A black novelist working in academia and struggling to get his next book published because it isn’t “black enough” suddenly becomes the primary caregiver of his ailing and elderly mother. Our main character Monk (Jeffrey Wright, in his best performance yet) is from a highly educated and dysfunctional, upper middle-class family from Boston – the type of insular and privileged yet troubled upper middle-class white family white novelists have been writing about for generations. This family just happens to be black. Black novelists, meanwhile, are too often expected to only write about black suffering – the ghetto and slavery and violence and oppression. And the primary readers of their poverty-focused literature are the same white people looking to appease their own guilt to feel better about their own privilege by reading about something extreme that feels “real.” Reality and people, of course, are usually far more complex than the caricatures of fiction.
Frustrated, tired, and broke, Monk cooks up a wild idea to write a grotesque parody of the celebrated black poverty novel (think of Precious from the novel Push by Sapphire) as a joke. His initially confused agent (an excellent John Ortiz) still sends it out, and suddenly there’s a high six-figure offer from a major publisher over-eager to bring this “important and necessary” book to the masses. Monk takes on a fake persona as a fugitive from the streets to further sell it. Hollywood instantly offers a movie deal. Hypocrisy, hilarity and pathos ensue.
At one point, Monk’s agent tries to explain the market for literature using Johnnie Walker’s color-based labels as a metaphor. Monk prefers to write refined literature that’s like Johnnie Walker’s celebrated and expensive blue label, and while sometimes the elites might enjoy that, more often than not, both the elites and masses just want to get drunk off the cheap red label stuff. Monk’s new book, that started as a joke, is the cheap stuff. So why not enjoy the riches it will bring and alternate between producing all labels?
Cord Jefferson’s adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel Erasure (which was birthed from the same time period as Spike Lee’s similarly themed film Bamboozled) is like a bottle of Johnnie Walker blue label. Satire, with its layers upon layers of observation and deconstruction, is the hardest genre to pull off successfully. Armed with an amazing ensemble cast (outside of Wright, Erika Alexander as Monk’s new love interest and Sterling K. Brown as his partially estranged brother stand out), and his own nuanced script where everything from the character names to the settings take on double and sometimes triple meaning, Jefferson’s directorially debut is of the most refined kind. The drama is affecting. The jokes are razor sharp. The satire is spot on.
Some might feel alienated by the meta-narrative style of the multiple endings, but it solidifies American Fiction’s stature as Satire with a capital S and Art with a capital A. It’s also immensely entertaining, allows you to care for the characters and see their humanity even when they are at their worst, and makes you think. Not surprisingly, the elites of Hollywood and award circuits have been eating it up, probably not even realizing the joke is on them. But none could argue it’s not deserving. It offers no easy answers to the questions it raises, even though everyone will probably fall over themselves trying to convince each other they understood the point of it all.
The Schleicher Spin 