And this creates a dilemma actually, more than one. The last thing he expects is what actually happens. He expects Pafiology to disappear, maybe to amuse a few people or piss off a few editors. The book is included, in full, as a story-within-a-story that is simultaneously infuriated and infuriating, painfully funny and just plain painful.ĭashed off in a fit of temper, in response to the runaway success of a Push-style, Oprah-approved “memoir” entitled We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, Ellison offers Pafology as a searing, up-yours diatribe, a satire that he hopes will expose the publishing industry’s racial pigeonholing-its inability to know what to do with a black author who doesn’t write like a “black author” is supposed to. Moreover, the primary plot thread in this multi-stranded but eminently readable story concerns Thelonius Ellison’s bad-tempered, tongue-in-cheek exploitation novel, Pafology. Metatextual references abound: Everett’s protagonist shares a last name with Ralph Ellison, whose most famous novel, Invisible Man, stands as a classic of 20th century American literature (and whose title echoes Erasure‘s themes of non-being and invisibility, or more properly, visibility only under certain circumstances). Normally I wouldn’t even go there, but this book practically dares you to. Let’s not jump to conclusions here, but it seems possible that, to some extent, Ellison serves as a reflection of some of Everett’s views on comtemporary literature and academia-especially contemporary black literature, and the sometimes awkward positions encountered by black academics. His protagonist, Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, is a black man who is a novelist and academic. Percival Everett is a black man who is a novelist and academic. Erasure is the first of his books that I’ve read, and it’s a killer. I’ll confess that Percival Everett’s was a name unknown to me before accepting this novel for review, but it turns out Everett is an established figure, with over 20 books out there, including I Am Not Sidney Poitier, American Desert and Swimming Swimming Swimming.
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