Erasure by Percival Everett

 

Erasure, published in 2001, is a wildly funny novel that works on a number of levels and is so playful that one feels constantly there are little jokes and references that are sliding by and will need a second reading. But much, much more than that, it is an immensely brave novel that is challenging some of the shibboleths of American culture and literature.

At its heart is a biting satire on the way race is handled in the US and, in particular, the constant stereotyping of black people that obtains – not only by white people but by black people themselves. The narrator, loosely based on the author himself, is Thelonius “Monk” Ellison a writer of avant-garde novels that even his agent thinks are challenging, brave, but ultimately unreadable. Monk despairs of a modern culture that puts his novels in the African-American section in bookshops, even when they are about Greek myths. In particular, he despairs about a culture that celebrates novels like We’s lives in da ghetto by Juanita Mae Jenkins, with its stereotyped depiction of black culture, hackneyed plots and over the top use of black idioms. This is false, he rails, it perpetuates the myths that black men are either sportsmen, musicians or drug dealers. And yet it is feted. Jenkins is interviewed gushingly on the Kenya Dunston Show, in a hilarious parody of Oprah Winfrey. Its paperback and movie rights sell for six figure sums. Meanwhile, Monk cannot find a publisher for his latest novel. ‘The line is,’ his agent tells him, ‘you’re not black enough’.

In a rage, Monk thrashes out a novella, My Pafology, into which he crams all the stereotypes he can muster. The protagonist has fo’ children by four different mothers, to none of whom he pays any maintenance. We see him indulge in casual sex that borders on rape. He turns quickly to violence. When a helping hand is offered to him by a wealthy individual who takes him on, he spurns the opportunity, and ends up raping the man’s daughter. The violence spirals into murder and he flees in an OJ Simpson type car chase, live on national television. My Pafology is included in its entirety in Erasure, running to 70 plus pages, and such is Everett’s skill that, while laughing at the parody, one still becomes caught up in the drama.

And this, of course, is exactly what happens in the novel. Monk pitches it to his agent who pitches to a publisher under the pseudonym of Stagg R. Leigh, and Monk is astonished – and appalled – to discover that his angry parody is immediately snapped up. He changes the title to Fuck in an attempt to put the publishers off, but they agree. It becomes a bestseller. It is nominated for a national award. It becomes the talk of the literary world and Stagg R. Leigh is the most sought after author in the country. This, naturally, causes Monk considerable difficulty, particularly when, under his own name, he is asked to be a judge for the award for which Stagg’s novel is nominated. He is the only judge to argue against it. ‘I should think as an African-American you’d be happy to see one of your own people get an award like this,’ one of the other judges says to him. 

All of this is brilliantly handled, and through the wonderful humour there are still uncomfortable truths about race and perceptions of race in America today. Much of the stereotyping is perpetuated by black people themselves and, at the very least, they are complicit in perpetuating those stereotypes. In a culture where African-American writers from Alice Walker and Toni Morrison onwards have been celebrating blackness as something to celebrate in itself, Everett is brave in standing aside and saying ‘no, the mark of the person resides not in his or her skin colour, but in their morality.’ Through Monk, he expresses his exasperation at being defined by the colour of his skin. Monk is asked by a taxi driver, ‘Are you Ethiopian?’ ‘No,’ he replies. ‘I’m just Washingtonian.’ But as the novel progresses he is in danger of being swallowed by his own stereotyped invention and becoming that which he despises.

There is much more at play in this novel. Everett pokes playful fun at the American publishing scene, with the crazy deals being offered to flavour of the month writers, the outrageous promotion of junk novels and the mutual back-scratching of award judges. Erasure also memorably takes on academia, with a brave and funny parody of Roland Barthes’ S/Z in the second chapter (if I hadn’t been warned about it in advance I would have been completely flummoxed by it) and deliciously cruel pen pictures of those postmodernist authors who subsist by publishing each other often enough in their journals to qualify themselves for professorships. That Everett himself plays some delightful postmodern tricks in the novel – for example conversations between, amongst others, Rothko, Hitler, de Kooning and Rauschenberg – merely adds to the sense of enjoyment.

At the novel’s heart, and this is what transforms it from a good into a great novel, is a series of erasures from which it gains its title. Monk’s mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s, is slowly having her mind erased; Monk himself is being erased by his alter ego. His sister, who works in an abortion clinic – itself another form of erasure – is killed, erased, by pro-lifers. His brother, a married man with children, comes out as gay and is thrown out by his family, his past erased. And so on. In this way, Everett takes on many of the issues that form the faultlines of current American society and offers a humanist response. Take me as I am, he says. Reward ability. Do not judge by appearances. Do not take a binary, yes-no, black-white approach to life. In a deliberately ambivalent ending, we are left wondering which way Monk will turn. I have no doubt, though, that he will turn to the good, to the moral. A flawed character, for sure, but a good man.

Glyph by Percival Everett

 Glyph is in some ways similar to another of Everett's novels, American Desert. In that, a man dies and comes back to life – literally so, rising from his coffin in the middle of his funeral service. In Glyph we have a ten-month-old baby prodigy who has the brain of a fully-functioning intellectual adult and an IQ of 476, reading, memorising and understanding everything that is put before him and, although he eschews speech, able to write and communicate fluently. On the face of it you might argue, then, that the two novels are not especially similar, but they are: in each, a person is violently removed from the mainstream of human experience in order to be able to observe it from the margins. It is the common stuff of satire, of course: by artificially intensifying the emotions and beliefs and taboos and mores of a society, the satirist can reveal its weaknesses and faultlines. This is what Everett does brilliantly.

And so, just as in American Desert, when Ted is kidnapped by religious lunatics and subsequently kidnapped again by the government, in Glyph baby Ralph is kidnapped by one crazed academic, undergoes a bungled kidnap by a second and is immediately kidnapped again by shadowy government agencies, where he is put to work as a spy. That’s not the end of it. He is rescued by a kindly guard, only to be effectively kidnapped again as the guard and his wife, who is desperate for a child of her own, flee to Mexico. There, he falls into the clutches of a paedophile priest, while, one by one, his previous kidnappers and his distraught mother converge on him, each determined to claim him for their own. Crazy? It certainly is, and extremely funny, too.  As ever, do not expect dry social realism from Percival Everett.

It could be argued that a fault of Everett’s is his tendency to take potshots at everything, and certainly, with Glyph, the usual suspects are lined up for their Everettian kicking – racial stereotyping, the media, the church, academia, the government. These tend to appear in all of his novels, and it is only the relative degree of their suffering that changes. That does sometimes give a feeling that his writing is unfocused, and it also serves to give a sense of déjà vu at times.

But that is not to say that this is a weak book – far from it. Everett is one of the funniest writers around and here he has enormous fun. His primary target in Glyph is academia, principally at the expense of Roland Barthes – ‘I’m French, you know’, and the postmodernist, deconstructionist school of literary criticism. Barthes is portrayed as a lecherous, pretentious buffoon, and baby Ralph joyfully rips his treasured theories apart. Of his structuralist analysis of Sarrasine, S/Z (which Everett also plays with in his most famous novel, Erasure), Ralph agrees that, in theory, he could read backwards or pull text randomly from a novel and so produce fragments in the way that Barthes suggests. ‘But I do not,’ he says, ‘any more than than I might walk the middle part of my trip to the refrigerator first this time and last the next.’ Thus, Everett trashes much of the artificiality of academia. There are in-jokes by the dozen here. Many of them fly straight over my head because I am not a literature scholar but, such is the brio with which Everett writes, it scarcely matters.

However, as with all the best satire, there is a message here. Everett makes his usual comments about race and religion and the evils of secret government, but this time his real target is truth. Near the end, Ralph insists that he ‘offers no truth about the culture’, but here he is being too modest. The novel has revolved around truth, around the ways that we interrelate and how we prevaricate, how we come to judgements not based on truth but on our own prejudices and fears and self-interests. Ralph also insists frequently that, the evidence notwithstanding, he is not a genius. How could I be?, he seems to be saying, because:

What genius, I guessed then and know now, allows is the start of a new race. Genius means finding a way back to the beginning where the truths are uncorrupted and honest and maybe even pure.

And there we have it. Raph, despite his massive intellect, is still literally a babe in arms, and for all his knowingness he represents that uncorrupted honesty that we all seek. There is, beneath the satire, a tenderness in the writing of Pervical Everett that makes him a most beguiling writer. He has the wit of a satirist, but the heart of a romantic.

American Desert by Percival Everett

  

Percival Everett doesn’t particularly regard himself as a writer of satire, citing only Glyph as a truly satirical novel. However, if American Desert isn’t satire, I’m not sure what is. It is also high octane farce, a study in psychology and a surprisingly deep analysis of love. More of that later.

The bare bones of the novel are striking enough. Theodore ‘Ted’ Street, a man desparately unhappy with his home life, decides one morning to kill himself. Fortunately or unfortunately, on his way to do so he is killed in a car accident, his head being completely severed from his body. At his funeral three days later, to the consternation of the congregation, he rises from his coffin and looks around. A riot ensues, followed by a media maelstrom. But for Ted Street, neither alive nor dead, the trouble is only beginning.

From the start this is high pressure farce, told in a light, cartoonish manner. But don’t be fooled, because Everett is no two-dimensional farceur. Depth emerges gradually. The story takes in kidnap, religious fanaticism, execution (failed, since it is impossible to execute someone already dead), abduction by shadowy government bodies, vivisection, the cloning of Jesus Christ, escape, more religious fanaticism and finally redemption. And that’s only the half of it. I forgot to mention Roswell, and incest...

You get the picture? We’re not talking high realism here. But nor are we talking shallow nonsense, for in satirising contemporary culture – the media, the government, the church – Everett does begin to ask questions about what it is to be human and the nature of love. For all its high-energy fantasy, this is a novel with weight.

At the start of the novel Ted is about to drown himself because he sees no value in his life and is essentially in a living death. He is failing at work (a university professor struggling to obtain a tenure), he is unfaithful to his wife and remote from his children, particularly his daughter. He is bored. He comes to believe ‘that life [is] over anyway, that he made no difference to anyone’. He has reached his nadir, or so he thinks. But by being thrust into a literal living death, by being brought unwillingly back to life, he is given a second chance and is forced to confront both the world and, more problematically, himself.

In his new, limbo-like state, he gradually comes to feel more alive than when he really was alive. When he returns to the family home after the riot at the church, ‘[t]he house felt more comfortable than ever’, different from the ‘cold tomb’ it had seemed before the accident. Later, as he lowers himself into the bath, he cries for the first time since he was eight. He re-reads novels and finds more resonance and joy than he ever had before.  When he makes love to his wife, we are told:

Then, he felt genuinely good about himself, realizing that the old Ted could not have been so selfless, that the old Ted would have worried about his manhood and passive-aggressively taken his feeling of inadequacy out on her. Ted closed his eyes and drifted, he hoped, only into sleep.

A by-product of his life-in-death status is that he can read other people. He observes them and can see episodes from their past playing out, those moments of deceit and dissembling of which we are all, to some extent, guilty. In this way, Ted begins to understand life, and in so doing, he starts to uncover the truth about himself. Gradually, he finds meaning. Late in the novel we are told, ‘Ted had new resolve in the matter of protecting life in general.’ This is very different from the Ted to whom we were introduced two hundred pages earlier. The climax of the novel occurs when Ted turns that resolve into action by attempting to rescue twenty-seven children from a murderous religious cult who have blockaded themselves deep in the desert. ‘I am finally, in this life, a decent man’, he tells the watching world in a media interview afterwards, and the novel concludes with Ted having found a very human redemption. It is, I suppose, an It's A Wonderful Life for our times.

This is a fine work. It operates at two levels – high farce and serious drama – but does so in a natural and unaffected way. This is a difficult trick to pull off. The slapstick quality of a farcical narrative makes it difficult to imbue any depth in the characters – even the master of the genre  Kurt Vonnegut didn’t always get it right – but here Everett succeeds impressively. He is sometimes criticised for taking pot-shots at easy targets – the media, the lunatic religious fringe, the government, all of them so bizarre they are beyond parody, we are told – but while that may be so it is hardly Everett’s fault. What he does is isolate them in the cold, hard light of reality and confront us with the vacuousness at the heart of so much contemporary culture. But, ultimately, this is shown not in the farces that attach themselves to the shallow media practitioners or deranged religious cultists. That would indeed be too easy. No, instead Everett allows us to see their vacuousness through the basic decency of Ted Street. That is why this novel works as a piece of satire and that is why, for all its madcap inventiveness, it is also a remarkably subtle piece of writing.