I heard good things about the movie version of this book (American Fiction), but since I haven’t been able to see it, I decided to just go to the source. This 2001 novel, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, is short but punchy and full of literary references that I could probably spend years investigating. It’s a riveting story but one of those novels that I know I am only partly understanding. Everett includes an incendiary novel within his novel, and exposes the many forms erasure takes.
Erasure’s main character is Thelonius “Monk” Ellison (a nod to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man?), a literature professor and writer whose novels (retellings of classical stories) while critically acclaimed are generally ignored. To his frustration, these books are shelved with “African American Lit” in book stores instead of with “classical” or just plain “literature”. Monk is the youngest of three children in a successful African American family. The son of a respected doctor, now deceased, Monk was the apple of his father’s eye even though his two older siblings followed in their father’s footsteps into medicine. His brother Bill, who has come out as gay, never could win his father’s approval and moved out West. His sister, who has been caring for their increasingly infirm mother, works in a women’s health clinic that performs abortions. Early in the novel, his sister is erased permanently by a protester with a gun. Monk finds himself now in charge of his mother and the family’s aging housekeeper. At the same time, Monk becomes aware of a hot, popular and roundly lauded novel called “We’s Lives In Da Ghetto” by Juanita Mae Jenkins. The novel, written in a heavy handed “street” vernacular, sickens and infuriates Monk. Jenkins becomes the darling of the literati and an incredibly wealthy woman. Monk, on leave from his professorship and wondering how he will take care of his mother, sits down one evening and in his anger, and with deep sarcasm, writes “My Pafology” under the pen name Stagg R. Leigh (Stagger Lee: murderer and pimp of folklore); this alter ego went to prison and maintains a low profile, making him all the more irresistible to the literary world. The main character of “My Pafology” is a young black man from the streets named Van Go Jenkins who sleeps around, fathers numerous children, can’t hold a job, engages in crime and violence, disappoints his mother and generally exemplifies every stereotype of a young black man that white America holds dear. Monk’s agent is appalled but the book is immediately picked up by Random House and Stagg R. Leigh gets a multimillion dollar movie offer for the novel, which Monk insists must be retitled “Fuck.” None of the things that Monk tries to do to turn off interest in his novel work; they simply seem to amplify it and lead the public to see “Fuck” as authentic, real and true.
While all of this is unfolding, Monk watches his mother recede into dementia, her consciousness erased by the progressing disease. His brother Bill, dealing with a shambles of a personal life, withdraws even further from the family, and Monk discovers letters that his father had left behind in a box. The letters were meant to be burned, unread. Or were they? Monk reads them and discovers another erasure within his family. At the same time, the success of Stagg R. Leigh and “Fuck” threaten to erase Monk himself, and Monk has to decide what, if any, action he will take to stop that.
Erasure puts stereotypes and stereotypical expectations front and center. Monk, a nerdy intellectual, feels as if he does not fit in anywhere and never has. His success with the novel he wrote in anger and disgust is making him a rich man able to take proper care of his mother but also goes against everything he believes and has tried to do in his professional career. His ultimate decision of what he has to do about his own erasure is exhilarating to read. Erasure is an excellent novel and I highly recommend it.