Erasure |
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| Title: | Erasure |
| Author: | Percival Everett |
| Publisher: | Hyperion |
| Type: | Book / Paperback |
| Publication Date: | 02 October, 2002 |
| ISBN / ISBN-13: | 0786888156 / 9780786888153 |
| List Price: | $19.95 |
| You Save: | $5.59 |
| Amazon Price: | $14.36 |
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Editorial Review / Publisher's Information:
Product Description
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.
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Customer Reviews:
• Loved It But Left A Tad Bit Cold At The End
01 March, 2010
Percival Everett's Erasure proved to be simultaneously hilarious, morose and thought-provoking. Prior to reading it, I had only read Everett's collection of short stories, Damnedifido. After reading this novel, I became an offical fan.
Erasure, is a semi-self-biographical tale of a black writer named Monk who comes to a crossroads in his life. His books are said to be too "obscure" and have failed to find an audience. His romantic life is almost non-existent. His father has passed away. His mother begins to suffer from Alzheimer's. His radical, leftist sister, a nurse in a self-ran abortion clinic in Southeast D.C., is murdered by right-wing anti-abortionists. His brother has lost his wife and kids after he recently came out of the closet. What's poor Monk to do?
Both baffled and frustrated at the quizzical reception to his novels and the celebration of black fiction like a highly successful novel entitled "We Lives In The Ghetto", creates "My Pafology" (which mimics works like "Ghetto") under the pen name of Stagg R. Leigh. "Pafology" turns out to be Monk's calling card. The cash-strapped Monk gets a six-figure advance, a million dollar deal for rights to the book and national recognition...as Stagg R. Leigh, not himself.
Although Erasure takes a satirical look at the crass exploitation that has become mainstream modern black fiction and the mockery that the literary press has become, the complexities of family is a major theme of the book. Monk discovers some major skeletons in his family's closet (including the discovery of a secret love child that his late father sired) and learns how to cope with the many revelations he has to own up to that concern both his family(his father's favoritism towards him and how it affects his relationship with his brother who often felt neglected; his mother's denial of reality; his brother's selfishness and struggle with his sexuality, etc.) and himself (his social awkwardness; the moral dilemma of becoming Stagg R. Leigh; his standing of a black author in both black and white literary worlds). Despite the bite of Erasure's main theme, there's also some real heart in the story.
Although I was captivated by Erasure and enjoyed Everett's snappy, imaginative style of writing (I found the random interludes between-story to be a very original touch) throughout its duration, I found the ending to be rather anticlimactic and a bit austere. Erasure was such a captivating ride that just simply dropped me off at the end.
The somewhat disappointing ending none withstanding, Erasure is a masterwork of the NEW black fiction. Everett, along with wife Danzy Senna, Zadie Smith, Colson Whitehead, Paul Beatty and others, brings a unique, intellectual, idiosyncratic perspective to modern black literary fiction that gives a much-needed alternative to the "Stagg R. Leighs" of the world.
- Amazon Customer Review
• Experimental Fiction At Its Fines
22 December, 2008
Not much more to say, really. A truly stunning and powerful book, that is far more genuine than it may seem -- art is the lie that tells the truth, after all.
- Amazon Customer Review
• More Than One Story To Tell....
23 December, 2009
A wonderfully written book. ERASURE will enlighten readers to the challenges of African-American writers who are trying to change the face of what the world understands about African American culture! There should be more books published and promoted about African-Americans that have interesting content for all to read......These writers are too often over looked and/or regarded as not "Ghetto" enough. When will publishing companies understand that African-Americans have more than GHETTO stories to write about!
I understand a film is in the works for this book - I can't wait to see it!
Erasure
- Amazon Customer Review
• Mary Sue's Got A New Pair Of Shoes
07 April, 2007
Have you ever heard the term "Mary Sue?" It comes from fanfiction. It refers to a non-canon character -- a character who doesn't come from the already existing fictional world -- who acts as an author surrogate in the story. And not just any author surrogate, either. A Mary Sue is an act of wish-fulfillment on the part of the author. A Mary Sue is an expression of everything the author wishes s/he was in real life. Stuff just works out for a Mary Sue in ways it doesn't for the rest of us.
In my estimation, Percival Everett is the premier purveyor of the Mary Sue phenomenon outside of fanfiction. In Erasure (and American Desert, and Glyph...) the narrator enacts what seems to me particularly adolescent revenge fantasies of the frustrated intellectual Everett. The narrator (I've already forgotten his name, like it matters) delivers a largely incoherent ("Oh, but it's not!" the defenders already shout. Yeah, yeah, save it for the comments at the end, okay?) paper that, evidently, gets the goat of his starchy academic nemeses. And the narrator gets to keep his cool as the kingpin frothingly quotes Pynchon at him afterward.
And the narrator -- no really -- uses his wits to best a raging redneck at a diner. And the narrator gets to stick it to the literary establishment that's overlooked his doubtless brilliant other books, slurping up a piece of pop dreck he whips off in an evening. Never mind, of course, that the narrator of that pop dreck is a more nuanced and sympathetic character than the narrator ever manages to be himself.
But all this is ironic, you say! Well, I say, maybe it is. It's also a singularly unsatisfying reading experience, not to mention a singularly smarmy and embarrassing one too. I have no doubt that Everett felt better about himself after writing this. Probably as good as I feel after masturbating. But you don't want to read about that, do you?
- Amazon Customer Review
• When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong
16 August, 2009
There's a novel within a novel that appears towards the tail end of the first 3rd of this book that I must confess I mostly didn't read. Much like Erasure's protagonist, Monk--and he wrote this piece of work--I couldn't bring myself to do it. The language is too ridiculous. The characters too much satire, too much buffoonery, simply too much. That I didn't read it, however, I doubt matters much to the story. The point is that Monk wrote it. Wrote it as a giant middle finger to the world. And, yet, it is received as art.
I'd read a short bit of Erasure before. It's excerpted in Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor. I'd enjoyed the quality of writing but without context the piece didn't resonate much. I picked up the full book this time only because his most recent piece of satire--I Am Not Sidney Poitier--was not yet in stock at the library. I'm thankful for the happy accident. I can relate to Monk. Not in his constant feeling of awkwardness (feeling intensely black but not quite black enough no matter the race of those around him) but in his frustration with the reality that a standard of "black enough" actually exists. The burden and the ridiculousness of these expectations weighs on him at a time when so much of his world is falling apart. He writes something under a pseudonym, sends it to his agent and rather than everyone waking up, the world simply gets more absurd.
And for that recognition of the absurdity of "Realness" and the impeccable quality of Everett's writing, Erasure is well recommended.
- Amazon Customer Review
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