Erasure: now a major motion picture 'American Fiction'

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I don’t even believe in race,” he says just as he steps to a sidewalk curb holding his arm out; a taxi passes him by only to pick up two white passengers.

This entire thing is reproduced over about 50% of the book and it's one of the most painful things I've ever read.In the book, the Ellisons live in Washington, DC (Jeffery Wright’s real hometown), but here, the elite enclaves of Boston serve as a more compact setting for their striver lifestyle, including the concentration of prestigious colleges and the proximity of Martha’s Vineyard with its history as a playground for the Black elite. Jeffrey Wright is captivating as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a professor and novelist who, like Everett, harbors deep skepticism about the truth-value of race as a concept. To me, that impossibility only reaffirms the relevance and value of the novel as a long textual form that allows for deeper intellectual exploration. If you've seen the recent trailer for American Fiction, the new film adaptation starring Jeffrey Wright, Issa Rae, and Tracee Ellis Ross, and garnering lots of early awards season buzz, then you already know that Monk's rage-fueled parody doesn't exactly get the kind of reaction he'd hoped for. Come on, a novel in which Aristophanes and Euripides kill a younger, more talented dramatist, then contemplate the death of metaphysics?

However, in writing this novella (included in full in the middle of this novel), Everett has done something so subversive that it makes me scream, and I'm not sure it was intentional. There’s a nod to Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle (Jefferson has mentioned it in interviews as an inspiration) and the work that Black actors must do to play the roles that are available to them while trying to hold on to their dignity and agency.

Their father committed suicide in the family’s Martha’s Vineyard beach house several years earlier, an incident that leads to some seriously dark humor. Monk quickly composes a satirical response based in part on Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) and Sapphire's Push (1996). At Erasure's end, a New York literary audience wonders why Thelonious Ellison has risen to accept Stagg R Leigh's prize.