Product Description

Avant-garde novelist and college professor, woodworker, and fly fisherman - Thelonious Ellison has never allowed race to define his identity. But as both a writer and an African American he is offended and angered by the success of 'We's Lives in Da Getto'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12784 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01-22
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Erasure is a tableaux of many delicate interconnected parts. Ostensibly though, it's a book about books, a novel about writing. An overpopulated genre perhaps, but Percival Everett's jack-in-a-box of a novel offers something fresh and quite unique. His narrator and protagonist Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a professor of English literature, is "a writer of fiction" whose obtuse books are regularly criticised for saying nothing about the "African American experience". He is so incensed by the runaway success of We's Lives In Da Ghetto--a novel that purports to represent contemporary black life but which Ellison describes as akin to finding "a display of watermelon-eating, banjo-playing darkie carvings" in an antiques mall--that he knocks off an expletive-riddled hood yarn of his own. Circulated to publishers under the pseudonym Stagg R Leigh, his pastiche, initially titled My Pafology later shortened to just Fuck, instantly draws a six-figure advance and Hollywood interest. The critics are equally fulsome in their praise: "Dazzling, raw and simply honest" emotes a New York Times reviewer. Monk, who has to meet agents and interviewers disguised as the monosyllabic Stagg, even finds his literary Frankenstein's monster nominated for a prize that he is judging.

Like Nabokov's Pale Fire, the novel Fuck appears in full; a slight hurdle (as with Shade's poem in Pale Fire, if we are honest) is having to endure over 70 pages of faux gangsta prose and being asked to believe that this "novel" would garner such acclaim. The story of Fuck is, however, intricately woven into events besetting Monk's family life; meaty subplots are provided by a quest for a half-sister and, in particular, the story of his mother's descent into senility. As Monk adopts a new identity as Stagg, his mother is increasingly unable to recognise her own son. With its rapier satire and flamboyant invention, Everett's savage, moving and amusing book recalls Philip Roth at his metafictional finest. -- Travis Elborough

Publishers Weekly
‘An over-the-top masterpiece.'

The Times
‘The novel is set for a classic.'

Customer Reviews

Genuinely clever, moving and dark
Everett has been pretty much ignored outside of the US, but he's a verytalented writer who deserves wider recognition. Erasure is probably hisbest book, the tale of a black US academic who writes a scathing pasticheof the sort of psuedo-authentic ghetto-talk black novels that are hugelysucessful these days in America. The book becomes a hit, despite his bestattempts to strangle it, and the resulting misadventures explore thenature of race and art and authenticity. And it's very funny, too.

An excellent read
This novel about a novelist is a fascinating read, focusing on Thelonious 'Monk' Ellison, a literary writer who's novels are not 'black' enough. In the name of satire, he writes a ghetto novel that is basically an updated version of Richard Wright's 'Native Son', only his character Go has none of the redeeming features of Bigger Thomas. Naturally, when his novel becomes a runanway success, he is bemused and disgusted, but still needs to take the money...
This is full of literary in-jokes, but also has meaty sub-plots about Monk's family that add to the novel as a whole. Ultimately a satisfying read.

Two books in one
Erasure is an enjoyable read. Everett writes with a beautiful, concise tone and offers many wry observations about modern America. My problem with the book is that it's essentially two stories. One is a mature, semi-autobiographical look at a black family struggling with age, death and relationships - and the other story is a satire of what white audiences want from black writers: endless cliches of ghetto misery, guns, bloodshed, sex and hip hop. Both stories are good, but I am not sure they sit well next to each other in the same novel.