I learned about this novel when the movie American Fiction came out (which I’m hoping to see this weekend). It’s striking and sad how relevant this 23-year-old book still is when it comes to race and racial stereotypes.
Percival Everett provides a sharp critique of race. It’s biting and funny and depressing and tragic. Told through journal entries, it follows Thelonious (Monk) Ellison during a time when he is facing dramatic changes in his family and has chosen to write a book intended to be a parody. Frustrated by his limited success as a writer and the recent wild success of a book about Black lives (called We’s Lives in da Ghetto) that he thinks is garbage, he pens My Pafology (later renamed with an expletive) under a pseudonym. It’s included in its entirety (as a 60-ish page novelette, though treated as a novel in the book), and honestly, it’s a little challenging to read. The main character is repugnant in multiple ways and is not someone I would typically want to read about, but that’s also the point. Monk is trying to satirically comment on how the world, including the publishing industry, sensationalizes depictions like this. His book displays all of the worst stereotypes that people have about African Americans, and Monk is horrified when it is lauded as a true-to-life novel from someone who must have experienced a life very much like it. Fans and reviewers make comments like, “The energy and savagery of the common black is so refreshing in the story.” Which, yikes.
Monk has to figure out how to handle the fame coming to his alter ego while navigating the challenges in his immediate family. The fact that he wrote the book, combined with the public’s reaction, led to a shift from the beginning of the book where he says that he doesn’t “believe in race” (though he believes in the harmful behaviors that comes from people who do believe in race) to the end of the book where he is grappling with what it means to be successful based on his conformity to racial perceptions, leading to this passage:
The fear of course is that in denying or refusing complicity in the marginalization of ‘black’ writers, I ended up on the very distant and very ‘other’ side of a line that is imaginary at best. I didn’t write as an act of testimony or social indignation. . . But the irony was beautiful. I was a victim of racism by virtue of my failing to acknowledge racial differences and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression. So, I would not be economically oppressed because of writing a book that fell in line with the very books I deemed racist.
The book has a postmodern style. Its unconventional structure includes story ideas, a short story, and tangential musings about fishing and woodworking. I’m sure there’s a lot I didn’t “get” as someone who hasn’t been trained in literary analysis (and has limited patience to do it myself), but there’s still a lot to get from this novel. The ending is unexpected and open-ended, and the last line (which I had to translate) blew me away.
Monk is an interesting and flawed character who is struggling with very real issues, making his life quite relatable in some way. I’m so glad I read this book, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the movie compares.