Book to Movie

American Fiction a film by Cord Jefferson.  With Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, Leslie Uggams, Issa Rae, Sterling K. Brown.  Streams on Prime Video.  *****

Of all the novels I might have thought would never be made into a movie, Percival Everett’s Erasure is at the top of the list.  I tend to think that writers who are unique verbally don’t translate into film: the whole joy of Moby Dick is in the language, and even the great John Huston (who was obsessed with turning books into movies) couldn’t make a great movie out of it.  Ditto The Sound and the Fury.  To Kill a Mockingbird, on the other hand (a book which Everett detests) made a rather good movie, probably better than the book, as did The Godfather, to name two books/movies at random.[1]

Everett isn’t so much a verbal wizard as a writer who is totally off the wall.  You never know what turn his sentences will take.  Look at the characters’ names, for instance.  When he is picking the name for his protagonist, a serious writer who happens to be black, he chooses Thelonious “Monk” Ellison.  And when Ellison himself writes a parody novel within the novel, he chooses the following pseudonym: Stagg R. Leigh.  And people take it seriously.  A publisher refers to him as Mr. Leigh.

I didn’t want to see the movie, I was so convinced it wouldn’t match up to the book.  I didn’t see how it could.  But director Cord Johnson is a huge Percival Everett fan, and American Fiction seems perfectly to capture the spirit of Erasure.  I was astounded.

The basic premises shatter one stereotype after another.  Ellison is a black novelist who doesn’t write about race (“I hardly ever think about race.  I don’t believe in race”).  He also teaches literature at a university, and when he writes a controversial title on the board, a novel by Flannery O’Connor that uses the n-word), it is a white girl who objects and stomps out of the classroom (“I got over it,” her professor says.  “You can too.”)  His family is prosperous—his father was a doctor—and they have a place in the city and at the beach, but the father died years ago and Ellison’s mother, who is in the early stages of dementia, is running out of money.  The movie slides over a few plot elements that were emphasized more in the novel: Ellison’s sister has had to take care of their mother because she lives closest to her, and she resents her faraway brothers for their neglect; also, the family has a longtime housekeeper who also has no resources, and is dependent on her job (that problem is tidied up before it is even mentioned).  The financial and emotional problems are closing in.

But director Cord Jefferson ignores these things to get to the primary problem: Ellison has been asked to take a leave from the university because of the way he clashes with the students (on the issue of race! Which they’re trying to teach him about!), and his latest novel won’t sell.  His editor says it’s not “black” enough.  So in a moment of desperate cynicism (I must say that Ellison’s cynicism sounds a lot like that of his creator; read this By the Book from the New York Times), he sets out to write a novel so black that it’s virtually a parody.  It would make a blaxploitation film look like high art.  After all, a book entitled We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, by an academic woman who seems just as serious as Ellison, sits on top of the bestseller list.  So he sits down to write, not My Pathology (the first title he thought of), but My Pafology.

One thing the movie doesn’t capture—you’ve got to read this novel—is how hilarious My Pafology is.  I was practically falling out of my chair.  For a guy who isn’t interested in race (his real interests are woodworking and fly fishing), Ellison knows the lingo and the situations.  He understands that he’s written a near parody, and his agent doesn’t know what to make of it.  But he sends it out, and they soon find, to their astonishment, that white editors take the book seriously.

Jefferson solves the problem of portraying a writer (usually a director has the man pacing the room, or tearing his hear out) brilliantly; he brings the characters into the room with him.  They talk back when his writing doesn’t seem up to snuff, and he makes changes.  That really is the relationship of an author to his characters—they’re in charge—and I’ve never seen another movie portray it.

For all the hilarity of the novel within the novel, and the novel itself, it looks at some serious subjects: aging siblings whose income may not be what they would like to be, who are dealing with a demented mother; relationships between two brothers, one of whom is gay, and the way so much of their relating goes back to things that happened early on, when they were kids; but the final focus of the movie is the absurdity of the American publishing and film industries (My Pafology, retitled Fuck at the last minute in Ellison’s ultimate act of cynicism, immediately sells to the movies, for big bucks) and the way a serious artist tries to deal with the attempt to get published and make a living in those worlds.  Ellison’s work on the film script, and the ending he finally chooses, is perfect.

In the meantime, at least one writer, Percival Everett himself, has finally gotten his due (after publishing a huge list of titles).  Erasure must be selling like hotcakes, he got co-writing credit for this movie, along with its director, and his new book is one of the most anticipated of the spring season.  The title is James, and it’s about the other guy on the raft with Huckleberry Finn.  You know him by another moniker.  But because of the state of our culture, I can’t mention it.

I wonder if anybody reads that book in school anymore.

[1] Although it’s weird that, in my random choices, I chose two movies with the same star.  What do Captain Ahab and Atticus Finch have in common?  Gregory Peck.