Erasure

Dear Erik,

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I always feel a low level sense of despair and futility upon beginning a public discussion of a book, whether I like the work or not. How on earth can one do justice to a 265-page labor of love? I never pick up such a volume without mentally whispering something like what aboriginals in bad movies do over the baby seal they've just clubbed. Something like: "Die with honor, now that I've slit your throat. I will tell of your death in many feast songs." Thumbs up or thumbs down, the writer gets stripped naked in the public square. Six pack or cellulite city, naked is naked.

Now, having said grace, let's eat.

Erasure, by Percival Everett, is a murderous satire on race and publishing. The hero, Theolonius "Monk" Ellison--that's his real name--is a professor and novelist who "doesn't believe in race." He understands that "there are people who will shoot me or hang me or cheat me and try to stop me because they do believe in race ... But that's just the way it is." Those two sentences tell you pretty much all you need to know about what the Negro auxiliary of the know-nothing branch of big-time publishing will have to say about Erasure. Neither Everett nor Ellison may be both black and apolitical--how does that help the community since everything must be according to the Black Politburo? How does that provide employment for talentless, middle-class blacks with word processors and a lust for stardom? How then will certain leisure-class whites get their vicarious thrills if they can't "visit" da hood and weep, from a safe distance, over the exciting pathologies on exhibit? "Blackness" must first be packaged and commodified before it can then be bought and sold.

This attitude, of course, dooms our hero's dense, literary novels and reworkings of Greek tragedies (what an Uncle Tom!) to obscurity while ghetto-rific, six-week-gestation-period, minstrel-show claptrap by bougie pretenders become best sellers. Watching the latest carpetbagger become an award-winning best seller via Erasure's Oprah Winfrey doppelgänger ("Kenya Dunston"), Ellison starts to lose it. Then, as his personal and professional life fall apart, he sees "Rita Mae Jenkins" on the cover of Time, with her book We's Lives in Da Ghetto (based on a two-day visit to Harlem), and it's either take hostages or take to the page. In furious despair, he writes a scathing parody, My Pafology. Needless to say, there'd be no Erasure if our hero's parody (a novel-within-the-novel under the hilarious pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh) were understood as such. It becomes a mega-hit and wins the National Book Award. "Leigh" becomes a millionaire.

HALLELUJAH!!!!!!!

I've been waiting for this book forever. If only it were better. Clearly, Everett is a very talented writer who took precious time from his serious work to register his disgust with the state of black writing and the pressure no doubt put on him to be more commercial. Who keeps up with books but hasn't heard of Makes Me Wanna Holler? Who keeps up with books and has heard of Glyph, Everett's 13^th novel? Erasure is a primal scream, a demand for respect for the black right to the life of the artist, to a life of the mind (bell hooks is very good on this point). It's a demand for the acknowledgement that black lives are more complicated than whether to do crack or heroin, "fo" illegitimate kids or "fibe," beat your wife or your kids, carjack or liquor store heist. It's even a demand for the acknowledgement that blacks, by and large, lead lives as uneventful as everyone else's. If even 10 percent of ghetto-ites were like My Pafology's protagonist, Van Go Jenkins (hey! Rita Mae Jenkins! I only just noticed that), the National Guard would be on permanent alert, wouldn't it? Fire would light up the skies over the hood every night. But it doesn't. The poor display an unself-conscious fortitude that few in the middle- or upper-middle classes could manage (and even fewer writers could render). We don't have to. We may hate our jobs and our lives, but at least they're comfortable. The poor get up with the sun, pour our coffee, haul our boxes, take care of our kids, go home, make dinner, and do it all over again the next day. They're not colorful, at least not in the way that "literature" most often records. The dramas are personal--births, deaths, loves, loss, mistakes, victories--just as with whites or Asians or Hispanics. The dramas are merely human. But in this genre, blacks are marionettes jerked from one spasm to the next to titillate an immature audience, and it is that, the denial of black inclusion in a simple humanity, that Everett seeks to erase and rewrite.

Erasure is also an act of aversion therapy. To confront the blaxploitation genre squarely--i.e., to read several of them, let alone to force yourself to write one--requires serious vertebrae. It's just so humiliating to know people think you're really like this, to know that people need to think you're like this. At the same time, Everett certainly knows there's pathology in the ghettos; they are meant, after all, as cages from which we pluck our manual laborers and mine shaft canaries. (Think of all the working-class kids who escaped to the military and will now be our terrorism tripwires). The healthy are trapped with the sick, and the escape routes are blocked. Not insurmountably, but definitely blocked. This is why, I suspect, Everett so clearly parallels My Pafology with Native Son. James Baldwin's criticisms notwithstanding, Native Son is still the best-respected novel of the dehumanizing effects of racial discrimination, marginalization, and malign neglect on anybody, blacks in this case. (See All Souls Day, by Michael MacDonald, on life in the white ghettos of south Boston.) The social context in which Native Son was set has greatly improved but has also been complicated by that very improvement. That's why Everett replaces the rich white family Bigger worked for with a rich black one for Van Go. Arguably, no one has yet improved upon Wright's depiction of racialized poverty and crime, so Everett can be understood to be throwing down the gauntlet: "[I]f you're going to write about alienation and marginalization and racism and dysfunction, at least do it well! Make it an accurate reflection of all the complexities." Do it Wright.

What do you think his main point was?

Cheers,
Debra

P.S.: Is his the coolest author's photo ever, or what? No small ego on this guy.

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This week Slate's Book Clubbers examine Erasure, Percival Everett's novel about a black professor whose satire of ghetto culture is taken seriously and becomes a best seller. Click here for more on our format, here to buy the book, and here to take a shot at writing a Slate "Book Club" yourself.

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