-destroying drivel.

Is Monk a sell-out, as he fears? The touchy issue of whether he is simply taking advantage of the market for such writing is elegantly presented in the film, where the author of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto (played by Issa Rae) defends her approach.

The novel is as much about Monk’s dysfunctional family as about black writing, and the author manages to make both parts interesting. He is clear-eyed about the failings of Monk and his family , but it is also a deeply sympathetic portrait of them. About his mother with Alzheimer’s:

Her most lucid moments seemed to occur when she first awoke and after that there were any number of cracks in the surface of her world through which to fall. There was no steering her toward solid ground: she stepped where she stepped.

Interspersed between the actual events are excerpts from Monk’s writing, story ideas, and calm thoughts about his hobbies (fly fishing and woodworking). Many of these insertions are delightful, and they are short enough to not interfere with the story.

The S/Z refers no doubt to the unvoiced and voiced, but the enigma pales in consideration of the slash which separates them. The ‘/’ at once combines the S and the Z into the title/anti-title and divides them, equally, but not so, as the S precedes the Z.

From Monk’s paper at the conference, titled ‘F/V: Placing the Experimental Novel’. His presentation receives a ‘tentative smattering of applause’.

This is likely mystifying to most readers, including myself, but I took it as the author, an academic himself, poking gentle fun at the more obscure papers he hears at conferences.

Towards the latter half of the novel, My Pafology is nominated for a book award, and the hilarious description of the award deliberations must surely come from the author’s personal experience.

This is a novel with many layers and reflected layers. The excerpts, the names (Stagg R Leigh — see this Wikipedia reference), and the references all have a point. They are mirrors — a novel within the novel; Monk is an author who like Percival Everett’ is not easily categorized — and I would need a second read to pick up on all of them. Even throwaway lines are interesting, and often funny.

Columbia, Maryland was noted as a planned city right up to the time that its population exceeded its plan. It then became simply a city and its original plan worked against it.

The film is set in Boston rather than the Washington DC of the film, but retains the same combination of irony, humour, and bitingly satirical social commentary. The novel and film leave the audience with much to think about, but they don’t hit you over the head with a message.

More sophisticated and intricate than Yellowface *, Erasure is complicated, funny and very clever.

^{Erasure was first published in 2001, and the film American Fiction was released in 2023.}