Book Report: Erasure

7. Percival Everett, Erasure (2001)

According to Wikipedia, Percival Everett has written 22 novels, many books of short stories and poetry, and a children's book. Why hadn't I heard of him before American Fiction—the movie on which Erasure is based?

Well, it doesn't matter, because now I have heard of him, and I will continue to read him. I loved Erasure: it's smart, it's funny, it's poignant, it's angry, it's fully lived. 

It's the story of Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a Black writer and critical theorist who becomes fed up with the publishing world and the cubbyholes they'd like to shove him in, and so decides to embrace the stereotype—in full irony. Yet, the irony overtakes him, for the gangsta novella that he quickly writes as something of a sendoff joke becomes celebrated as the "real" thing.

Meanwhile, he is dealing with family issues, and money issues, and job issues. And perhaps most directly, identity issues. 

Immediately after I finished the book, we watched American Fiction. It was okay. But it missed the internal dialogue and a lot of the nuance of the novel (of course). That said, it also made for a different ending than the book did. The book was very much in Monk's head, whereas the movie needed to externalize—and it was allowed, perhaps, a looser play on "fiction" than the book. Both work. Different media.

I loved Everett's writing, and seeing the experience of being Black—by which I mean, an individual American—through his eyes. I flagged many passages. Here are the first few.

Anyone who speaks to members of his family knows that sharing a language does not mean you share the rules governing the use of that language. No matter what is said, something else is meant and I knew that for all my mother's seeming incoherence or out-of-itness, she was trying to tell me something over tea. The way she had mentioned the smoke in the living room twice. Her calling the blue box gray. Her easy and quick capitulation to what it was she and her cronies actually did at their meetings. But since I didn't know the rules, which were forever changing, I could only know that she was trying to say something not what that something was. 

There are times when fishing that I feel like a real detective. I study the water, the lay of the land, seine the streambottom and look at the larvae of aquatic insects. I watch, look for hatches and terrestrial activity. I select my fly, one I've tied at streamside, plucking a couple of fibers from my sweater to mix with the dubbing to get just the right color. I present the fly while hiding behind a rock or in tall grass and wait patiently. Then there are times when I wrap pocket lint around a hook, splash it into the water while standing on a fat boulder. Both methods have worked and failed. It's all up to the trout.

I tried to distance myself from the position where the newly sold piece-of-shit novel had placed me vis-à-vis my art. It was not exactly the case that I had sold out, but I was not, apparently, going to turn away the check. I considered my woodworking and why I did it. In my writing my instinct was to defy form, but I very much sought in defying it to affirm it, an irony that was difficult enough to articulate, much less defend. But the wood, the feel of it, the smell of it, the weight of it. It was so much more real than words. The wood was so simple. Damnit, a table was a table was a table. 

Lately, I've had trouble keeping my attention on a book. This book, though, I had no trouble sticking with. I've now got I Am Not Sidney Poiter on the Kindle.