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A review by sarahetc
Erasure by Percival Everett
5.0
This is a tour-de-force novel about family, race, and class. And I understand that is about as generic as praise can get, so I'll also say that I laughed, I cried, I cringed, and I told people to shut up and go away so I could get back to the story.
Thelonius "Monk" Ellison is a novelist and professor in California. He grew up wealthy in the suburbs of DC, the son of a homemaker and a doctor. Both his older sister and brother became doctors and remain very, very wealthy, while Monk himself is only somewhat wealthy. A classicist by temperament and training, Ellison's fiction out is dominated by satires of Greek and Roman classics. Most of the world, including the establishment literati and his own family, find them impenetrably dense. Monk is also know for his disdain of postmodernism and when he goes so far as to give an obtuse paper generally criticizing it at a conference, is singled out for death threats.
So here you have a fairly unique person. Certainly not your stereotypical American black man.
Meanwhile, Monk's mother's health is failing and she is moving into the end stages of Alzheimer's disease. He is the only one of his siblings with the wherewithal to help, so he does the majority of the work, both physical and emotional, to transition her into a care facility and anticipate her death.
Monk is now totally atypical and everyman at the same time. His literary and academic uniquity is totally obscured by the awful banality of the experience of caring for an aging parent and managing impossible sibling expectations.
Meanwhile, a wealthy black American woman is getting incredible press, praise and compensation for writing a novel called We Lives in Da Ghetto, replete with poorly rendered AAVE patois. She goes on and on about how she was inspired after visiting family in Harlem for a few days. Her relative success gnaws at Monk, while he scorns her inspiration and her skillset.
While coping with some of the more difficult aspects of helping his mother through dementia, he decides to escape by writing a novel, in the style of "Da Ghetto" about a young man with four children by four different women, taking the worst, basest tropes and stereotypes about inner-city black men, and writing them until they're purple. He hands it to his agent under a pseudonym and is floored when it sells immediately for a vast sum of money. When he insists it be published under the title Fuck, as a way to try to get out of actually publishing it, the price increases and he is massively wealthy.
He is then tapped to be on the committee to drive the Book of the Year Awards. Do you see where this is going? Yikes.
The novel is so well written that every character Monk speaks with, no matter how briefly, is fully and completely rendered. You can imagine them all having rich, complete lives outside their interactions with our main character. As for Monk himself, it seems likely he's a deeply autobiographical character, as Everett is a novelist and writing professor in California who seems to live to mess with the literary establishment. Highly, highly recommended!
Thelonius "Monk" Ellison is a novelist and professor in California. He grew up wealthy in the suburbs of DC, the son of a homemaker and a doctor. Both his older sister and brother became doctors and remain very, very wealthy, while Monk himself is only somewhat wealthy. A classicist by temperament and training, Ellison's fiction out is dominated by satires of Greek and Roman classics. Most of the world, including the establishment literati and his own family, find them impenetrably dense. Monk is also know for his disdain of postmodernism and when he goes so far as to give an obtuse paper generally criticizing it at a conference, is singled out for death threats.
So here you have a fairly unique person. Certainly not your stereotypical American black man.
Meanwhile, Monk's mother's health is failing and she is moving into the end stages of Alzheimer's disease. He is the only one of his siblings with the wherewithal to help, so he does the majority of the work, both physical and emotional, to transition her into a care facility and anticipate her death.
Monk is now totally atypical and everyman at the same time. His literary and academic uniquity is totally obscured by the awful banality of the experience of caring for an aging parent and managing impossible sibling expectations.
Meanwhile, a wealthy black American woman is getting incredible press, praise and compensation for writing a novel called We Lives in Da Ghetto, replete with poorly rendered AAVE patois. She goes on and on about how she was inspired after visiting family in Harlem for a few days. Her relative success gnaws at Monk, while he scorns her inspiration and her skillset.
While coping with some of the more difficult aspects of helping his mother through dementia, he decides to escape by writing a novel, in the style of "Da Ghetto" about a young man with four children by four different women, taking the worst, basest tropes and stereotypes about inner-city black men, and writing them until they're purple. He hands it to his agent under a pseudonym and is floored when it sells immediately for a vast sum of money. When he insists it be published under the title Fuck, as a way to try to get out of actually publishing it, the price increases and he is massively wealthy.
He is then tapped to be on the committee to drive the Book of the Year Awards. Do you see where this is going? Yikes.
The novel is so well written that every character Monk speaks with, no matter how briefly, is fully and completely rendered. You can imagine them all having rich, complete lives outside their interactions with our main character. As for Monk himself, it seems likely he's a deeply autobiographical character, as Everett is a novelist and writing professor in California who seems to live to mess with the literary establishment. Highly, highly recommended!