Erasure: now a major motion picture 'American Fiction'

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In need of distraction from old memories, new responsibilities, and his professional stagnation, Monk composes, in a heat of inspiration and energy, a fierce parody of the sort of exploitative, ghetto wanna-be lit represented by We's Lives in Da Ghetto. The struggles of a gay black brother, an aloof father that shows him unabashed favoritism and a mother who is approaching dementia are contrasted against the protagonists own self recrimination and doubt.

The name seems a bit silly and artificial at first, but develops layers and layers of meaning as the book proceeds.however, forces both within and without this novel refuse to cooperate, assigning the black identity only to a particular (romanticized and fetishized) “inner-city,” “gritty,” and “ghetto” experience.

In Erasure, Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, the lone artist in a high-achieving African American family — his brother and sister are doctors following in their father and grandfather's footsteps – is facing professional setbacks just when his family needs him to step up.

Monk is an African-American academic and struggling author whose agent tells him his books won’t sell because they're not "black enough. In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off a novel meant to be an indictment of Juanita Mae Jenkins’s bestseller. Funny, moving, and—as with the seven other Percival Everett books I've read—unexpected and unpredictable, the paperback of Erasure is printed in a tiny font, and I was glad because I didn't want it to end. The novel has other narrative styles within the larger narrative frame, including an academic paper, personal letters, story ideas, and imagined dialogue between fictionalized historical characters.