Everett, 2001. Erasure.
Everett, Percival, ed. 2001. Erasure. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press.
I bought this book after reading about it (and Pimp which I’m reading now) in Sinykin’s Big Fiction.
According to Sinykin, Everett wrote Erasure after his previous novel Frenzy was placed in “African American studies” in book stores, rather than “just” literature. The novel is about Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, an avant garde (and Black) novelist whose work focusses on rewriting classical European stories. He is told by his agent that the agent can’t sell his latest book because “it isn’t black enough” and he is shocked by an (in essence) blaxplotation novel written by Juanita Mae Jenkin, We’s live in da ghetto, which — despite being almost a parody of African American speech is being praised as an “authentic Black voice.”
Ellison decides in a fit of anger to write his own parody of Jenkin’s work, initially called My pafology and later Fuck, using the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, who is said to be an ex-con. He asks his agent to push it, despite the agent’s misgivings, and then, to Ellison’s horror (but also financial good luck), the novel takes off: it is bought by a major press for a $300,000 advance, then sold to a film studio for $3,000,000, and selected by several book clubs, including, most importantly one modelled on Oprah.
Finally, inevitably, when Ellison is serving on a book prize panel, Fuck is submitted and, of course, wins the prize. The novel ends with Ellison walking up to receive the prize, even though almost nobody realises he is in fact Stagg R. Lee.
A subplot in the story is the decline of Ellison’s mother and siblings: his sister Lisa, who runs a woman’s health clinic is assassinated by an anti-abortion activist, and his brother Bill, who was a closeted homosexual, comes out and has a fairly tumultuous set of relationships, largely off stage. Ellison’s mother is falling into dementia and needs to be put into a home.
A couple of striking things about the novel, beyond its plot:
- it is an exemplum of Bakhtin’s argument that the novel is the genre that contain all other genres: Erasure contains notes, fragments of verse, and a complete lecture and novel. The lecture is a parody of an academic lecture and is the most self-indulgent part of the book (it introduces a couple of characters who barely figure in the rest of the story, and I didn’t think the parody was that good). The novel is really quite unusual, in that it is the complete text of Pafology/Fuck that later becomes the hit novel.
- there is a whole theme going of the idea about authenticity: what it means, who decides, and how. Ellison can’t sell novels because he “isn’t Black enough”; We’s live in da ghetto annoys him because he doesn’t think it parodies rather than reflects authentic Black lives and speech; Pafology/Fuck parodies We’s live in da ghetto but then gets picked up because it is so “authentic”; the few white people Ellison meets as Stagg Leigh are all surprised by how well-spoken he is, as this contradicts their sense of his authenticity; the (otherwise) all-white prize jury disagree with their only Black member precisely about the authenticity of Pafology/Fuck.
