Dint, Ax, Fo, Screet

Being a fiction writer can be an anxiety-riddled experience. Faced with an ominously blank computer screen or sheet of paper, writers worry whether their stories will be good enough, daring enough or will sell enough. Add to those concerns one that is peculiar to African American writers: Will it be black enough?

Writers and others outside this small fraternity might wonder what on earth that means. And why it should matter? Yet the question--and its implications for what black writers write and what publishers print--is always present for those who feel the answer hovering just out of reach, like the brass ring at a merry-go-round, with a six-figure advance check attached.

It is a question that haunts the dreams and reality of Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, protagonist of Percival Everett’s satiric novel, “Erasure.” Monk is a professor at an unnamed Southern California university and the youngest son of an emotionally distant Washington, D.C., family. He delivers ponderously hilarious lectures on obscure texts and writes dense novels with heavy historical and literary allusions that, editors agree, are incongruent with his physical appearance as a dark brown-skinned, curly haired, broad-nosed black man. But what “should” a man like Monk write?

Should he aspire to the heights (or depths) of Juanita Mae Jenkins’ “runaway bestseller,” “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto,” a story of a 15-year-old, pregnant with her third child, who lives with her drug-addicted mother and basketball-playing brother? Monk is righteously indignant about Jenkins’ debut novel and its success and is incensed when he reads accolades from a major periodical praising the novel’s “haunting verisimilitude.”

“Da Ghetto’s” $500,000 sale of paperback rights and a $3-million movie deal only rub salt into Monk’s writerly wounds. And when he learns the novel was written by an Oberlin College dropout who claims her inspiration came from spending a few days with relatives in Harlem when she was 12, Monk’s rage is complete.

But what is Monk to do? His latest novel has racked up its 17th rejection, with his agent delivering the blunt “not black enough” assessment of the chorus of rejecting editors. A tragedy has befallen his family back home, which forces Monk into the role of principal caregiver for his mother who has Alzheimer’s. An answer comes as he sits in his deceased father’s study: “I remembered passages of ‘Native Son’ and ‘The Color Purple’ and ‘Amos and Andy’ ... my hands began to shake, the world opening up around me ... people in the street shouting dint, ax, fo, screet and fahvre! and I was screaming inside, complaining that I didn’t sound like that, that my mother didn’t sound like that, that my father didn’t sound like that ... [but] I put a page in my father’s typewriter. I wrote this novel, a book on which I knew I could never put my name.”

The book is “My Pafology” (later retitled an expletive), written under the pen name Stagg R. Leigh, the moniker itself a riff on a black trickster folk hero. Reprinted in its entirety in “Erasure,” “My Pafology,” which concerns a disaffected young man who fathers four children by four women, is a wicked sendup of every ghetto-focused “I’se been ‘buked and I’se been scorned” novel praised in the press as powerful or naturalistic, replete with allusions to Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” among others.

Monk’s-Stagg’s novel wows an editor at Random House, who calls it “true to life” and promptly outbids the competitors with a $600,000 advance. Parallels to the real Random House’s 1996 purchase of “Push,” a similarly controversial novel by the poet Sapphire, abound. Yet the tale of “My Pafology” and its success are less about an actual occurrence than Everett’s blistering indictment of an industry which can be pathologically obsessed with promulgating a narrow view of African American life.

Successful on the level of black comedy, “Erasure” is also possessed of a moral ambiguity and increasingly surreal settings that recall Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” But, unlike Ellison, Everett takes numerous detours in his narrative, presented in the form of Monk’s diary, which, while fascinating, undercut the narrative thrust. But in the hands of Everett, a professor of literature at USC and author of more than a dozen well-regarded but under-appreciated novels, one is left to wonder: Is it writerly excess, or is “Erasure” a satire within a satire, challenging the reader to engage with a dense, allusion-laden, richly provocative novel about writing novels designed to provoke our baser instincts? “I have brought to a head the battle between language and reality,” a character asserts early in the novel. So, too, has Percival Everett, in a novel (published, not surprisingly, by a university press) that skewers the publishing hierarchy in amusing and astonishing ways.