Book Review: Erasure by Percival Everett

When we last saw Percival Everett on this blog back in 2024, he was earning eight out of ten hot dogs for James, the undisputed novel of the year. For this read, I went all the way back to 2001 (25 years ago! Can you believe that?!?!) for his book Erasure. Erasure is, on the surface, about selling out. But intrinsically, it's about the African American experience and how that is perceived.

Erasure is the story of Thelonious "Monk" Ellison. Monk is black. He is also about the most genteel person you have ever met. He comes from Annapolis, Maryland, where his grandfather, father, and sister were all doctors. He himself is a little-read novelist and sometime professor specializing in esoteric fiction. His hobbies are trout fishing and woodworking.

Some challenges are thrown Monk's way, and he scrambles to find the money to keep his family afloat, all while receiving rejection after rejection for his latest novel and finding out that he won't be able to secure a worthy teaching position in Washington DC-area colleges. While he is going through his troubles, he follows a much less learned author who just published a novel called We's In Da Hood, and watches as this author climbs the bestseller list, appears on an Oprah-type show, and sells the movie rights for millions of dollars, all for a novel that most of America (read: white people) are calling a seminal book about the African American experience.

In a rage one night, Monk assumes the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh (a top tier nom de plume!) and writes a novel called My Pafology, a first-person account of a hustler in South Central LA whose promiscuity gets him into a ton of trouble. Monk decides to send it to his agent and see if it sells, thinking that some publishing house might like it as a satire.

I think you can guess the result.

And that's the thing - there are very few surprises in Erasure - we all know this is going to become a major success and the new "African American experience" book, that Monk will have to delicately balance his real life from his life as ex-con author Stagg R. Leigh, and that Monk will have serious questions about whether he's selling out by keeping My Pafology afloat. But when you have an expert novelist like Everett, you don't need surprises - the writing itself keeps you captivated.

I can't give this a perfect score - some sections of the book do feel a little bloated, and it doesn't have the most satisfying of endings (what we call in the business a "Schmoopie ending"), but overall this is a very good read - another eight out of ten hot dogs for Everett!