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Feb 27, 2008

Maren rated it:

I took an advanced fiction class from Percival Everett and admired him immensely as a teacher and person, so I finally got around to reading one of his books. I had taken a look at "Glyph" before, but "Erasure" really got me. It's the story of a brilliant Black man who defies popular (and forced) stereotypes about black men - not unlike Everett himself though I'm sure he would resent comparisons intensely.

The character - Monk - is so discouraged by the lack of au More...

1 comment like (5 people liked it)

Jul 19, 2007

Mary rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

3 comments like (5 people liked it)

May 04, 2011

MJ rated it:

A strange blend of family drama and razor-sharp satire. Thelonious Ellison is an academic writer in the mould of Barthes or Derrida, whose unreadable novels upset and alienate colleagues and readers. Riled by the rise of cheap and racist "ghetto-lit," he pens a satire against the genre, which becomes unbearably popular.

Despite this mouthwatering premise, however, most of Erasure is about Ellison's relationship with his mother, a passionate woman succumbing to Alzhemier's. T More...

5 comments like (3 people liked it)

Mar 14, 2011

Steven rated it:

I love this novel. I laughed throughout, but it's not merely a satire and a meta-commentary about race and the corporate publishing industry. It's also a moving story about family dynamics and professional frustration. I'll be recommending this one to everybody I know.

Edit: just a final thought: while the novel-within-a-novel, My Pafology then Fuck, contains elements of Push and Invisible Man, I also detect in it the film Menace 2 Society and the memoir Makes Me Wanna Holler. More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 11, 2011

Jennifer rated it:

After reading "Erasure" I wondered why it took me so long to read something of Everett's. Even though this was originally published 10 years ago, Graywolf Press is re-releasing it and the subject matter has as much relevance now as it did then and, I fear, always will.

I love the balance of voices that he uses for Monk and the punch of the prose. Thelonious Monk feels like he's going crazy by the end but he's still one of the most sane people around. It's almost like a horr More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Bonnie rated it:

Well - This was an extrememly thought provoking book and I would have given it five stars had it not been so thought provoking at times that I had some difficulty following where the author wanted me to go.

I felt the work dense -- and unfortunately I don't know Latin beyond the rudimentary and it was hard at the end to make sense of the big picture that Everett wqas painting.

But I do understand what he meant by alienation. What happens when you don't belong anywhere? More...

6 comments like (2 people liked it)

Nov 06, 2007

Pete rated it:

Probably my favorite contemporary work of fiction, also one of my favorite all-time novels, and written by one of my two favorite authors. _Erasure_ was mostly marketed as a send-up of the publishing industry (especially in regards to race), and while it performs that function as humorously as you could hope for, its real pleasure for me was its presentation of something I guess you could call the indeterminacy of identity. Our protagonist here is black by white standards and white by black More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

May 22, 2008

William rated it:

I had a lot of fun with this book...from his waaay over the top novel within a novel..to the imagined conversations of historical figures..it was a book I was anxious to get back to. Also included was a rather sad piece of family dynamics that the majority of the baby booming generation is currently facing..the aging of ones parents...Its not often one finds historical hilarity, skewering of authors and the publishing game, racial perceptions and stereotypes and family drama all wrapped into one More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Mar 14, 2009

carolime rated it:

preachy. self-involved. oft-times offensive in the very way that his character is offended. i wonder if this is one of the book's strategies-- offending you so that you understand how the 'poor protagonist' feels. i found the "literary remarks" to be stodgy and pretentious. for example, the narrator is woodworking in his shop when he is suddenly reminded of theories of language and his own existential angst. oh give me a break! this is yet another book where the author is thinly g More...

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Aug 08, 2011

Ben rated it:

There is a huge writerly risk taken on nearly ever page of Erasure, and the fact that each part of the book functions more or less equally well is a testament to Percival Everett's skill and hard work. What Erasure sets out to do is ambitious; a quietly affecting family drama grafted into a more high-register secret identity farce. Let's not forget the book-inside-a-book, or the epistolary shards scattered through the pages. Or issues of race and class, treated in ways that are familiar but reso More...

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Aug 10, 2010

Tsehay rated it:

Nutshell: Educated, black, literary novelist takes the piss at the gangsta or street books that is all the rave these days.

His gripe seems to be the racial profiling of the 'black experience'. He seems bitter that the urban books are selling like hotcakes, crowding the shelves of bookstores everywhere while people who write of his genre (the re-telling of Greek classics) struggle to make sales. He constantly asks himself, whatever happened to style and skill? Whatever happened to in More...

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May 11, 2010

Spanakos rated it:

If you read or watched Precious/Push you need to read this book. Everett brilliantly satirizes virtually everything in this novel about black novelist whose only crime is trying to write highly intellectual fiction. Bookstores do not know where to place him, the academic world is also ambivalent, and the market does not treat him much better. He abhors the bestselling novels in "African American Fiction" sections which involve poor spelling, stories based in ghettos, which assume an ai More...

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Feb 12, 2010

Becca rated it:

The anti-Precious! Just as Mo'Nique is set to win an Oscar for the cinematic adaptation of "Push", Percival Everett poses the question: Why the high praise? Is "Push" as honest as its champions claim, or is it hailed because it reinforces accepted stereotypes?

"Push" claims to shed light on an invisible character in American popular culture: An obese, illiterate, twice-pregnant black teen. While Precious-types aren't a common sight Hollywood, I've read in More...

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Dec 14, 2009

Michael rated it:

Percival Everett has been a wonderfully unexpected discovery for me this year. Here is this guy doing exactly the sort of thing I'm interested in (smart satire, lapsing into deeply felt surrealism, of contemporary culture), and he's hiding in broad daylight. He has something like twenty books out, and, having now sampled four from different points in his career, I'm inclined to expect that they're all pretty awesome and pretty different from one another. Yet I'd only heard of him once before I p More...

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Nov 12, 2009

Eugene rated it:

ERASURE was published eight years ago, in 2001, before the J.T. Leroy hoax was outed and before the eerily echoing current debate over the film PRECIOUS. it's hard to discuss the novel without talking about its elaborate plot and book-within-a-book structure. here's PW's gloss:

Thelonius "Monk" Ellison is an erudite, accomplished but seldom-read author who insists on writing obscure literary papers rather than the so-called "ghetto prose" that would make him a comm More...

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 14, 2007

megan rated it:

i love this book. i wish john would give it back to me. it is about a black author who, frustrated that his overintellectual experimental novels get no readers bc they get put in the 'black' sections in bkstores, decides to write a satirical 'ghetto lit' book (which is titled "My Pafology" and later changed to "FUCK") which is taken seriously and becomes a bestseller. really interesting indictment of the publishing industry's marketing practices and a whole lot of other thing

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 31, 2011

Phil rated it:

I would without hesitation stack this book up against any great postmodern work--Coetzee, the magical realists, anyone. The conception of the book is brilliant. The plot centers around Thelonious Ellison, an African-American writer of dense and unreadable prose whose aesthetic includes heavy reliance on retellings of Greek myths. As a joking parody, he writes a novel mimicing the degradingly stereotypical We Lives In Da Ghetto (his literary arch-nemisis), which Ellison publishes under the pseudo More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 15, 2011

Ryandake rated it:

percival everett's works are so interestingly uneven... sometimes genius, sometimes slapstick. i can't really pigeonhole his books at all.

parts of this book are so incredibly moving--the mother's disintegration, the inability of the brothers to talk, the protagonist's frustrations at the assumption that there is one "black literature."

but then he goes and makes caricatures of women who exhibit some sexuality (Linda, in particular) and allows his characters to p More...

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May 04, 2010

E. rated it:

Percival Everett takes on a lot in this far-ranging, contempt-derived satire. His narrator Theolonius Ellison, nicknamed Monk, gives up the unprofitable career of writing intelligent, aesthetically rigorous novels to move home and care for his mother. Around the same time he writes a Precious-style novel in the ghetto patois familiar to fans of 50 Cent. It is a piece of doggerel, purposely bad, lurid, and affirmative of every African-American stereotype. Refusing credit, he has it published unde More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 26, 2010

Stephen rated it:

I really like this novel, it accomplished many things, asked many questions and was a very accessible read.

The main plot, about a frustrated African-American writer who isn't "black" enough for a market he isn't trying to be a part of, is an excellent satire about the perception of race in America; the need to pigeon-hole everything to be able to market it; and also the pack-mania of the book buying public.

But where this book really excels are the passages in wh More...

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Apr 20, 2009

Janet rated it:

Dazzling. An arch, clever, often sad, and very, very funny entertainment satirizing the publishing world and commenting incisively on writerly woes of "not being black enough" and, well, not being read enough. Contains an entire, deliberately bad, sassy and profane novel-within-a-novel that completely changes the reading experience for a while but is well worth the slogging through. (Note: if you just can't slog through "My Pafology", at least read its last page carefully, More...

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Aug 15, 2009

Jason rated it:

There's a novel within a novel that appears towards the tail end of the first 3rd of this book that I must confess I mostly didn't read. Much like Erasure's protagonist, Monk--and he wrote this piece of work--I couldn't bring myself to do it. The language is too ridiculous. The characters too much satire, too much buffoonery, simply too much. That I didn't read it, however, I doubt matters much to the story. The point is that Monk wrote it. Wrote it as a giant middle finger to the world. And, ye More...

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Aug 15, 2009

Mike rated it:

I could've lived without the entire text of "My Pafology" (later retitled "Fuck"), the short novel-within-the-novel. It's interesting, up to a point, but I also felt like: okay, I get it, this is offensively bad and over-the-top.

The other "imbedded" stuff, though, I liked a lot more, like the brief "idea for novel" interludes, or the game show episode, or the little dialogues and jokes, like this one, which made me laugh out loud:

W More...

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Feb 28, 2011

Chris rated it:

So unlike "I Am Not Sidney Poitier" is "Erasure" that I felt punched in the gut fairly early. But it is so compelling that I couldn't put it down, no matter how hard some of this is to read. And I mean "hard to read" in the best possible way.

The brief description of the book sounded like it'd be another comic romp, possibly with some depth and heart--but comic all the same: Thelonious "Monk" Ellison is a college professor whose works of fictio More...

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Jan 31, 2012

Babydoll rated it:

Erasure is an exceptional fictional novel by Percival Everett concerning the literary world and its controversial acquiescence of African American literature. Written with intellectual boldness and sprinkled with random comical satires as well as colorful characters, Everett creates a noteworthy novel within the confines of its pages.

Protagonist Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is an unenthusiastic academic whose career as a writer has been met with numerous rejections from publishers. Mon More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 25, 2010

Cat rated it:

This book is gorgeously written, and it's a searing indictment of the publishing industry and fetishized and stereotyped blackness in popular culture. I loved the way Everett laced miniature plays throughout his text, ironic encounters between famous artists. (Cecille B. DeMille and Richard Wright was perhaps my favorite pairing.) The family relationships are drawn sparely and poignantly; Everett does an amazing job evoking the joint violence and passivity of Alzheimer's and the difficulty of More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 14, 2011

Waven rated it:

Erasure is almost a parody of a parody, a smart and sometimes darkly comedic story of a writer who has trouble coming to terms with what he writes. After several intelligent but obscure publications, main character Thelonius "Monk" Ellison finds himself pressed for money and quickly authors - under a pseudonym - a short novel as a parody of popular fiction. He is unprepared when it becomes more popular than the rest of his books combined, and not as the parody it was intended. Asham More...

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Aug 02, 2009

Elizabeth rated it:

This I was very keen on. A writer is having difficulty getting his most recent book published because his books aren't "black enough," much to his disgust, so he whips up a fake ghetto memoir which immediately becomes a huge sensation. While this is going on, he's also trying to cope with being a caregiver for his Alzheimer's-inflicted mother. The family drama parts were extremely satisfying -- characters who felt like real, believable people with whom you could easily envision yoursel More...

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Jul 19, 2009

Christianne rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

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Nov 13, 2011

Marc rated it:

When I was a few chapters into this novel, I didn't realize how complete and apt the title was going to be. The satire, including the clever and ballsy use of a story within a story, was hard hitting and vast. In fact, I got the impression as I read that there was much more of it that I missed. It was displayed well and I experienced both the laugh out loud moments and the exasperation of the author(s) that the satire was commenting upon. Beyond that, I liked the explorations and complications o More...

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