Erasure [Paperback]

Thusly Mr. Everett makes his point, you'll have to read the book to find out what the point is. The plot was interesting, poignant and believable. Mr. Everett does a fantastic job of weaving flashbacks and the characters are completely developed without being bogged down by unneccessary detail. I do agree with another reviewer in that Mr. Everett does seem to take himself a little seriously and (in this reader's opinion)is on a well deserved soap box.

I highly recommend this intelligent read. My biggest disappointment was that the book ended and that I did not find out the reaction to "Monk's" revelation even though I could only imagine.

Nevertheless, "Erasure" has received prominence largely because of its discussion of what it means to be "black." The protagonist, Theolonius "Monk" Ellison, is a professor at a major California university who writes postmodern, academic fiction but finds himself unread and ignored largely because he refuses to publish the type of work "expected" of African Americans. To an obviously significant extent, this portrayal is autobiographical: in an interview published in The Guardian (a British newspaper), Everett commented, "When I see my books in the Black Fiction or Black Studies section, I feel baffled. I really don't know what those terms mean." Similarly, in the novel, Monk has a fit when he finds his own novels shelved in the African American studies section at a major bookstore chain. After reading this book, I went to a local branch of that same chain to look for Everett's other novels and found them all, ironically, in the last place I thought to look: under African American literature.

But back to "Erasure": When another writer, after spending a few days in Harlem, writes a "ghetto novel" that becomes a national best-seller, Monk, in anger, writes a dead-on satire that is published and, to the author's surprise, taken seriously as "the best novel by an African American in years . . . a true, raw, gritty work." The novel-within-the-novel, "My Pafology" (which is "reprinted" here in its entirety) is so over the top that it's impossible to believe that reviewers wouldn't recognize it as a farce. (An example of its humor: the main character, Van Go Jenkins, has fathered, by four different mothers, "fo' babies": Aspireene, Tylenola, Dexatrina, and Rexall.) But realism is not the point: Everett intends to reduce to absurdity the idea of the "ghetto novel" and its widespread acceptance as the embodiment of black experience.

In the previously mentioned interview, Everett carefully qualified this view of literature, saying, "I have nothing against ghetto novels or rural Southern novels, except that they are the only representations out there." This partly explains why, in spite of himself, Everett can't write a truly horrible "bad novel"; "My Pafology" is bracing even when it is ridiculous; it is undeniably authentic in its very inauthenticity. Everett acknowledged, "I can't even bear to read from that section because, despite all my efforts to the contrary, it works in some weird way." It's clear from the many ambiguities throughout "Erasure" that Everett does not mean to denounce such works as much as he means to condemn their pervasiveness. After all, Everett himself makes quite clear his own admiration for Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God"--the archetype of "rural Southern novels."

The aspect of "Erasure" that charmed me the most, however, was the interaction between Monk and members of his family: his aging mother, whose mental acuity is rapidly deteriorating; his sister Lisa, who works in a women's health clinic and is threatened by anti-abortion activists; and his brother Bill, who undergoes a hostile divorce when he reveals to his wife and children that he is gay. After you're done chuckling at Theolonius Ellison's antics as an author, you'll find yourself tearfully reflecting on the heartaches of his experiences as a son and brother. This storyline may seem detached from the major theme of the book--and that is, no doubt, exactly Everett's point: we all have families and experiences and backgrounds that transcend any notion of what it means to be "black"--or a member of any other blurrily defined group.