Erasure by Percival Everett

American Fiction

Source – Library book

I feel I was bound to read Percival Everett at some point in the next year, his new novel due out later this year. James, a retelling of the Huck Finn story from the point of view of Jim, the slave they meet along the way was on my radar like most of his recent books. There are few US writers these days that really grab my attention but his books over the last few years have been ones I have noticed and felt I would read at some point. So when I watched the trailer for American Fiction it made me want to watch that film I had seen it was taken from this book I just had to try it as it seemed a book I would love a look at being a black writer but also what sort of writer publishers may want at a specific time. I was reminded of the song about certain styles and ways the black community is viewed that Spearhead brought out many years ago.

Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison is a writer of dense, obscure fiction.

His latest effort has been rejected by publishers for having little to do with the ‘black experience.’ After a series of personal and professional tragedies, Monk sets out to write a novel loosely inspired by Richard Wright’s Native Son and certain commercial novels of black misery.

Monk has his agent send the manuscript, titled My Pafology (later changed to Fuck), around to editors under a pseudonym. Shockingly (or perhaps not so shockingly), his pastiche-cum-parody (reproduced within the text) is a runaway commercial and critical success. My Pafology is broken up into numbered chapters, the titles of which are spelled phonetically, and traces, in parallel to Erasure, the life of a young black man living in America. However, it deals more explicitly with the violence and turbulence of life in the ghetto, rendered in highly stylized vernacular and dialect.

Monk struggles with his latest book

Erasure is the story of a successful writer, but his books have stopped selling. He is one of those heavy writers with a serious intellect. His books are the sort that gets 5-star reviews in the TLS and then sells ten books. We know the type of writer they are, the sort I have loved. Thelonious Elliot, or Monk as he is better known, has been trying to get his latest book off the ground but to no avail. When he ended up seeing a writer with her Debut novel We Liv in Da Ghetto, I was taken aback by the style of the book she read to firstly The Wire but then to those Seventies blaxploitation films. But this book is a bestseller and lauded as much as Monk Books were. SO he just as a joke really writes a book My pafology about a gangster. As a joke, he submits it under the name Stagg R. Leigh. This is, of course, a nod to the folk song Stagger Lee or Stackolee as it has been called over the years. He is then shocked and dumbfounded at what to do when the book and film rights are sold for thousands simultaneously. What is Monk to do?

Mama look at me and Tardreece and she call us ‘human slough.’ That how it all start up. ‘Human slough,’ she say, ‘You lil’ muthafuckas ain’t nuffin but human slough.’ I looks at her and I’m wonderin what

“slough’ means and I don’t like the look on her face and so I get up from the chair I been sittin in and I walk across the kitchen and grab a big knife from the counter. She say, ‘And what you gone do wif that, human slough?” And I stab Mama. I put the knife in her stomach and pull it out red and she look at me like to say why you stab me? And I stab Mama again. Blood be all on the floor and on the table, drip drip drippin down her legs and my baby sister starts screamin and I says,

‘Why you be screamin, Baby Girl?’

The opening chapter when he writes as Stagg R Leigh

This is a fun book. It was a little different from the trailer, but it is an insightful look at the day-to-day struggles of a writer. it is a satire on the absurd nature of books and publishing. I remember not long after the first book came out from Steig Larsson, it was like every agent and publisher sent people to Nordic countries to sign up for the next Larsson. So when Monk writes his Gangster-inspired novel in the middle of a wave of books like that, it is sold regardless of him as a writer not being Stagg R Leigh. But it shows how fashion rather than style and content can now rule what we read where celebrities write novels or do they (I am pushed to talk about them as I haven’t or will never have an inkling to read a celeb novel, sorry). This is the reason I read books in translation. We get books from countries where this sort of style, fashion, whatever the fuck is popular this week movement is happening, most of which to me seem to involve people holding up piles of books on photos(I mean people that do this every day )  these days anyway personal winge over. This is a sharp satire about publishing and the struggles of writing and being a writer in the modern age of ever-changing Publishing Fashions. If anything, I look forward to reading his other books at some stage. Have you read Percival Everett?

Winston;s Score – A I will be reading him again which to try next ?