The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Erasure by Percival Everett
Trey Strecker

Percival Everett. Erasure. Univ. Press of New England, 2001. 265 pp. $24.95.

Percival Everett’s new novel offers a compelling exploration of “the notion of a public and its relationship to the health of art.” The protagonist, Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, an avant-garde writer, woodworker, and fly fisherman, becomes offended by critics’ charges that his dense novelistic parodies of poststructuralism are “not black enough.” Unable to find a publisher or an audience for his most recent book, Monk becomes infuriated by the national success of Juanita Mae Jenkins’s We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, as the “ghetto wanna-be” novel is celebrated as one of “the true, gritty real stories of black life.” Hiding his identity behind a pseudonym, Monk composes a bitter parody of Jenkins’s blaxploitation novel, but the literary community hails Stagg R. Leigh’s My Pafology as the new voice of black America, a genuine representation of the animality of ghetto life, and an authentic “glimpse of hood existence.” Erasure’s acerbic satire on race and publishing is balanced by Monk’s heartfelt attempt to reconcile himself to tumultuous changes in his family life: his sister’s murder, his mother’s Alzheimer’s disease, his brother’s coming out, and his father’s suicide. At the same time, Monk faces a defining crisis in his artistic and racial identity when he serves as a judge for a book prize and Leigh’s misunderstood novel is named as a finalist. While Everett imports various texts into the novel’s frame, including an excerpt from Ellison’s Barthesian novel and ten chapters of My Pafology, he further expands the boundaries of his art and his critique with extended intertextual references to Native Son and Invisible Man. In some ways Erasure echoes Ishmael Reed’s Reckless Eyeballing and Trey Ellis’s Platitudes, but Everett’s brilliant and incisive anger, as well as his sincere understanding, makes me hope this provocative novel will find the audience it deserves. [Trey Strecker]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Erasure by Percival Everett Trey Strecker Percival Everett. Erasure. Univ. Press of New England, 2001. 265 pp. $24.95. Percival Everett’s new novel offers a compelling exploration of “the notion of a public and its relationship to the health of art.” The protagonist, Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, an avant-garde writer, woodworker, and fly fisherman, becomes offended by critics’ charges that his dense novelistic parodies of poststructuralism are “not black enough.” Unable to find a publisher or an audience for his most recent book, Monk becomes infuriated by the national success of Juanita Mae Jenkins’s We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, as the “ghetto wanna-be” novel is celebrated as one of “the true, gritty real stories of black life.” Hiding his identity behind a pseudonym, Monk composes a bitter parody of Jenkins’s blaxploitation novel, but the literary community hails Stagg R. Leigh’s My Pafology as the new voice of black America, a genuine representation of the animality of ghetto life, and an authentic “glimpse of hood existence.” Erasure’s acerbic satire on race and publishing is balanced by Monk’s heartfelt attempt to reconcile himself to tumultuous changes in his family life: his sister’s murder, his mother’s Alzheimer’s disease, his brother’s coming out, and his father’s suicide. At the same time, Monk faces a defining crisis in his artistic and racial identity when he serves as a judge for a book prize and Leigh’s misunderstood novel is named as a finalist. While Everett imports various texts into the novel’s frame, including an excerpt from Ellison’s Barthesian novel and ten chapters of My Pafology, he further expands the boundaries of his art and his critique with extended intertextual references to Native Son and Invisible Man. In some ways Erasure echoes Ishmael Reed’s Reckless Eyeballing and Trey Ellis’s Platitudes, but Everett’s brilliant and incisive anger, as well as his sincere understanding, makes me hope this provocative novel will find the audience it deserves. [Trey Strecker]

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