The Mario Puzo Solution

Erasure by Percival Everett.  Graywolf Press.  265pp.  $16.00 *****

For much of my reading of Erasure, I thought it was a sad novel at the heart of which—as a novel within a novel—was a wicked satire.  By the end, really just the last couple of pages, I realized the whole thing was a wicked satire.  Yet the emotional resonance of the sad story remained.  I think it will stay with me for a while.

Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (talk about a suggestive name) is a highbrow midlist novelist; he writes difficult novels that are highly praised but not widely read.  He is African American, but doesn’t identify that way (early in the novel he makes the astonishing statement, “I hardly ever think about race. . . . I don’t believe in race”).  He likes trout fishing and wood working, undoubtedly likes writing (though he doesn’t like his problems getting published) and has a good job at a university teaching writing.  He’s like a lot of writers, and more successful than most.

But his latest novel has been to seventeen publishers without finding a buyer.  His agent urges him to be “more black” (an odd comment when you think of it).  Ellison is galled by the smashing success of a recent novel entitled We’s Lives in Da Ghetto by Juanita Mae Jenkins, especially because the author’s experience of the ghetto involves one weekend visit to some cousins in Harlem.  Ellison is facing the perpetual question of the serious artist confronting commercially successful work: why do people like this crap?

He also has more immediate concerns.  He’s visiting a sister in DC who loves her brother but resents the fact that he doesn’t help more with their elderly mother, who also lives there, with an elderly housekeeper who is more or less part of the family.  Lisa has the perpetual problem of the sibling who lives in closest proximity to the aging parent; her brothers’ jobs are elsewhere.  Then suddenly the sister is no longer on the scene.  There’s no one left to take care of the mother but the man she calls Monksie, when she remembers who he is, which isn’t all the time.  He has to take a leave of absence from his university job.  He’s lost his moorings, and his major source of income.

So he does what writers have traditionally done when they can make money no other way, at least writers who are talented enough to do it.  He takes the pen name Stagg R. Leigh and writes a novel entitled My Pafology, which is so black that it goes too far even for his agent.  That novel is absolutely side-splitting.  I could literally quote from anywhere and give its flavor.  I’ll choose a section early on.  The only problem is when to stop, it’s so much fun to quote.

“My name is Van Go Jenkins and I’m nineteen years old and I don’t give a fuck about nobody, not you, not my Mama, not the man.  The world don’t give a fuck about nobody, so why should I?  And what I’m gone do instead of going to work over at that Jew mothafacka’s warehouse over on Central is go over to the high school and wait for Rexall’s mama.  Her name be Cleona.”

The mother of his child is still in high school.  Though only nineteen years old, he has four children, by four different women.  And yes, I do think this son was named for the drugstore.  “He got Down Sinder, but he okay.  In dis fuckin world, he don’t need no brain no way.”

The book is absolutely irresistible.  I won’t go into detail about the Olympian heights it reaches, once he convinces his agent to send it out.  Let’s just say Monk’s financial problems are over.

The whole thing is so much fun that you can’t help noticing the rather grim story that surrounds it.  For one thing, Monk actually loves his mother, and she loves him, when she remembers him.  Their housekeeper has been around forever, and when Monk asks what she’ll do if his mother dies—does she have retirement plans?—she says,” I’ll stay here and take care of you” (not noticing that he doesn’t want to be there, and can’t stay).  He vaguely longs for female companionship, but when he finds a woman who seems right, and they’re about to consummate their relationship, not only does she have a copy of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto on her bedside table, she rather liked the book.  The penis of a serious artist withers at such a moment.

I didn’t know how far Everett would take things with My Pafology, even after Ellison decided, pre-publication, to change the book’s title to Fuck.  You wouldn’t think that would go over, but by that time he had the publishing industry eating out of his hand.  Let’s just say that the book’s success has no bounds.  Also that P. T. Barnum was right.

Everett is an inventive, highly skilled, and hilarious writer; I only discovered him because he was featured in a By the Book column in the Times.  But the man is hugely prolific, and there’s lots to choose from.  I Am Not Sidney Poitier sounds like a winner.  As does a novel entitled Percival Everett By Virgil Russell.