Erasure
Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a Black intellectual novelist, writes a parody of ghetto fiction out of frustration. The parody becomes a bestseller. Everett published Erasure in 2001 to modest sales; the 2023 film adaptation (American Fiction) brought it the audience it deserved. A satire of the publishing industry's appetite for "authentic" Black suffering, and one of the funniest novels about race in America.
Publishing, white liberal guilt, academia and a dying parent all get aimed at, and readers say “Nothing gets enough time or attention.” The parody novel takes nearly a quarter of the pages in exaggerated dialect, and readers who agree with the point it makes still admit it was “painful to read so I skipped most of it.” Imagined conversations between Barthes, Derrida and Wittgenstein sit alongside “too many Latin quotes and obscure cultural references,” which critics say “clog the flow.” The family half and the satire half never quite become one book, and the brother’s crisis gets rushed. “Far too clever for its own good.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
