Erasure - A Review
Can a black author find success in America’s cultural landscape without sounding “black”? This is the question posed by the 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner Percival Everett in his novel, ERASURE.
ERASURE is a first person narrative narrated by Thelonious Ellison, a university professor who writes dense and unreadable retellings of Greek tragedies. One day, he discovers the work of best-selling author, Juanita Mae Jenkins, who wrote the novel, We’s Live In Da Ghetto. Monk, Thelonious Ellison’s nickname, is deeply offended by Juanita’s book, which is written in Ebonics and has made the author fabulously wealthy and absurdly popular. Well respected periodicals call We’s Live In Da Ghetto a masterpiece of African American literature.
Monk laments the fact that his literary fiction based on retellings of Greek tragedies has no readers and so makes him no money, while a hack writer like Juanita Mae Jenkins is considered a black literary genius. ERASURE leans a bit into fantasy when it is revealed that Monk not only has an agent, but has had five books published that are, as described in the novel,” dense, unreadable, and do not sell.” One traditionally published book, maybe two, but five? He has not won a Pushcart Prize once, but three times, which also reaches into the realm of literary fantasy considering how absolutely loathed Monk is by his peers.
However, his current manuscript keeps being rejected by publishers, and when he suddenly has to financially take care of his mentally ailing mother after his sister is killed by an anti-abortion fanatic, Monk decides to abandon his literary principles and write a novel about a young black teen who speaks with Ebonics, curses every other word, has a goal to buy a gun so that he can rob the Korean grocery store owner, has sex with multiple women as young as fourteen years old, and has four babies with four different baby mammas. This book, which Monk eventually calls Fuck, becomes a best seller, and he makes millions of dollars when the movie rights are sold.
ERASURE is doing a lot of things, though largely it is criticizing the publishing industry and English academia, in one form or the other. The fact that one of Monk’s books, which is based upon Greek mythology, is put in the African American section of a bookstore, shows how the publishing industry cannot look past the fact that a writer is African American, even when the subject he is writing about has nothing to do with black identity. The fact that literary critics and consumers see Monk’s book as “real” because it portrays a black male who encompasses all of the negative stereotypes that are held about black people, is detailed in all its narrative absurdity in ERASURE. Van Go Jenkins, the central character of Monk’s farcical book, is ignorant, loves chicken, loves having sex even if it verges on rape, insults his mother, has a father that has stepped out on the family and is probably a homeless wino, has multiple children by multiple women, and whose highest inspiration is to rob the Korean storeowner at gunpoint. Monk writes what America expects a black person to be, and by reconfirming their prejudices, they label his novel Fuck as “real”.
The theme of ERASURE has been touched upon by other black writers in the past. Robert Townsend’s HOLLYWOOD SHUFFLE (1987) mocked the movie industry’s insistence that black people be portrayed, as the film says, “as a slave, a butler, or a street hood,” which causes the main character to open a “black acting school” that teaches black actors such acting techniques as “how to talk jive” in order to get parts. Spike Lee’s BAMBOOZLED (2000) features the return of a black minstrel show, where black actors paint their faces blacker and proceed to embody all of the worst stereotypes held about African Americans by white Americans, to grand financial success for the producers of the show.
Percival Everett’s ERASURE is the latest cultural icon to point out the perceived notion that black art and entertainment must sound black if it is to find success by mainstream audiences of white and black consumers, a point which is underscored in the novel. ERASURE was made into the movie AMERICAN FICTION, which was released in 2023.
