Thus my P.E. obsession loses its vestigial tail and sprouts wings . . .Initially, I wanted to read through a few reviews to see how anyone really had the ballsgumptioncojonesintestinal fortitudeaudacityinsipidnessignoranceloveto write a review. My favorite artist is Basquiat. "Is" because although he is dead, he lives on through the massiveness of his art. Anyone who has seen his art in the flesh (and they do seem to be breathing, layers upon layers of thoughts like skin whispering to be peeled away so that one might uncover their essence) knows that it is as explosive and organic as an expletive after a stubbed toe. Thus "massive" #1. Anyone who was fortunate enough to see him in person or those who have seen stills and recordings of the man knows how influential he was and continues to be in the art world and as a worldwide cultural icon. Thus "massive" #2. The massiveness of his being is awe-inspiringly intimidating, unless you truly believe that you are as great as you would have others believe. But then, you're just insane.That is what it is to attempt to review an Everett book. The massiveness, the layers, the living, breathing organism which is his work orders you to tread lightly and be certain of your steps, almost punking you out of making any attempt at all.Thelonius Monk Ellison. Monk. Monksie. Theo. Ellison. Mr. Monk. has never felt a part of anything, least of all, his dysfunctionally ideal upper-middle-class Washingtonian family. His contempt for all things disingenuous, including himself, at times, has alienated him from his colleagues and his readers, whomever they might be. It is only after the combination of a family tragedy and "mourning" sickness-like reaction to the runaway success of one Juanita Mae Jenkins’ novel We’s Lives In Da Ghetto, does he decide to write his own parody of what he sees as the racist drivel which the sheep-like masses consume, grazing wherever they are herded by the media and their own embryonic palates. What follows is a series of events that ask:1. What is the responsibility of the artist to his/her art and form?2. Should one be true to duty or true to love?3. Is it possible to be loyal to love but not to a lover?4. Is “keeping it real” selfish, to a fault?5. Can you truly love someone and be disgusted by the idea of their presence? Can that someone be oneself?6. Does the weight of a secret outweigh friendship and family?7. Who is hurt more by stereotypes? The tereotypes, or the stereotypers?8. Is a black artist black, then an artist, an artist, then black, or is this just a dumb ass question that people need to finally stop asking?9. Can an intellectual ever really love and live with someone who has remedial taste in books without holding them in contempt of art?10. Can I too write a crappy book in a week and get a $300,000 check for poisoning the literary community and perpetuating stereotypes for decades to come? No. Really. Can I?I can’t say much more without pre-empting your “ahh” moments, but I will say that the structure itself, with the ancient Greek-like choruses of artists’ conversations and fishing and woodworking metaphorical tales only solidifies the truth in my prior P.E. comment: “We’re not worthy.”Favorite Quotes:Dammit, a table was a table was a table.The center of the tree is the heartwood. It does little t feed the tree, but it is the structural support. The sapwood, which feeds everything, is weak and prone to fungi and insect damage. The two look the same. But you want the heartwood. You always want the heartwood.My journal is a private affair =, but as I cannot know the time of my coming death, and since I am not disposed, however unfortunately, to the serious consideration of self-termination, I am afraid that others will see these pages. Since however I will be dead, it should not much matter to me who sees what or when.The hard, gritty truth of the matter is that I hardly ever think about race. Those times when I did think about it a lot I did so because of my guilt for not thinking about it.But this book was a real slap in the face. It was like strolling through an antique mall, feeling good, liking the sunny day and then turning the corner to find a display of watermelon-eating, banjo-playing darkie carvings and a pyramid of Mammy cookie jars.Anyone who speaks to members of his family knows that sharing a language does not mean you share the rules governing the use of that language. No matter what is said, something else is always meant . . .A metaphor cannot be paraphrased.. . . if I had been in her office (looking the part), she would have been tearing off her blouse and crawling across her desk toward me, perhaps not literally, but at least literarily.I wouldn’t use the cliché that I was the captain of a sinking ship, that implying some kind of authority, but rather I was a diesel mechanic on a steamship, an obstetrician in a monastery.There are as many hammers as there are saws. A misplaced thumb knows no difference.For all the aggravation a trout can cause, it cannot think and does not consider you. A trout is very much like truth; it does what it wants, what it has to do.I select my fly, one I’ve tied at streamside, plucking a couple of fibers from my sweater to mix with the dubbing to get just the right color. I present the fly while hiding behind a rock or in tall grass and wait patiently. Then there are times when I wrap pocket lint around a hook, splash it into the water while standing on a fat boulder. Both methods have worked and failed. It’s all up to the trout.I have often stared into the mirror and considered the difference between the following statements:(1) He looks guilty.(2) He seems guilty.(3) He appears guilty.(4) He is guilty.This is a tortuous journey through the banal.I had to rescue myself, find myself and that meant, it was ever so clear for a very brief moment, losing myself.
If Erasure is about anything, it’s about identity. Ones we invent for ourselves, ones we invent for others, ones that are forced on us, and ones that we lose. From the first page, the novel’s protagonist, Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, tries to establish his:I have dark brown skin, curly hair, a broad nose, some of my ancestors were slaves and I have been detained by pasty white policemen in New Hampshire, Arizona and Georgia and so the society in which I live tells me I am black; that is my race. Though I am fairly athletic, I am no good at basketball. I listen to Mahler, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Parker and Ry Cooder on vinyl records and compact discs. I graduate summa cum laude from Harvard, hating every minute of it. I am good at math. I cannot dance. I did not grow up in any inner city or the rural south. My family owned a bungalow near Annapolis. My grandfather was a doctor. My father was a doctor. My brother and sister were doctors.While in college I was a member of the Black Panther Party, defunct as it was, mainly because I felt I had to prove I was black enough. Some people in the society in which I live, described as being black, tell me I am not black enough. Some people whom the society calls white tell me the same thing….The hard, gritty truth of the matter is that I hardly ever think about race. Those times when I did think about it a lot I did so because of my guilt for not thinking about it. I don’t believe in race. I believe there are people who will shoot me or hang me or cheat me and try to stop me because they do believe in race, because of my brown skin, curly hair, wide nose and slave ancestors. But that’s just the way it is. (pp. 1-2)There are two foci to the book. The first is the satirization of the publishing industry; the second is Monk’s relationship with his family.Monk’s books languish unread because publishers and bookstores don’t know how to market him. A publisher complains in a rejection letter that he “shows a brilliant intellect, certainly. It’s challenging and masterfully written and constructed, but who wants to read this shit? It’s too difficult for the market. But more, who is he writing to? Does the guy live in a cave somewhere? Come on, a novel in which Aristophanes and Euripides kill a younger, more talented dramatist, then contemplate the death of metaphysics?” And a reviewer moans that “one is lost to understand what this reworking of Aeschylus’ The Persians has to do with the African American experience.”When the “authentic,” African American novel, We’s Lives In Da Ghetto by Juanita Mae Jenkins (whose experience of inner-city life extends to a few days spent in Harlem) rises to the top of the best-seller list, and the author receives accolades and lucrative publishing/movie deals, Monk writes a scathing parody titled My Pafology (subsequently renamed Fuck! under the nom de plume Stagg R. Leigh. It’s the story of Van Go Jenkins, tough-talking, 19-year-old father of four babies by four different mothers. A typical resident of “da hood.” He convinces his agent to shop the book around, and Random House picks it up for $600,000. Of course, Hollywood becomes interested in making a movie based on it. And to add grievous insult to near fatal injury, it’s named the best book of the year by the awards committee he’s sitting on despite his attempt to derail the nomination:“It’s not that it’s a bad novel…. It’s no novel at all. It is a failed conception, an unformed fetus, seed cast into the sand, a hand without fingers, a word with no vowels. It is offensive, poorly written, racist and mindless.”Wilson Harnet, Ailene Hoover, Thomas Tomad and Jon Paul Sigmarsen just looked at me, none of them speaking.“It’s not art,” I said.Ailene Hoover said, “I should think as an African American you’d be happy to see one of your own people get an award like this.”I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “Are you nuts?”… “I would think you’d be happy to have the story of your people so vividly portrayed,” Hoover said.“These are no more my people than Abbot and Costello are your people,” I said….“I learned a lot reading that book,” Jon Paul Sigmarsen said. “I haven’t had a lot of experience with color – black people – and so Fuck was a great thing for me.”“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” I said. “People will read this shit and believe that there is truth to it.”Thomas Tomad laughed. “This is the truest novel I’ve ever read. It could only have been written by someone who has done hard time. It’s the real thing.” (p. 261)The second focus of the novel – Monk’s personal life – receives less attention than the first, which is unfortunate because it’s potentially more interesting than the first and could have been more extensively mined. There’s Monk’s mother, whose identity is rapidly being lost to Alzheimer’s; there’s Bill, his older brother, who has come out after being divorced by his wife; there’s Lisa, his older sister, a doctor at a woman’s clinic who’s been murdered by an anti-choice fanatic. And there’s his deceased father, whose heretofore unknown love affair with a British nurse he met in Korea suggests a private life and identity that his son completely missed. And there’s Monk’s own struggle to be honest with himself and respond to the demands society and the expectations that people in his life have of him.For the most part, I enjoyed Erasure. There were times when the satire became heavy handed and distracting, but not to such an extent that I wouldn’t recommend this book strongly.
What do You think about Erasure (2002)?
What a great book. Just read it. It will shatter (perhaps) any preconceived notions of what "black writing" (whatever that might be) is. Everett throws in everything here -- a parody of academic non-writing, a demolition of white-centric notions of black literature (again, whatever that is), and most important of all, a genuinley moving story about a man alienated from his own family, coping with his aging mother's failing health.Charles Dickens said that to write a great story, you had to "Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry." Everett does this. The fact that he does so while radiating palpable fury at every turn is just that much more remarkable.
—David Maine
As always, Percival Everett challenges us as readers. The name comes from a short conversation between Robert Rauschenberg and Wilhelm DeKooning in which Rauschenberg asks DeKooning to draw a picture, which he then erases and sells for $10,000, calling it Erased Drawing. Yes, this really happened, maybe not just the way Everett tells it. http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/multime...But this is not a spoiler. The book is not about DeKooning or Rauschenberg. It is about art and our idea of it. It is also about life and what is important. Or rather, it questions what is important. Everett is never one to tell the reader what to think. He certainly makes some strong suggestions on what to thing about, though.Never boring, always challenging.
—Joyce Fischer
Erasure is an exceptional fictional novel by Percival Everett concerning the literary world and its controversial acquiescence of African American literature. Written with intellectual boldness and sprinkled with random comical satires as well as colorful characters, Everett creates a noteworthy novel within the confines of its pages.Protagonist Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is an unenthusiastic academic whose career as a writer has been met with numerous rejections from publishers. Monk’s writings are not consistent upon the themes of the “black experience”; for his few published novels are lengthy, dull, and laborious works of fiction. His literary works carries no mentions of the stereotypical black experience of being raised in a household full of turmoil, and living in a poverty stricken “ghetto” neighborhood, nor does it echo the angry black citizen who relies on crime and drugs to cope with being Black in America. However, he has unwillingly noticed that publishers now have an insatiable thirst for works by Black writers that resembles We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, the first work and best selling novel by fictional author Juanita Mae Jenkins. Monk loathes this novel, for its literary prose has no traces of intellectual comprehension. Furthermore, an African American woman who has never lived first hand in the environment or lifestyle she so ineloquently writes about, earns her millions of dollars, a highly critically acclaimed novel, and rights to a movie adaptation of her best-seller.While observing the grievous success of the novel, Monk experiences financial dilemmas and heart wrenching family difficulties. In an act of desperation, vexation and shear anger, Monk writes a novel that resembles Jenkins’ novel entitled My Pafology, but under a false name Stagg R. Leigh. Irony settles as the novel Monk creates as an insulting joke to Jenkins’ novel is welcomed with great enthusiasm by the literary world. Publishers that were once rejecting his previous works of literature are now flocking to his manager to meet Leigh, while offering a large amount of money for the early release of his novel. He is also met with grave disappointment, as the reading audience seems to embrace and highly praise the novel. How Monk deals with the unforeseen success of the novel offers a thrilling ride for the reader. Author Percival Everett lends his brilliant lyrical talents to this novel, by addressing a rather serious subject matter that unfortunately remains relevant in today’s literary world. A sure page-turner, this book is an absolute must read.
—Babydoll
