The More You Try To Erase Me
On Percival Everett's "Erasure" and the film "American Fiction"
A lot has changed in the 22 years between the publication of Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001) and its movie adaptation American Fiction (2023), but perhaps the most important thing that’s changed for the purpose of evaluating the two works is that the concept of “selling out” just does not exist anymore. Capitalism is getting later all the time, and at a certain point in the mid-to-late 2000s, the conditions for artists became so bad that cultural tastemakers generally stopped faulting someone for taking an easy or compromised paycheck. Where you were once supposed to keep your artistic integrity and shun careerism and popularity – think Stephen Malkmus agonizing over “songs [being] bought / and so are you” and “a career, career, career, career, career, career!” on “Cut Your Hair” – the paradigm flipped to a more mercenary position, where one was supposed to get theirs when they could. Some tried to save face by saying the money let them continue making the challenging and/or quality work they liked to make (“one for them, one for me”), others just said the game was the game and moved along, dollars in pocket. One of my favorite indie bands turned one of their songs into an Outback Steakhouse jingle, another licensed their song to a Budweiser ad; with pirating and streaming sites eroding record sales, well, they had to make a living somehow. (God, remember all the iPod ads??) Respected actors and up and coming directors started making comic book movies, because who was funding small independent movies or adult dramas anyway? Many literary writers these days have established the template of writing one to two good books for small presses before signing with one of the five major publishers and delivering something a little more… broad. That’s a rude thing to accuse of some authors – though some certainly fit the bill – while others will just freely admit it: Ottessa Moshfegh, after the small-press McGlue, set out to write a hooky, lurid, sellable novel, and out came Eileen with a bigger publisher. Sales did follow and critics didn’t really care all that much, up until My Year of Rest and Relaxation became such a cultural phenomenon that the knives came out for her successive novels.1
Percival Everett has impressively not sold out in the two decades since Erasure; he still publishes experimental novels with small presses, and he mostly shuns publicity. His latest author photo shows an empty bench, and his most recent novel, Dr. No, was a metaphysical riff on James Bond and advanced mathematics. Erasure is, among many other things, a novel about the deleterious effects of selling out; American Fiction, directed and written by Cord Jefferson, exists in a different cultural milieu, and can’t quite reconcile the present day’s indifference to selling out with its source text’s absolute enmity towards it. The film does not, in the end, really know where it stands, and turns out instead to be a lesson in lowering one’s own expectations; snobbishness is the flaw to be eliminated, not the culture’s wider dumbing-down.
There are a number of superficial changes between the movie and the book – Boston as the setting rather than D.C., some plot threads shorn away, etc – but the general outline of the story remains the same: Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, played by Jeffrey Wright in the film, is a struggling fiction writer whose new book is too experimental and not “black enough” to get published; when his sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) unexpectedly dies, Monk has to take care of his ailing mother (Leslie Uggams) and needs money to pay for her extensive end-of-life care. Short on cash and enraged at the runaway success of a book called We’s Live in the Ghetto, written by a debut author named Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), Monk decides to write a satire of the book called My Pafology, which leans into every ugly stereotype of lower-class black people while offering the sort of ghetto-wisdom pablum that white audiences eat up. He sends the book out to his agent (John Ortiz) under the pen name Stagg R. Leigh, hoping only to rub publishers’ noses in the fact that they publish stuff like that; to he and his agent’s surprise, the big publishers love it, and offer him a lot of money for it. Monk takes the deal, and then has to watch in horror as the book becomes a sensation, garnering a huge movie deal and major awards consideration. (He’s on a judge’s panel with Golden and three white authors; you can guess how the final vote splits.) At certain points, he has to assume the persona of Stagg R. Leigh, performing a kind of gruff gangsterized stereotypical blackness at odds with his own somewhat awkward intellectual personality. Parallel to the publishing world satire is Monk dealing with a variety of family issues: his father’s suicide seven years ago, his mother’s onset of Alzheimer’s, his brother Bill’s (Sterling K. Brown, having a ball and chewing up the scenery in every appearance) increasingly dissolute life after his coming out, the loss of his sister, a fledgling romance with his neighbor Coraline (Erika Alexander), and what exactly to do with the family’s longtime housekeeper, Lorraine (Myra Taylor), who has nowhere else to go without the Ellisons. In both works, Monk’s family story is the kind of nuanced black narrative that big unsubtle works like We’s Live in the Ghetto overshadow in the popular imagination; there’s a kind of Trojan Horse maneuver where the publishing satire allows the fleshing out of the more muted and underrepresented kind of story that represents a wider spectrum of black experience than is typically presented.
What Jefferson does in the film is essentially sand down all the hard edges of Everett’s novel, turning it from a bleak comedy into just a comedy. Weddings are crucial in any comedy; and you can see the precise difference in tone between the two works in their wedding scenes.2 In the novel, the scene is a calamitous farce, highlighting a number of inter and intrafamilial tensions; in the film, it’s a feel-good moment of connection across generations. There’s also the change of the relationship between Monk and his older brother Bill; in the novel, Bill is the ultimate sell-out, completely abandoning his Monk and the rest of family to chase libertine pleasures, while in the movie he has a redemptive arc that brings him closer to his family. On the one hand, that difference is Hollywood, baby – you just don’t see too many relentlessly cynical movies come out these days. On the other hand, the difference speaks to the film’s uneasy relation to its own source text; it does not necessarily want to have the same answers to the questions raised by the story.
Something is lost in every book-to-screen adaptation; that’s just the nature of the two mediums. Erasure is a metatextually rich book in a way that film simply cannot mimic, give or take a couple of those screwy Charlie Kaufman flicks. My Pafology takes up somewhere around a third of Erasure, an extended parody that takes every opportunity to further debase its main character, Van Go Jenkins. American Fiction gives us a brief acting out of scene from My Pafology as Monk writes it, but it can’t properly mimic the accumulative effect that the novel achieves. My Pafology in the movie just seems like a bad or corny story, akin to the clip of Get Rich or Die Tryin’ that Monk laughs at on his hotel TV; My Pafology in the novel is an evil text, with Van Go a stupid and venal character who fathers four children with four mothers, abandons them, rapes multiple women, and eventually murders a bunch of people as he flees the police after being emasculated on an exploitative Maury-like television show. That there is nothing redeeming or noble about Van Go makes the white publishers and award judges’ love of the book all the more bewildering and absurd in Erasure; the film tries to match the absurdity, but it can’t quite be the same without the extended structure of the novel.3 The film also eventually comes to think of My Pafology (later titled, in an act of envelope-pushing by Monk, as Fuck) and We’s Live in the Ghetto in a kinder light than the novel. Monk catches Coraline with a copy of Fuck, and is aghast at her enjoying it; she tells him that she basically reads past the ebonics stuff and focuses on the depiction of black life, and thinks that Monk is just jealous of Fuck’s success. “Not being able to relate to people isn't a badge of honor,” she tells him, and it is that sentiment that is supposed to push Monk towards a general softening of his high standards. This scene twists a similar scene from the novel, in which Monk spots We’s Live in Ghetto on his girlfriend’s nightstand and can’t get an erection; he confronts her about liking the book, she gives the same reasons for liking it, and they break up, without even a hint of reconciliation.
But the biggest change in the film is the addition of a new scene in which Monk talks directly to Sintara Golden, who delineates a difference between We’s Live in the Ghetto and Fuck. Fuck, she says, feels empty and shallow, whereas her book is informed by research and tries to actually depict the lives of poor black people. She accuses Monk of condescension and being too wrapped up in the reactions of white people rather than the text itself. “Is it bad to cater to people’s tastes?” she asks; when Monk claims that drug dealers say the same thing, she replies, “And I think drugs should be legal.” Coming to a head in their argument, Monk claims that he just thinks that African American literature has “so much more potential,” to which Golden says, “potential is what people see when what’s in front of them isn’t good enough.” One of their fellow judges comes in at this point and interrupts their conversation, but the lingering thought is that Monk has been unfairly dismissive towards We’s Live in the Ghetto and its ilk; at the very least, he has to respect the mercenary writer who produces art under our current system of last-call capitalism. Who can say whether something is aesthetically ‘good’ or ‘bad’ when a check is on the line? It’s a confusing moment, as the film plays Golden’s book for a punchline at the beginning and then gives its author a hero line at the end. Jefferson, in interviews, has stressed the importance of this scene, and claims that the conversation is a “draw” – sometimes he agrees more with Monk on the side of artistic integrity, on other days he’s on Golden’s side as someone “making art in a series of systems and institutions that have been around since before she was born. The work she’s making is reflective of the parameters that have been put around her and artists like her.” In another interview, he said that “[w]e didn’t want this movie to feel like it was scolding people and artists for making the art that they wanted to make.” With this idea in mind – that anyone can make whatever art they want, and only the greater system is to be blamed for its success – the satire at the heart of the movie becomes half-defanged; we can still laugh at the the industry and the white audiences, but the sellouts who create bad work are at no fault. In fact, there’s no bad work at all!
If the old saw is that there’s no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism, American Fiction posits that there’s no such thing as ethical production, either, not if you actually want to live. Mom’s medical bills have to get paid somehow, so one has to simply create within and for the debased system in which they exist. If you make slop, that’s fine, as long as someone’s buying it. (That line of thinking might be ultimately more cynical than the novel. Funnily enough, this is how Jefferson describes meeting Percival Everett: “I’ve never met somebody who gives less of a shit about anything. He doesn’t care about awards, doesn’t care about money, all he cares about is making art.” Wait, is that allowed?) The final scene of the film is instructive; Monk, having just left a meeting with a Hollywood director where he’s ended up pitching a derivative “black man gunned down by police” ending to a meta-movie about his own story, steps into a fancy new car. He sees a black actor dressed up in a traditional slave outfit, waiting to get on set for an exploitative movie about slave ghosts haunting a white family. The two men nod at each other, both stuck performing a certain kind of blackness for the implacable forces of Big Entertainment, before Monk drives off into the proverbial sunset with a happy and more fulfilled Bill. Well, you gotta make a living somehow: just make sure to cash that check when it comes in. It is the facetuned version of the ending of Everett’s novel, which ends with Monk being asked “How does it feel to be free of one’s illusions?” and responding: “Painful and empty.” How about rich and empty instead? Does that help?
American Fiction is in theaters now; Erasure is well worth a read, and now available at more bookstores than ever. If you enjoyed this post, please share it with a friend!
You can get rich and famous, but only to a certain point before people will call you on it. The line is thin!
I won’t spoil who gets married, so apologies for the vagueness here.
Everett also creates a parallel structure out of My Pafology and the rest of Erasure, with Monk’s story mirroring Van Go’s in increasingly humorous ways.
I just watched the film last night and was distressed by how timid and indifferent the adaptation was. I’m baffled that Jefferson wanted to make this in the first place unless, as you outline, he wanted to rebut Everett from a defensive position. Great analysis.