American Fiction is a trick. It sits, grinning, when you open the book and find it containing everything it is supposed to cover and yet, seems to be a misfit. You grimace, it grins.
But you don’t mind. Because really, you would want it to wear the face of happy despite its struggles, right? It makes you bloat less with guilt, good enough to slip into your evening dress of class and slip into those parties in high hotels and shiny conferences. But what is behind that grin, and by extension, behind your grimace?
The movie, based on the book ‘Erasure‘ by Percival Everett, is an absolute cracker. Monk, a Black author in America, with an oeuvre of intellectual novels, is struggling to find commercial success since his books aren’t ‘Black’ enough. His reluctance to deploy the easy tropes of drug abuse, violence, murder, forced pregnancies, prison tenors and the likes leaves him in a corner no one gives a second glance towards.
As he witnesses, in disdain, another new African-American Black voice ascent to become the literary critics’ darling with her debut novel that doesn’t entirely leave the coast of age-old prejudices towards the Black community, he launches a counter-attack by penning a satire under a pseudo name, Leigh, and suffuses the book with bizarre elements that hover around stereotypes inflicted on Black people, even naming it, well, ‘Fuck’. And it becomes a runaway hit! New York Best Seller, Movie Rights, Literary Awards – everything starts coming Monk’s, err, I mean, Leigh’s way. What’s next?
The love for the movie doesn’t just come from the fact that it addresses a serious, very relevant, issue of society’s tendency to define certain sections of people with biased lenses that have never been cleared of its historical rust, but also from the structure it erects, making the entire expedition, a heady rush. If you thought the climax shall give a sombre statement or a rousing accusation, you are wrong. The mastery of its maker comes from this very stroke of ingenuity – they make it, a book within a book (or a movie within a movie)! So, the ending becomes a wholly independent vehicle of sarcasm, potent with its many endings – whether Monk shall confess and fall from the pedestal he has just recently climbed onto? Or he shall surrender to the authorities under the charge of forgery and impersonation? Or he shall simply run away, disappearing into someone’s arm who is willing to forgive his treachery? Or he shall shun everything to return to his mother whose failing memory is erasing his name by every passing day?
Director Cord Jefferson holds the dark comedy in enviable balance, not eulogizing one and belittling the other, not erasing one and erecting the other. And in Jeffrey Wright, he finds his perfect ally. They walk, they laugh, they stumble, they question, they joke, they regret, they pause but they never lose their way.
I would definitely like to read what Thelonius Monk writes next.
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