Erasure

Erasure was one of those books which made me want to buy a copy for every person I meet on the street and shove it into their hands. It's the kind of compelling litfic which far exceeds the bounds of genre and hits something transcendent. Thelonious AKA Monk AKA Stagg R Leigh is sick and tired of being sick and tired of his failing career as a novelist. Publishers keep asking him, “Why aren't you writing about the black experience? No, not THAT black experience, the other one!” So, outta spite, outta anger, outta depression, he writes My Pafology, the most grim and grotesque depiction of black life he has in him. And he gets the deal. This is all supported by an absolutely wrenching depiction of dementia, family dissolution through longform shared traumas, dreams and reveries, and interview transcripts. I tore through this book in two days. There's a movie coming out with Jeffery Wright as Monk, called American Fiction. I couldn't be more excited to see it. Meanwhile, I now have to read as much Percival Everett as I can.

I assumed Thelonious (Monk) Ellison was an over-the-top satirical portrayal of a tweedy, leather-elbow-patched, white academic who of course enjoys fly fishing and woodworking when he's not teaching literary theory and writing dense papers on semiotics. Someone who mutters “egads” on the basketball court after missing a shot and the obvious polar opposite of the Stagg R. Leigh persona. Turns out author Pervical Everett teaches literary theory when he isn't fly-fishing, woodworking, and ranching besides. What does that say about me and my assumptions?

The book pokes at credulous readers and the publishing industry hype machine fumbling around representation. It recalls the early days of Indigenous writers and authors from Africa selected to shore up misery porn narratives. Predominantly white industry gatekeepers shaping BIPOC narratives, fuelled by good intentions but blind to their own biases.

Ellison is in the middle of a family crisis as his sister is killed by an anti-abortion protester, his brother is newly out which has thrown his marriage on its head, and their mother is clearly deteriorating with Alzheimer's. The bank gained by his literary minstrelsy sure could make things easier but then who is Thelonious Ellison at the end of this? The existential crisis he faces is evident on the page as he drops snippets of dialogues between Wittgenstein, Derrida, and Joyce along with the entire hit making novel My Pafology. It can make for a disjointed story that careens all over the place, glancing lightly on both the satirical, like the literary award panel, and the sombre struggles of his family situation.

There is a lot packed into this short work. Not all of it worked for me, but the ninety percent that did, wow. And the rest, it's probably a failing in me: one gift-slash-curse of mediocrity is being able to recognize genius but only myopically, where you know it's there and if you squint you can almost make it out but you know there's much more to it.

Like, Sokal Hoax. Chapter 2 is obviously a riff on pompous postmodernist windbags, with lovely echoes throughout the rest of the book. Or is it? And Heller: I thought I saw hat tips to Catch-22 several times, particularly the absurdist exchange between de Kooning and Rauschenberg. But what am I really seeing? I can tell that's the central focusing point in the book, but I lack the ability to see it in its fullness.

Erasure is much more than satire. I'd say the main theme is loneliness, with Everett tackling it from an impressive number of perspectives. Loss, too, and racism, code switching, integrity (artistic and personal), and our human need to be seen. Plus much, much more.