Me Now 110
Percival Everett, Erasure, and American Fiction
I saw Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction in late January of this year and it is—kinda—the subject of this dispatch. But before we get there here’s the playlist:
Playlist stretches from around January 30, 2024 to March 1, 2024
Apple Music for real music lovers
Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure is anything but neat. The sentences are razor-sharp, the paragraphs rush by without even a hint at a frayed edge and Everett employs all these hallmarks of good, no great, writing in service of a story littered with the psychic detritus of a man trying to make sense of America’s imprecise and baffling relationship with Black writers. Erasure was a rebuke. The novel excoriated the American publishing industry’s creation of the race novel, that distinctly American curio. While the novel loudly took up the topic of the publishing industry Everett, on a lower register, wove a story that reckoned with race, yes, but also class, and relationships, and did so without the niceties of a tidying hand.
Erasure’s Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is a Black writer with something of a bone to pick against the industry’s definition of “Black writer.” Monk, an English professor, writes heady Greek mythology infused novels with little to no mass appeal. In one pivotal scene he strides into a bookstore in search of his own work and seethes at the realization that it is placed in the African American section. Monk’s foil is another fictional Black writer, Juanita Mae Jenkins the author of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto. Ghetto, unlike Monk’s work, represents a Black narrative praised by the publishing industry, stuffed with the hallmarks of urban poverty. Monk reacts to the work with incredulity, imaging it as something lesser, stereotypical, racist even. After a series of turns and shifts in his own life circumstances, Monk in a scene of conflagration sits down and writes My Pafology, his own “Black novel” that tells the story of Van Go Jenkins as he endures a life of poverty, violence, abandon, and recklessness in a nameless urban environment. Everett plays the bit of metafiction, reproducing My Pafology (later named Fuck) in full within Erasure. Suffice to say My Pafology, which Monk tells his agent to sell as a joke and which he uses a pen-name to avoid attaching to himself, is very successful.
The tension between Monk and the books within the book of Erasure seem the central tension of the novel, and the satirical dressing down of the publishing industry works on every front. However, the book’s drive continues not by engine of the protagonist’s rage, Erasure finds a way to be a story that reveals much about class and the complications of race as a single, homogenizing experience. Monk’s distaste for the Black novel that peddles in stereotypes reveals as much about his own character and sense of male grievance as it does about America’s fascination with Black struggle narratives. Everett’s greatest skill remains that commitment to avoiding neat conclusions. Monk is not a unidimensional hero fighting the publishing industry, he’s also an angry man that finds himself dealing seriously with the role class plays in his relationships and understanding of Blackness. Later in the book Monk looks at the maid he imagined as part of his family who spent years living alongside his fading mother and realizes he’d actually considered her so little. His own shit, a sense of frustration and grievance, comes out in his reaction to Ghetto and his own relationship with My Pafology. Monk is a character, not a caricature.
Erasure inspired Cord Jefferson’s film American Fiction, released earlier this year. In many ways the film remains a faithful retelling of Everett’s novel: both works satirize the American publishing industry and ask Monk to consider whether he will remain faithful to his idea of what makes a good novel amid the deteriorating condition of his mother and other family tragedies. Though attempting a faithful reproduction of the novel, the constraints of film and this film’s pacing skew towards neatness in an un-Everett-like way.
American Fiction released to a different world than Erasure. That observation is so obvious to feel almost benign but it is worth sitting with for a moment. In 2001, the American appetite for Black stories was different. That moment predates some of our modern updates to race-thinking™️. The appetite for diversity narratives and the purported expansion of racial stories post-Obama; a media landscape confusingly self-congratulatory about the publishing of Black stories while still reporting woeful metrics on who is actually getting to tell stories; over a decade of protesting and racial reckoning on the mattering of Black lives in the face of police violence all were yet to come. American Fiction tries, often to address all of these bits of culture and it does so in a language that feels familiar to anyone in these conversations over the last decade. This isn’t to say Everett’s novel published into an easier landscape of race-conversation or that the novel doesn’t have a dogged preoccupation with the world it was critiquing. It is to say that the role of racial satire, now, seems jaded by another 20 years of experience and subsequent waves of televised death and over a decade of corporate inclusion speak from CEOs and Democratic politicians. And Everett’s Erasure, as much of his work, prefigures the discussion we’ve been having since 2001, and does so in a sharp language and attention to conflicts we mostly leave untouched as a culture. Erasure deals with questions of race and identity with an honesty that exposes the fraught edges of representation for representation’s sake. The book meditates on class, how class and upbringing shape racial identity and racial experience. At it’s most touching moments—much like, to its credit, the film adaptation—the book explores relationships, familial and otherwise, with candor. American Fiction, despite a murderer’s row of Black acting talent, can’t quite get at all of that. Jason England penned the most forceful criticism of the film on Defector in February. Towards the end of the piece England offers this indictment of American Fiction and the culture of race-thinking that birthed it:
That has been the great con of the post-George Floyd era: So many opportunists posing as garden-variety creatives, activists, intellectuals, and DEI experts sold the idea that the success of their individual pursuits should be seen as a referendum on collective black uplift, that an assertion of black identity is part and parcel of what makes a piece of art or an essay excellent, worth your attention, and deserving of your money. Rather than a meaningful discourse in which we examine how race and art move in tandem, we’ve seen the creation of a crude capitalistic “representation” assembly line that cheapens the seriousness and stakes of both.
Erasure is the first Everett work I read and it inspired me to read and collect more. Everett’s oeuvre stretches across form and genre in shocking ways—his last work James was a retelling of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, the preceding book Dr. No copped the form of a a Bond novel to tell a story too confusing to explain here, and before that Trees is a good ole fashioned detective novel about *checks notes* a ghost coming back to kill descendants of lynchers. The cumulative effect of reading Everett is to see things as both more and less serious. Race feels newly animated and atomized. The role of an academic reduced and inflated. The limits of acceptable vengeance tested. Everett built a career being prolific but never quite widely-read. He consistently resists the call to neatness, instead choosing intellectually rigorous books masterful at the sentence level that do not hand-hold on the path to easy conclusions. It appears this is truly how he sees the world, a site of contradictions and curiosities best thought through with a perspicacious eye. Oh, and there is another hallmark of Everett’s work: it is frequently fun, easy, and enjoyable to read. The film is fine, but it doesn’t quite reach Everett.
This is all a long con to get everyone I know to read more Percival Everett so I can talk to more people about it. I’ve been accused of being an Everett superfan and the last 1,000 words will not help me beat the allegations. Enough of that, some quick notes on the playlist.
Mk.gee: “DNM” and “Rylee & I”
I’ve seen Mk.gee in concert twice since this album dropped and this playlist was made (a sign of how behind I am on this whole substack experiment). What I’ll say about Mk.gee, both the album and the live show, is that it’s a good time, 10/10 would recommend. I came to Mk.gee via Dijon, whose blend of r&b and other stuff melds perfectly in my brain. The melodies Mk.gee let’s slip from beneath the hoodie he always seems to have flipped up are all ear-worms. The yearning at the end of a strained line on “Rylee & I” melts into a riotous explosion of sound, made only more explosive in the live show. Word is on night two of the LA tour stop over the weekend he ditched the hoodie AND his shirt and had everyone Mk.geeked up in the Palladium.
Usher: “U Don’t Have to Call”
How close are we to just accepting that this is the best Neptunes beat and the best Usher song? I’m not sure I’m ready to call either yet, but every time I hear this song on a nice enough day with the windows down and the car doing 60+ I feel close to committing.
Teezo: “Sweet,” “Third Coast,” “Luckily I’m Having Fun,” and “Technically”
This playlist unfortunately overlaps with the Teezo phase I hit earlier this year. I don’t think I really like Teezo all that much and the first 30 times I heard Teezo on a song was against my will because he was just showing up places as a feature (mostly looking at you, Tyler, for “RUNITUP”). Earlier this year when the weather was nice and I was on a long drive I queued up the Teezo album and let myself, momentarily, be surprised. How Do You Sleep At Night? is a strange whiplash-inducing ride. The record pivots between big, small, and terrifyingly niche genres. At their best (like the aforementioned Mk.gee record) these kinds of amorphous records don’t show too much of the effort of eclecticism, the sense of difference and variety works and makes sense, Teezo’s genre shifts sound too much like work. They don’t feel seamless. In many instances I found them grating, but to Teezo’s credit he finds the smooth edge often enough across the album’s 17 tracks. His forays as a feature artist and the subdued “Technically” remain among my favorite of his work, though he gets the genre-shifting formula right on the very Southern “Third Coast.”
And with that we’re done. Tune in Thursday for another link-dump where I confess to some ignorance about Hello Kitty’s imperialist origins and talk about the manosphere. Until next time.