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ERASURE
By Percival
Everett
University Press of New England: 266 pp., $24.95
By PAULA L. WOODS, Special to The Times
Being a fiction writer can be an anxiety-riddled experience.
Faced with an ominously blank computer screen or sheet of
paper, writers worry whether their stories will be good
enough, daring enough or will sell enough. Add to those
concerns one that is peculiar to African American writers:
Will it be black enough?
Writers and others outside this small fraternity might wonder
what on earth that means. And why it should matter? Yet
the question–and its implications for what black writers
write and what publishers print–is always present for those
who feel the answer hovering just out of reach, like the
brass ring at a merry-go-round, with a six-figure advance
check attached.
It is a question that haunts the dreams and reality of Thelonious
"Monk" Ellison, protagonist of Percival Everett's
satiric novel, "Erasure." Monk is a professor
at an unnamed Southern California university and the youngest
son of an emotionally distant Washington, D.C., family.
He delivers ponderously hilarious lectures on obscure texts
and writes dense novels with heavy historical and literary
allusions that, editors agree, are incongruent with his
physical appearance as a dark brown-skinned, curly haired,
broad-nosed black man. But what "should" a man
like Monk write? Should he aspire to the heights (or depths)
of Juanita Mae Jenkins' "runaway bestseller,"
"We's Lives in Da Ghetto," a story of a 15-year-old,
pregnant with her third child, who lives with her drug-addicted
mother and basketball-playing brother? Monk is righteously
indignant about Jenkins' debut novel and its success and
is incensed when he reads accolades from a major periodical
praising the novel's "haunting verisimilitude."
"Da Ghetto's" $500,000 sale of paperback rights
and a $3-million movie deal only rub salt into Monk's writerly
wounds. And when he learns the novel was written by an Oberlin
College dropout who claims her inspiration came from spending
a few days with relatives in Harlem when she was 12, Monk's
rage is complete.
But what is Monk to do? His latest novel has racked up its
17th rejection, with his agent delivering the blunt "not
black enough" assessment of the chorus of rejecting
editors. A tragedy has befallen his family back home, which
forces Monk into the role of principal caregiver for his
mother who has Alzheimer's. An answer comes as he sits in
his deceased father's study: "I remembered passages
of 'Native Son' and 'The Color Purple' and 'Amos and Andy'
... my hands began to shake, the world opening up around
me ... people in the street shouting dint, ax, fo, screet
and fahvre! and I was screaming inside, complaining that
I didn't sound like that, that my mother didn't sound like
that, that my father didn't sound like that ... [but] I
put a page in my father's typewriter. I wrote this novel,
a book on which I knew I could never put my name."
The book is "My Pafology" (later retitled an expletive),
written under the pen name Stagg R. Leigh, the moniker itself
a riff on a black trickster folk hero. Reprinted in its
entirety in "Erasure," "My Pafology,"
which concerns a disaffected young man who fathers four
children by four women, is a wicked sendup of every ghetto-focused
"I'se been 'buked and I'se been scorned" novel
praised in the press as powerful or naturalistic, replete
with allusions to Richard Wright's "Native Son,"
among others.
Monk's-Stagg's novel wows an editor at Random House, who
calls it "true to life" and promptly outbids the
competitors with a $600,000 advance. Parallels to the real
Random House's 1996 purchase of "Push," a similarly
controversial novel by the poet Sapphire, abound. Yet the
tale of "My Pafology" and its success are less
about an actual occurrence than Everett's blistering indictment
of an industry which can be pathologically obsessed with
promulgating a narrow view of African American life.
Successful on the level of black comedy, "Erasure"
is also possessed of a moral ambiguity and increasingly
surreal settings that recall Ralph Ellison's "Invisible
Man." But, unlike Ellison, Everett takes numerous detours
in his narrative, presented in the form of Monk's diary,
which, while fascinating, undercut the narrative thrust.
But in the hands of Everett, a professor of literature at
USC and author of more than a dozen well-regarded but under-appreciated
novels, one is left to wonder: Is it writerly excess, or
is "Erasure" a satire within a satire, challenging
the reader to engage with a dense, allusion-laden, richly
provocative novel about writing novels designed to provoke
our baser instincts? "I have brought to a head the
battle between language and reality," a character asserts
early in the novel. So, too, has Percival Everett, in a
novel (published, not surprisingly, by a university press)
that skewers the publishing hierarchy in amusing and astonishing
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