'American Fiction' Could've Been Great

Instead it was mediocre. Read Erasure instead.

In early April¹ I finally got around to watching American Fiction. People kept recommending it to me, telling me I had to see it, and while I was dragging my feet waiting for it to stream (on MGM+ of all places) it won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. The premise was intriguing and based on how much hype was surrounding it, I had high expectations going into it (I also love Jeffrey Wright). I ended up with lots of feelings about the film—so much so that I furiously scribbled in my journal while watching and immediately read Erasure after. Like many book-to-film situations before it, the book is much better, and not just because of Percival Everett’s wit and sharp observations on the page². The film flattens key dynamics that would have taken it from an “elevated” social commentary with a few funny moments to a sharp satire that examines Black class difference, art and its relationship to capitalism, and exploitation. 

The book and film center on Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, a writer who wants so badly to be an individual but unfortunately is Black instead. He believes that his Blackness has been thrust upon him by a society that doesn’t see him for who he is: a genius. Monk is trapped in the psychological purgatory of double consciousness. A waiting room where he exists only in opposition to what is expected of him. A place where he wants to be seen by the very people who made him subhuman to begin with. Monk attempts to wash himself clean of his Blackness by sheer force of his talent, a feat that has been attempted by many greater than he. Spoiler alert: It always fails³. But beyond Monk’s self-obsession is a more salient, urgent conversation: class. It’s the most nuanced terrain available for American Fiction, but the film largely chooses to ignore it. Instead, it is gestured at through visual codes: a maid, a summer house on the Vineyard, a detached mom the children call mother.

The bulk of the film’s class analysis comes from the family’s relationship with their longtime housekeeper, Lorraine, but it’s disappointingly shallow. Lorraine is a textbook mammy figure who has no more agency than the furniture she sweeps and dusts, deriving purpose from serving this family for decades. This portrayal stands in stark contrast to the novel. In Erasure, Monk isn’t shy about his disregard for Lorraine’s inner life or his mother’s cruelty toward her. Where the movie flattens their relationship into one where Monk is somewhat uncomfortable with thinking of her as their family’s employee (she’s family, he insists) the book clearly outlines the tension of an employer trying to lay off his longtime employee. The one time we see a hint of this tension in the film is when Monk attempts to give Lorraine the apron she’s worn for years, assuming she had some kind of choice in her uniform. But then the moment is gone. Fleeting. The refusal to complicate this relationship in the film reinforces a fiction that racial solidarity transcends class, that the Black community is one big, monolithic cookout, where socio-economic status doesn’t affect treatment or attitudes. The choice to soften this part of the source material is a grave one. To portray Monk and Lorraine as being in community or part of one family when they aren’t makes his choice to exploit working class Black people for personal gain seem innocuous when it was not.

Erasure, however, outlines this class difference and the resulting tensions, deftly. Everett starts with the setting. The book is set in 2000s-era Washington DC⁴—a time when the city was 59 percent Black—and Monk’s family lives in a wealthy neighborhood within the district. The Ellison’s belong to the upwardly mobile class of Margo Jefferson’s Negroland and Lawrence Otis Graham’s Our Kind of People, a world of cotillions and Jack and Jill and beach houses in Sag Harbor and Oak Bluffs.  He is very far removed from being working class anything, and even if he has an errant poor auntie or cousin somewhere, it is never mentioned.

Then there’s Monk’s general attitude. He consistently underestimates working class Black people and their intelligence level. This is clear when he visits his sister Lisa, doctor like their father (and his father before that). Monk’s sister works at an abortion clinic in Southeast DC, a historically poor area. Monk thinks this is “brave.” While there, he strikes up a conversation with a woman in the waiting room and is surprised to learn that she has read Their Eyes Were Watching God and Cane. Monk expected her to be “slow and stupid,” and is shocked that she knows who Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer are. This is notable for a few reasons. First, it clearly states his prejudice. Second, despite being aware of Black luminaries Monk doesn’t engage with Black art, save for Aretha Franklin and Charlie Parker. Instead he’s obsessed with Mahler and poststructuralism and dead Greek poets. These interests are evidence that he’s not like “other Black people”, that his race does not define or inform what he finds interesting or valuable. That he too is having a Black experience, even if it doesn’t look like anyone else’s. And while this is unproblematic in theory—Black people can and do like things across a range of cultures—it takes on a different tenor when used to create separation between the self and the other. We also learn that Monk feels alienated in Black spaces, which contributes to his inability to identify or relate to Black people. He’s never quite comfortable around dropped consonants and hand slaps. His solace is in his work: obscure, complex, intentionally opaque, a world where he’s confident that he is better than everyone else and he isn’t measuring his Blackness against anyone else’s. He is mostly frustrated that the world identifies him as Black because when he sees other Black people, he doesn’t see himself.

Then there’s the matter of society writ large and publishing. You don’t need me to tell you that publishing has a race problem. It’s a pernicious one. Black authors are underrepresented, marketed incorrectly, intentionally misunderstood, given bad covers, the list goes on. This is top of mind for Monk, who is very critical of society and very rarely critical of himself. He sees the lack of attention toward his work as a racial issue (which, sort of yes) rather than a result of him writing complicated, obscure texts for highly specific audiences, like people who buy books from university presses. To Monk’s credit, he doesn’t care a lot about popularity but he does value acclaim. He wants to be respected for being the smartest person in the room and sees his peer’s refusal to do this as a result of their racism (absolutely yes). He believes his point is driven home when these same people fawn over the novel We's Lives In Da Ghetto a novel by first-time writer Juanita Mae Jenkins (renamed Sintara Golden in the film and played by Issa Rae). It’s an instant success and Jenkins/Golden becomes a literary darling, something Monk resents. He writes the work off as trite and loses faith in publishing’s ability to interpret and evaluate work by a Black writer that doesn’t reinforce a stereotype (fair point!). In protest, Monk writes My Pafology, a novel that follows a Black man who’s trying to make a way but the system keeps getting him down. He lies and cheats and steals in order to get what he desires, willing to go to any lengths to satisfy his urges. It’s as ridiculous as you think, but it works. Monk is offered a big advance for the novel ($600K to be exact) and then cosplays as a former felon to hide his true identity and also lend him credibility. This piece of the plot is particularly insidious. While Golden wrote a questionable novel as well, she never pretended to have the same lived experience as her characters. Monk on the other hand, was happy to assume a caricatured identity because he figures white people are too dumb to notice. This additional step is crucial, because it makes clear that Monk is just as willing to exploit the stereotype of the kinds of Black folks he has zero connection with as the industry he’s satirizing if money and access is on the line.

The thing is, Monk could’ve chosen to pass as white and write under a pen name to prove a point. But his only instinct—in both the book and film–is to parody working class Black people. Monk isn’t lifting these stories from a family member or someone he knows. He isn’t airing out family business. The one working-class Black person he has a connection to is his employee (and he’s trying to fire her!). He’s producing a version of Blackness he can’t be sure exists. An amalgamation of what he believes white people think Black people are up to. But perhaps Monk believes this is what they get up to too? He relies on this etching in the same way white people do, because he has no one to tell him different. It’s a minstrel show with a Black puppet master, and when it becomes successful with both white and Black audiences, he is disturbed that Black audiences aren’t in on the bit.

My favorite scene in the movie comes near the end, when Monk and Sintara finally meet face to face. In the book, the two exist in the same orbit but never cross paths, while in the film Monk and Sintara are on the judges panel of a major literary prize. They eventually meet in a conference room, where they trade intellectually lazy jabs over sad lunches (she calls his work pandering, he says hers is Black trauma porn) and they lightly interrogate the ethicality of performing legibility for white audiences. They say anything revelatory or productive, but I was struck by the book Issa is reading: White Negroes by Lauren Michele Jackson. The book, which became required reading during the “racial reckoning of 2020” is about cultural appropriation and exploiting Black culture for capital gain. This moment frames the entire film for what it is: two Black people with access and opportunity exploiting the image of poorer, working class Black folks for profit. It’s self-conscious in a way I wish the film was throughout, allowing the characters (and Black viewers) to confront their own relationship to cultural exploitation rather than being a stage for “good” white people to see themselves as separate and apart from their caricatured counterparts. Instead of teasing out this irony the movie spends lots of time justifying this performance and making the fatalistic point that capital will always emerge victorious. Blackness is merely a commodity, one that even Black people can tap into and, well I’ll be damned, I guess that’s progress. 

If anything, Erasure and American Fiction are about the danger of trading identity for capital, pandering or not. It is a warning for the Black petite bourgeoisie, a class made up of entrepreneurs and writers and thinkers and artists and creatives that trade in cultural capital more often than cash, to be mindful of what we give away in exchange for financial security and access. A seat at the table is meaningless if its sole function is to advance one’s personal agenda. That seat becomes dangerous when it hinges on translating our culture into a palatable package, and we become dangerous when we participate in that translation for the purpose of class migration and legibility. In other words, talk about what you know about, and even then, keep some shit to yourself. For us.

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Syllabus

Additional reading. These are books and articles that contributed to my thinking around this and help provide context. Anything I haven’t read in full will be asterisked!

• Negroland by Margo Jefferson

• Our Kind of People by Lawrence Otis Graham

• Training School for Negro Girls by Camille Acker (specifically the story Mambo Sauce)

• Black Marxism* by Cedric J Robinson - Feels relevant, idk!

• How Oscar-buzzy ‘American Fiction’ defangs Percival Everett’s scathing novel ‘Erasure’ - A great article on how the movie was poorly adapted and didn’t feel nuanced or in line with the times

• Colour bind - A review of Erasure when it came out by Darryl Pinckney, a playwright who wrote Black Deutschland (which Bryan Washington mentioned in the interview I did with him!).

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Sidebar

• Stylistically, Erasure was so fun! It shared some format similarities with Martyr! and now I want to email Kaveh Akbar and ask if Everett had any influence on his novel.

• So much of American Fiction gave Boondocks for white people, I’m glad I didn’t see it in theaters.

• I liked the way the film plays with public/private. Monk is navigating a lot of familial struggle while trying to navigate his career as an artist and I think they pulled off this duality.

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1. I know I’m late to reviewing this, forgive me! I sat on this essay for six months because, Virgo melodrama.

2. Reading Erasure gave me the worst book hangover. I haven’t read anything as good since.

3. Ta-Nehisi Coates explains this phenomenon in his essay for The Atlantic,  I’m Not Black I’m Kanye where he illuminates Ye’s desire for exceptionalism, juxtaposing it with Michael Jackson and his navigation through race.

4. I’m resentful that they set the film in the Northeast! We don’t have enough films set in the DMV as-is. Like why take that away from us?!