Percival Everett is an experimental novelist and an English professor at the University of Southern California. Erasure is his thirteenth book of fiction. He has bounced from a major New York publisher in 1983, when he was a promising young African American writer, to small houses and university presses, his face glowering from his book covers more unhappily every time.
My late husband, an experimental novelist (Edmond Caldwell), shared Erasure with me back in 2006 or so. I read the opening pages of "My pafology" and was gobsmacked by its power. Why did this laughable parody gobsmack me -- because the opening page confronts readers with the sordidness of a teenage male using girls for sex. Although designed to shock, the image of the bored male carelessly ejaculating into a girl (or onto the newly purchased couch) hit me in the gut because it was goo real. Although white and privileged, as a teenage girl I was naive with poor social skills so boys/men meanly used me for sex. I got used until in college I learned to avoid make-up, sexy-clothes, and males in general.
Back to Erasure and the parody story within. Although I often read the novels Edmond was reading, for some reason I never got to continue reading Erasure. Now I will. It's embarrassing to have been gripped by a few pages of a parody novel. I appreciate one of the ideas you (Marcus) put out for the appeal for middle-class people of a safe tour through a world of an underclass group. This is your painful comment:
"it offers its black heroine uplift and its white readers the certainty that no matter how far the great mass of black Americans might lift themselves up, it will never be to their level."
First, if Dr. MLK was a journalist, he would be Ralph Ellison. Second, after trying to read a little of Mr Everett novel, I found his style, very self-referential, resulting in a splitting of character between the protagonist and the narrator (who is supposedly the same).
My late husband, an experimental novelist (Edmond Caldwell), shared Erasure with me back in 2006 or so. I read the opening pages of "My pafology" and was gobsmacked by its power. Why did this laughable parody gobsmack me -- because the opening page confronts readers with the sordidness of a teenage male using girls for sex. Although designed to shock, the image of the bored male carelessly ejaculating into a girl (or onto the newly purchased couch) hit me in the gut because it was goo real. Although white and privileged, as a teenage girl I was naive with poor social skills so boys/men meanly used me for sex. I got used until in college I learned to avoid make-up, sexy-clothes, and males in general.
Back to Erasure and the parody story within. Although I often read the novels Edmond was reading, for some reason I never got to continue reading Erasure. Now I will. It's embarrassing to have been gripped by a few pages of a parody novel. I appreciate one of the ideas you (Marcus) put out for the appeal for middle-class people of a safe tour through a world of an underclass group. This is your painful comment:
"it offers its black heroine uplift and its white readers the certainty that no matter how far the great mass of black Americans might lift themselves up, it will never be to their level."
Ouch. Well put.
First, if Dr. MLK was a journalist, he would be Ralph Ellison. Second, after trying to read a little of Mr Everett novel, I found his style, very self-referential, resulting in a splitting of character between the protagonist and the narrator (who is supposedly the same).
Thank you for this. I didn’t know about him--and now I do. Trees and James on the reading list.
Surprised you didn’t include a comment about the fine film, American Fiction, made from the book. Thank you.
It’s in this month’s Real Life Rock, posted yesterday.
Silly me, I realize your column was written years before the film was made.