BookBrowse Reviews Erasure by Percival Everett

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A prismatic modern classic marked by boundless playfulness, deceptive simplicity, and Everett's trademark wit.

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Erasure by Percival Everett, first published in 2001, has reached great heights with its author's escalating fame and the 2023 film adaptation American Fiction. But it retains within the confines of its pages an odd smallness. Like much of Everett's work, it feels blunt yet malleable, static but approachable from multiple perspectives, like a sculpture meant to create optical illusions that depend on your particular distance from and orientation to it.

Protagonist Thelonious "Monk" Ellison is a middle-aged professor and writer of relatively obscure intellectual fiction. A significant part of the book centers on Monk's frustration with how he is limited as a Black author. As he struggles with sales, he witnesses others being rewarded with a place in a narrow field of literary success by appealing to white people's desire for representations of Black stereotypes, namely Juanita Mae Jenkins, made famous by her bestseller We's Lives In Da Ghetto. In response, he crafts his own "ghetto" novel that he supposedly intends to be a parody of such books (the full text of which is included within Everett's novel), first called My Pafology—later, Monk insists, under cover of the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, that the title be changed to Fuck. It follows a young man named Van Go Jenkins who turns to a life of crime. Surprisingly for Monk, the book is taken seriously by a publisher and picked up with a hefty advance.

In a simpler novel, the driving force behind Monk's writing of My Pafology/Fuck might only be Jenkins' book. But in the story-outside-the-story, that is, Monk's story, the inciting incident that seems to spur the plot into action is the murder of his sister Lisa, a doctor shot at her clinic serving a poor section of DC, probably by an anti-abortion extremist. Along with the family housekeeper, Lorraine, Lisa has until now taken primary responsibility for the care of her and Monk's mother, who is developing signs of dementia. Their father is long gone, having died by suicide years earlier. Their brother Bill has made a lucrative living as a plastic surgeon, but, having recently admitted to his wife that he is gay, he is in the process of losing nearly everything to her and their children in the separation, and becoming an emotional wreck. All of this leaves Monk to deal with the logistics and finances of their mother's situation, which he means to mitigate with his parody-turned-anticipated-bestseller.

Erasure is many different things. It is narratively challenging—including not just the internal novel but additional snippets of Monk's writing, bursts of Latin and French, and other textual tidbits not immediately obvious in meaning—yet still relatively straightforward, accessible enough to enjoy from beginning to end without picking apart too much. That is, if you choose not to dwell on Monk's notes and elaborations, and thereby miss out on the pleasure of getting lost in a Joycean thicket. It is a linear and entertaining, if dramatic and fever-dreamish, series of events. Its relationship to real-world culture has shifted, somewhat, since first publication. As Everett commented in 2024, the landscape of American publishing has changed in the ensuing years, though the simplified thinking around race that created the conditions featured in Erasure remains. Perhaps partly because of this, it doesn't seem outdated, but another reason for its ongoing relevance is its seemingly endless layers.

One of these is the significant presence of guns, which may not appear significant at first glance because this is a basic reality of America that hasn't shifted much, if at all, since Erasure's release. In Monk's novel, Van is set on obtaining a gun, with which he intends to rob the store of a Korean man he has a grudge against. Monk's father, a veteran of the Korean War, shot himself, and Monk will later find that he was keeping a secret related to his time in the military. One of the events that pushes Monk to finally have his mother committed to a care facility is a nerve-wracking incident in which she aims a loaded gun at him. And of course, Lisa is killed by gunfire in her clinic. A reader can analyze Monk's conscious or subconscious reasons for integrating firearms and certain parallels into his fictional narrative the way he does, to consider what his choices say about the American military's overseas reach and its role in immigration, who is incentivized to join the military, America's cultural weaponization of East Asian immigrants against Black people, and so on. One can also consider the irony that alongside Van's participation in gun violence within his impoverished world, Monk, an educated man from a well-off family who seems to make no habit of being around guns, has been unable to avoid a brush with at least the strong possibility of every type of firearm tragedy: accident, suicide, murder.

But more notable than any of this is that we don't see Monk, a highly analytical thinker, comment on these elements or ponder how he may have put his own experience into his book. What he does dwell on is how the hype around the novel threatens his artistic self. As he attempts to navigate his new universe, appearing in various forms as Stagg Leigh—behind a screen on a talk show, in dark glasses at a meeting about movie rights—he operates as a split personality, and considers how to resolve this. The answer seems obvious. As his agent Yul remarks, his other books will probably sell better once he comes out as the author of this one. But Monk tiptoes around this inevitability like it's an impossibility.

One of Erasure's textual interludes consists of a dialogue between the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Willem de Kooning, based on real events. Rauschenberg offers to fix de Kooning's roof in exchange for a drawing, saying that it doesn't matter what it's of because he intends to erase it. Weeks later, Rauschenberg informs de Kooning that he has erased the drawing, taken credit for this "Erased Drawing" himself, and sold the "erasing."

What is the erasing in Erasure? Stagg Leigh's novel and its hype blotting out the multiplicity of Black literature and existence? The publishing industry and mainstream white readership doing the same and patting themselves on the back for it? Monk erasing himself as a writer with the persona of Stagg Leigh? Or is Everett just messing with us by hinting at there being any one particular parallel to this cute philosophical vignette? The book, with what it leaves out, doesn't allow any of these interpretations to be the only story. With all that's packed into Erasure—its madcap pace, its series of urgent situations, its literary doodlings—it's easy to be distracted, to not notice what's missing. For instance, despite being inside Monk's head, we know so little of his conscious intentions, what he was thinking as he wrote his novel. And what was he thinking and feeling following the death of his sister, a death barely remarked upon, a death inevitably bound up in politics and race but that can finally be assigned no meaning? A better question might be, who would want to think or feel anything about that? To have thoughts and feelings about an event whose reasons or causes do nothing to mitigate its stark, undeniable result, a devastating, violent event whose full impact on Monk we never see—except, of course, in how it seems part of all we do see.

This review first ran in the July 16, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.