Product Description: ow in paperback, this provocative tale within a tale details the life of avant-garde novelist and college professor Thelonious 'Monk' Ellison. Monk, frustrated with his dismal book sales, composes a fierce parody of exploitative ghetto literature entitled My Pafology, which is greeted by critics as the work of a great new voice and garners him the success that he covets. Monk's impending struggle with his moral principles emerges as a revolutionary and riotous indictment of race and publishing in America.
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Rating: - Mary Sue's got a new pair of shoes
Have you ever heard the term "Mary Sue?" It comes from fanfiction. It refers to a non-canon character -- a character who doesn't come from the already existing fictional world -- who acts as an author surrogate in the story. And not just any author surrogate, either. A Mary Sue is an act of wish-fulfillment on the part of the author. A Mary Sue is an expression of everything the author wishes s/he was in real life. Stuff just works out for a Mary Sue in ways it doesn't for the rest of us.
In my estimation, Percival Everett is the premier purveyor of the Mary Sue phenomenon outside of fanfiction. In Erasure (and American Desert, and Glyph...) the narrator enacts what seems to me particularly adolescent revenge fantasies of the frustrated intellectual Everett. The narrator (I've already forgotten his name, like it matters) delivers a largely incoherent ("Oh, but it's not!" the defenders already ... Read More
Rating: - An amazing work of literary criticism
I have got to think that Everett cringed when the New York Times Book Review praised his book as having addressed "the highly charged issue of being 'black enough' in America." As Monk says in the beginning of his story, race out of context is an empty concept, as is gender.
Throughout this book Everett spoke directly to me (a fairly old, white woman) as if the he were my alter ego. Several decades ago, I was enrolled in a seminar in American Literature as part of a post-graduate program. I was looking forward to Melville, Twain and Hurston, but no, the idiot professor was all heated up over the pretentious and impenetrable ramblings of Roland Barthes, so we had to crawl through "S/Z" practically line by line. Later, as I understood, English Literature departments at large universities sort of evaporated as they abandoned art in pursuit of gaseous theories.
Rating: - Monk Who?
Let me preface this review by stating that I was "forced" to read this book in an American Literature Survey course. I am so glad that I was introduced to Everett's work. As many of the reviews of this book point out there is definite racial tension in the novel. However, it was not the friction created by Everett's criticism of the "stereotypical" black American that i found most interesting in this novel.
At its core, Erasure is a novel dealing with identity, or the lack thereof in today's world. Everett's numerous allusions to Ellison's The Invisible Man are only arrows, roadmarkers along the way to gear your mind towards thinking about Monk's identitiy.
I will not spoil the end of the novel for you, which by the way is a cataclysmic gathering of all of the loose ends, but I will say that Everett's style is engaging to even the most amature literary critic. And, if you feel up to ... Read More
Rating: - two books in one
Percival spends the first 1/4 of the book telling you how dreadful Da Ghetto literature is, then makes you READ some for the next 1/4 of the book. That may be a clever conceit, and maybe it would work in smaller doses, but for me it was a major turn-off and I almost stopped reading, I certainly skipped a fair bit of it .... I suppose if you are more familiar with the genre then the parody is more obvious. It certainly did not strike me as "blisteringly funny". Maybe the echoes of other literature might also work for some, as mentioned in other reviews, but it didn't work for me. The rest of the book, and the protaganist's dilemma struck me as more entertaining and mildy funny.
The only other novel I've read which is written in a black-vernacular is Color Purple. Is Alice Walker one of the writers that he is mocking? It was to find an answer to that question that I have come on-line today. I appreciate ... Read More
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- Mary Sue's got a new pair of shoes
- An amazing work of literary criticism
- two books in one
