Name: Erasure
Rating: 4.365384615384615 (26 reviews)
ISBN: 9780571370894

Percival Everett

Erasure

Emily McMeans

“My self-murder would not be an act of rage and despair, but of only despair and my artistic sensibility could not stand that.”

Hailed by the New York Times as "both a treatise and a romp," a bold and brilliant novel of a man coming to terms with himself. Now in paperback, this provocative tale within a tale details the life of avant-garde novelist and college professor Thelonious "Monk" Ellison. Monk, frustrated with his dismal book sales, composes a fierce parody of exploitative ghetto literature entitled My Pafology, which is greeted by critics as the work of a great new voice and garners him the success that he covets. Monk's impending struggle with his moral principles emerges as a revolutionary and riotous indictment of race and publishing in America.

incredibly inventive & American fiction is also a stellar depiction

B.A. Bacigal

Percival Everett's blistering satire about race and writing, available again in paperback Thelonious "Monk" Ellison's writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been "critically acclaimed." 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." Meanwhile, Monk struggles with real family tragedies—his aged mother is fast succumbing to Alzheimer's, and he still grapples with the reverberations of his father's suicide seven years before. In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off a novel meant to be an indictment of Juanita Mae Jenkins's bestseller. He doesn't intend for My Pafology to be published, let alone taken seriously, but it is—under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh—and soon it becomes the Next Big Thing. How Monk deals with the personal and professional fallout galvanizes this audacious, hysterical, and quietly devastating novel.

A Novel

I know that I missed so much of the references which is why I felt like I could never ‘get’ into the head of Thelonius, but of course this is also intentional. I loved the work on the interpersonal struggles that populate around someone reckoning with one’s self. The hurt and pain and fear relating to his family. I think, upon reflection or discussion, my rating will go up as I contemplate the plight of our narrator.

Erasure

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