About this deal
It turns out to be a massive commercial and critical success, though at the expense of Monk's identity and integrity. Monk also finds a mystery to solve: among his father's private papers are clues to the identity of a sister Monk never knew he had, the child of his father's love affair with a German woman in the 1950s.
He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days.
Everyone’s complaints about Black stereotypes don’t come from a good place, and some Black intellectuals, like Monk, just don’t want to be too closely associated with those other Black folks.
This version of My Pafology is more melodramatic than comical, and it offers Monk a means of getting out aggression about both his father’s indiscretions and the fact that those indiscretions reaffirm certain stereotypes about Black men. Despite this mouthwatering premise, however, most of Erasure is about Ellison's relationship with his mother, a passionate woman succumbing to Alzhemier's. In disgust over the success of a recent novel purporting to immerse the reader in the language and events of black life, We’s Lives In Da Ghetto, by a young fresh-out-of-Oberlin-coed who once spent two weeks in Harlem, Ellison sits down and pens a parody.In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off a novel meant to be an indictment of Juanita Mae Jenkins’s bestseller.
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. But none of that stops this from being one fucking hell of a great book, or Everett from being ridiculously under-read. The novel is finely crafted, with fully developed characters, rich language and subtle play with the plot, but one is lost to understand what his reworking of Aeschylus' 'The Persians' has to do with the African American experience.
Hailed as an authentic representation of the African American experience, the book is a national bestseller and its author feted on the Kenya Dunston television show. But there is much bigger and more general fear, a fear that is so terrifying that it has not be given a proper name. however, forces both within and without this novel refuse to cooperate, assigning the black identity only to a particular (romanticized and fetishized) “inner-city,” “gritty,” and “ghetto” experience. Part farce, part realistic, this is one of the more unique stories I've read, but comes as little surprise given Percy's talent.
And then when we’re shaken from this blistering revelation, he then reminds us that at the root of all this craziness is really an incredibly sad story. It's gotten very good reviews, but I think I'll reread the book at some point, rather than seeing the film. Naturally, Random House give him a huge advance, there's a movie deal, and he's nominated for a prestigious literary award, with assorted well-meaning white idiots cooing about the authenticity of the teenage street Black experience as made up by an upper middle class academic with a beach house. Throughout the film, Jefferson distills information from Everett’s prose into visual representations, as when Monk is on the phone with Arthur, complaining about the racial expectations making it hard for his work to sell.Ellison becomes a judge for a major book award and My Pafology (title changed to Fuck) gets nominated, forcing the author to come to terms with his perverse literary joke. Because here's what: whatever sour grapes I may have expected, feared from this particular set up, the man has a point.