“I wouldn’t use the cliché that I was the captain of a sinking ship, that implying some kind of authority, but rather I was a diesel mechanic on a steamship, an obstetrician in a monastery.” – Percival Everett, ‘Erasure’
By now, I am betting you know: I have a book coming out next September and my wife had a baby that came out this September. Even if these columns are being pre-written, I’m going to grant myself a short intro. The novel I read this week, plus a couple episodes of the BLACK LIT podcast, have me thinking about why we read books. Sure, there’s information to be gleaned. There is learning to be done. It is a close approximation of another person’s experience that you can experience more or less for yourself, and that’s valuable. But reading is also meant to be fun, it’s meant to be escape, it’s meant to be spiritual. The novel this week did teach me things. It aimed for high art and reached it. My first thought was “damn writers need to try harder.” Like, this is a standard-setting novel. But also: not everything has to be that lofty. Not everything has to push boundaries all the time. What do we gain from reading? Plenty more than just information.
Hey, quick edit here. I’ve been bad at promoting since my kid was born this week. On The Line Break this week, Bob and I talked about my book, then read poems that reminded us of each other. Apple | Spotify | Soundcloud
On The Lazy & Entitled Podcast, I was so happy to be able to sit down with a person I am lucky to call my friend, Kansas City Poet Laureate Melissa Ferrer Civil. You wanna talk about radical poetics? Melissa’s yr woman. Apple | Spotify | SoundCloud
What I’ve Been Reading This Week
A book that made me want to put more effort into writing. A book that is so much more than what’s on the back cover. A book that I felt like I had to read before I could honestly consider myself a fan of this author—it’s mentioned everywhere, it’s the one that got made into a movie, etc. A book that absolutely lived up to the hype! In no way disappointed. It’s also a gorgeous new (recent?) edition from Graywolf, man, Graywolf makes beautiful books. I’m talking, of course, about Erasure by Percival Everett.
Erasure by Percival Everett: the plot hook is that a moderately successful but obscure Black novelist, Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, writes a sellout novel (“My Pafology,” later renamed “FUCK”) as a joke and accidentally becomes a huge success. Monk’s writing in response to new novelist Juanita Mae Jenkins’ runaway success, We’s All Lives In Da Ghetto, which Monk abhors. The term “minstrel show” is not used once in the novel, but. Sometimes it’s more about the words we don’t say.
Now, there are around 60 pages devoted to reproducing My Pafology as a novel within a novel. Monk also presents a paper at a conference, and that’s in the novel in its entirety. Some sections are told in script-like dialogue, one section is all letters. Formal experimentation is happening here, which is a way of saying that this is not simply a novel dramatizing why Ralph Ellison hated Native Son. This is a novel about identity—Monk’s mother is slipping into the throes of Alzheimer’s, his brother comes out as gay and his wife and kids leave him, Monk learns something unsettling about his late father, the family housekeeper gets married and leaves the house at age 70 or whatever she is. It’s a novel that says, over and over, that who we are is changeable. Sometimes without our consent. Who we think other people are often isn’t the full picture. People can change, as Tim Robinson taught us. Is this a novel about identity? Maybe it’s more accurate to say that it’s about metamorphosis.
In Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut cautions “we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful who we pretend to be.” That’s not quite a theme of this book, though it certainly applies to Monk and the trash novel he publishes under a pseudonym. Monk’s mother cannot pretend away Alzheimer’s. Monk’s brother can’t pretend away the gay. Monk’s sister, an abortion doctor murdered by right wing freaks, doesn’t have a choice about her metamorphosis into a dead person. Yet the novel isn’t as fatalistic as, say, Native Son. Action and agency matter, but some things are just gonna happen. It reminded me a good deal of Everett’s Telephone.
I recognize I’m going long, and I’m struggling to find a way to wrap this up. There’s stuff I’m leaving out. Monk is an accomplished wood worker and trout fisherman, two qualities that don’t fit into what it takes to be a Black bestselling author, apparently. This novel resists having itself filed down into a single point. It demands we account for complexity in identity. It’s finely crafted, and I believe it will reward multiple re-reads. Which, like. All I wanna do is read Percival Everett novels.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? I’m going through an Ann Peebles phase right now.
- Win Stracke dreamed of music as a path to peace by Steve Krakow in Chicago Reader
- Assata Shakur: an enduring legacy that serves as the blueprint for Black liberation by Tonia Hill in The Triibe
- Assata Shakur Was a Black Revolutionary Who Fought for Freedom Even in Exile by Marian Jones in Teen Vogue (RIP both Assata and Teen Vogue)
- Femdot on balancing rap, teaching Chicago hip hop at DePaul and his vision for a Pulitzer by Jerome “RomeJ” Robinson in The Triibe
- Chicago invested in a record 32,500 youth jobs this summer. Here’s why it matters. by Tiffany Walden in The Triibe
What’re you still doing here? Here’s the trailer for American Fiction, starring Jeffrey Wright and Issa Rae and Sterling K. Brown and Tracee Ellis Ross, directorial debut of Cord Jefferson. When I first saw the trailer, I hadn’t heard of Percival Everett. The trailer looked a little like Stranger Than Fiction, but instead of a comedy, it was designed to make me feel bad about everything. This review in Defector by Jason England called the movie a moral failing. Watching the trailer now, I am interested in seeing the movie—although, after reading the book, I can see what England’s problems are, and how they’d be difficult to overcome.
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. May your customers and coworkers see the fullness of you, the whole of your personality, and not just your pafologies.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris