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Erasure

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"Chekhov Lite"

By Debra Dickerson
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2001, at 4:34 PM ET

Dear Erik,

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"Cathected"? "Bien pensant?"

Is your mama reading the "Book Club" this week and complaining about what it cost to send you to college? I didn't know I was going to need a MFA for this gig; I thought we'd just read the jacket copy, lob each other a few softballs and have a little fun smarting off about a book the gen pub hadn't had time to read yet. (I'm in this for the free books. Aren't you?) Just so you know, I've already been contacted by the rest of the BC gang to ensure that you never work in this town again. (When I was in the service, we called this playing Stump the Dummy: You'd be giving a briefing about the B-1 bomber and some hoser would shower you with fake questions cum lectures, larded with bits like, "Who would have guessed that a lower-middle-class spinster from Hampshire would become one of the greatest novelists in the English language?" so he could show off. This is the Book Club version: Where's Waldo ... Emerson.)

Why is this so bracing, so much fun? Why are we so excited by a book we both find disappointing? I think that as writers and avid readers, we both truly feel what Everett is trying to do. He just wants to follow his artistic inclinations unimpeded by political considerations. He wants to see bad work, whatever its source or political cachet, identified as such. He wants to see good work, whatever its source or lack of political cachet, identified as such. That's all. And now, it's time to give him his wish. We need to talk about why Erasure, for all its nobility, fails. (It should still be read, just not given a pass because one applauds its politics. Surely Everett would appreciate that.)

Erasure, while long on politico-artistic statements, is just too heavy-handed, too rushed. It telegraphs all its punches. Everett doesn't want to write this novel, just the parody. The novel is really only flashbulbs lighting images from a story, the flesh of which must be provided by the reader.

He gives Ellison an underdeveloped, cameo-appearing girlfriend, just so he can see We's Lives in Da Ghetto on her nightstand at the moment of coitus. Rita Mae Jenkins is a ludicrous monstrosity who all but announces herself to be a cretin. One of the more cringe-worthy passages came near the end. Ellison has discovered and tracked down a half-white sister from his deceased father's Korean War fling. His mother is Alzheimer's-ridden, his sister murdered by a cardboard cut-out anti-abortion zealot, his brother dazed and confused by the homosexuality he has yet to understand. He finds the woman, Gretchen, living in near squalor in New York.

"This is my granddaughter," she said. "I watch her while my daughter works. Then I go to work. Tomorrow will be the same and the day after even more the same. What do you do, Mr. Ellison?"

Chekhov lite.

Still, the promise of Everett's skill lies scattered all over Erasure. I certainly intend to tackle those 13 other novels. Eventually. Even the line just before Gretchen's thud of a speech resonates. Monk surveys her apartment and thinks, "I knew that the reverse sides of the cushions were even more stained." That's a tidy little detail. Everett understands, whether firsthand or merely artistically, what poverty is apart from the mere absence of money, what it does to the spirit, how it's exhibited in a life. Jenkins would simply tell you her characters are poor, no doubt in a speech about racism and "the man."

In My Pafology, one really gets the sense that he could "do" the ghetto if he had a mind to. As Van Go flees an enraged and saddened 14-year-old whom he has just gleefully date-raped, she screams, "I hate you." Go responds, "And I hate you too. What that got to do wif anythin'?" Watch Ricki Lake or Jerry Springer; Everett has crystallized the can't-live-with-them-can't-live-without-them battle between poor black men and black women perfectly with that exchange. Later, as the dragnet slips tight around the murder-rapist Van Go and he confronts the wino he realizes is his father (and whom he is about to kill), "I see myself rockin on my heels, waitin, waitin, waitin for sumpin I won't recognize when it come."

He has more sympathy for Van Go (the archetype) than he thinks we'll notice; there's more good writing here (in the parody) than he thinks we'll appreciate. You know, in rereading the relevant passages, I'm not even sure anymore what he means with the invocation of Native Son. My Pafology is like the girl on the Morton Salt Box who's holding a Morton's Salt Box who's holding a Morton's Salt Box. ... You're right Erik, it is a Round Robin "fuck you."

Dizzily,
Debra