One of the dirty secrets of what used to be called “literary journalism” is that book reviewers don’t actually read the books they’re supposed to be reviewing. Instead of providing an honest account of the work in question, the author uses the review as a springboard for himself — giving voice to his opinions about the topic the book addresses (sometimes interesting), the author under review (frequently bitchy), or unrelated personal confessions (occasionally touching).
I’m going to do the same in this movie review, of American Fiction, which came out in December. I haven’t seen the film, and I’m not going to. But unlike the straw men book reviewers I just called into existence — trust me, they really do exist — at least you are entering this reading experience with eyes fully open.
American Fiction is based on Erasure, a novel by Percival Everett. Everett is an English professor at the University of Southern California. Unlike many of his colleagues in the groves of academe, Everett does not have a doctorate. His aversion to credentialism isn’t a reason for you to avoid him. Instead of seeking 3 letters after his name, Everett chose to be a writer. He has published 20 novels, and probably written more.
Erasure, published in 2001, is his greatest work. Its main character is Thelonius “Monk” Ellison,1 who, like Everett, is a college English professor. Monk is also a novelist, writing books that are modeled on and inspired by classical works. For his troubles, bookstores refuse to put him in the “Fiction” section, and instead place him among the “African American” authors. While Monk’s books are well received by critics, his agent frets that none of his books will sell — and they don’t. Instead, he is relegated to academic conferences, in which he presents papers critiquing post-structuralism, and the requisite meaningless hook-ups with professorial peers and stifling status-chasing that those meetings entail.
Monk may have been content to gripe about this treatment to his intimates and continue to write novels in the Western tradition. But the antics of a certain Juanita Mae Jenkins push him to take extreme measures. A light-skinned, middle-class woman, Jenkins visits her cousins in Harlem for a month. She records her harrowing, four-week experience of black poverty in the succinctly titled We’s Lives in Da Ghetto. It becomes a bestseller. Jenkins is interviewed by a thinly veiled version of Oprah, which leads to superstardom for the author and even more book sales.
Enraged by the publishing and entertainment industry’s promotion of Jenkins’ “work,” and its refusal to judge his own work by its merits, Monk, under the pseudonym “Stagg R. Leigh,” writes My Pafology.2 It is a matter-of-fact description of the activities of a young, unemployed, and welfare-dependent black man in Los Angeles, as he engages in petty criminality, girlfriend impregnation, and other feckless schemes. Monk’s agent is thrilled — multiple publishers engage in a bidding war for the manuscript. To end the bidding war, and his self-humiliation (of which only he is aware, or cares about), Monk changes the title of the book to Fuck. This simply titilates his (white) editors and drives the advances even higher. At the end of Erasure, Monk, and all of his interesting, inventive novelistic output has been erased. He is known to the public as Stagg R. Leigh, author of the acclaimed book and film, Fuck.
There’s A LOT going on here. Percival Everett is skewering everyone: the academy (with its absurd pretensions to relevance and meaning), black Americans (for their dysfunction), and white Americans (for their fetishization and monetization of that dysfunction). Note that Monk’s goal is to JOIN the Western canon — he is writing novels in a classical tradition, that he wants compared to and considered equally with, the great Greek tragedians. This is a meritocratic and uniquely WESTERN goal. Ellison is seeking to become a part of what V.S. Naipul called the “Universal Civilization” — created by European men, but something to which anyone can aspire if they honor the standards and rigor of those men.
That’s a brief summary of Erasure, on which American Fiction is based. Now, watch the trailer:
All nuance is lost. Instead of depicting both white and black Americans as equally culpable in the condoning (on the black side) and glorifying (on the white side) of black poverty and criminality, whites are shown as cultural philistines, unable to appreciate Monk’s genius. They relegate him to a typecast, and lower, author. Taking revenge, he “gives them what they want” — ghetto porn. In so doing, American Fiction robs black Americans of agency. They are solely reactive to the whims and semi-depraved tastes of white Americans — and not at all culpable for their own culture and behavior that Everett attacks in the novel. Whites, ultimately, are the sole villains: not only for their fetishization of (and implicit condescension toward) the unpleasant aspects of black life, but for their refusal to recognize the talent of one who wants to join their number.
Had it been faithful to the novel, American Fiction could have been a deeply subversive movie, equally offending MAGA conservatives, white professors, and black DEIsts. It is instead a film that approves, and upholds, all of the shibboleths of our disturbing, yet deeply boring, time.
Hello, Ralph Ellison reference, and welcome!
My Pafology is reprinted in Erasure, as a novel within a novel.