Erasure

Erasure is a tableaux of many delicate interconnected parts. Ostensibly though, it's a book about books, a novel about writing. An overpopulated genre perhaps, but Percival Everett's jack-in-a-box of a novel offers something fresh and quite unique. His narrator and protagonist Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a professor of English literature, is "a writer of fiction" whose obtuse books are regularly criticised for saying nothing about the "African American experience". He is so incensed by the runaway success of We's Lives In Da Ghetto--a novel that purports to represent contemporary black life but which Ellison describes as akin to finding "a display of watermelon-eating, banjo-playing darkie carvings" in an antiques mall--that he knocks off an expletive-riddled hood yarn of his own. Circulated to publishers under the pseudonym Stagg R Leigh, his pastiche, initially titled My Pafology later shortened to just Fuck, instantly draws a six-figure advance and Hollywood interest. The critics are equally fulsome in their praise: "Dazzling, raw and simply honest" emotes a New York Times reviewer. Monk, who has to meet agents and interviewers disguised as the monosyllabic Stagg, even finds his literary Frankenstein's monster nominated for a prize that he is judging.

Like Nabokov's Pale Fire, the novel Fuck appears in full; a slight hurdle (as with Shade's poem in Pale Fire, if we are honest) is having to endure over 70 pages of faux gangsta prose and being asked to believe that this "novel" would garner such acclaim. The story of Fuck is, however, intricately woven into events besetting Monk's family life; meaty subplots are provided by a quest for a half-sister and, in particular, the story of his mother's descent into senility. As Monk adopts a new identity as Stagg, his mother is increasingly unable to recognise her own son. With its rapier satire and flamboyant invention, Everett's savage, moving and amusing book recalls Philip Roth at his metafictional finest. -- Travis Elborough


Genre: Literary Fiction