With Erasure, he has produced a multilayered, tightly written novel that refuses to equivocate. It’s a funhouse of manipulated reflections, lives viewed through screens and lenses. The story winds through cutaways and short stories, pieces of Greek chorus conversations between philosophers and artists, world leaders--all alternate prisms glimpsing family, academia, identity and pop culture ... While much is played for laughs, Erasure is a trenchant examination of the labels and assumptions that the outside affixes on others, and that many, in turn, unquestioningly affix on themselves ... It’s a fluid, unwieldy world Everett chooses to embrace and ultimately reconstruct on a page, one dominated, finally, by complex themes.
The satire – the well-made story – and the equally well-made parody it depends on are only part of Erasure: distractions fly off in all directions ... Erasure is designed to feel like a novel, and Everett uses the whole box of novelistic tricks. The dialogue is disjointed: people are characterised by the questions they choose not to respond to ... Everett’s unfaultable novelistic techniques are performances, but they don’t aim to dazzle. They are modes he speaks in temporarily, like the modes (gangsta, streetwise kid) Monk has tried to speak in, and they take their place among the more spectacular ventriloquising performances scattered through the book.
Everett's subject is serious, but his tone, social observations and stylistic inventiveness reach for the bleakest comedy. Erasure is a sly work, not easily described, though what it's for and what it's against are always clear. The narrative is allusive, thickly ironic and includes different texts, various textures. It is a novel that builds and then surprises ... Monk also says that he is usually put off by stories that have a writer as the main character. But in Erasure he, the post-structuralist black author who isn't funky enough for the market, will tell his story his way. It has two parallel strands: the disintegration of his family and an explosive crisis in his writing life ... Ma Pafology is only one of the texts or voices that give to Erasure an intriguing layered quality. Everett presents swathes of the paper on Barthes that Monk gives to the Nouveau Roman Society, with sample footnotes about hermeneutic codes.
Essentially, the novel asks the question(s): What does it mean to be black, and how black must a black artist act before she is considered authentic and legitimate, a standard-bearer for racial culture, and thus, a 'credit to the race'? ... The question the novel asks us to consider is how any artist of color might manage to hang on to her creative and personal integrity, especially when an entire industry is devoted to maintaining a pathological and sometimes blatantly racist lie about them. What makes Erasure such a great book is the answer it posits, but in the grand scheme of things, as for what that answer actually means, I feign no hypotheses.
With equal measures of sympathy and satire, it craftily addresses the highly charged issue of being 'black enough' in America ... It is only thanks to Everett's well-calibrated and witty handling of this material that Monk manages to think his way through such a sticky situation.
In this new book, Everett, a character himself, gives us a series of encounters with his father in a nursing home, where the old man has gone to go to pieces. As the book moves along, the question of the narrator's identity constantly comes into play — is it the younger Everett who is narrating or is it the father? Or the painter or the physician, characters whom the father seems to have conjured up in a manuscript that the son seems to have appropriated? ... Real, fascinating, important dramas lie buried beneath distracting passages of self-referential rhetoric ... Metafictional asides and intrusions clog the flow of the story and drag down what might have been a fine novel about fathers and sons.
Erasure is more than a decade old, but the depiction of Oprah Winfrey as a clucking, mugging Aunt Mammy still seems breathtakingly illicit—and even extend to the masterpieces of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. Monk, who rejects racial distinctions, is portrayed as the contemporary invisible man, black in the eyes of the white world, not 'black enough' in the black world ... Mr. Everett of course knows that trying to deny racial classification is hopeless; his awareness charges Erasure with both quixotic idealism and mordant resignation.
Its self-consciously cerebral style precludes mass-appeal, but produces intellectual satisfaction ... Erasure is a satire of America's popcorn postmodernism and chat-show culture. Everett's scalpel-like prose can anatomise his subject. Sardonic asides glance at everything from academia and teenage discos to brushing your teeth ... At times pretentious, Everett's degree-zero style is cool, however, to the point of freezing: it is the rustle of the language, rather than any emotional engagement with the characters, that is rewarding.
Desperation outstrips the satire in Everett's latest exercise in narrative wizardry, as a lonely African-American writer faces private torment and instant fame when his parody of ghetto literature is taken as the real deal ... More genuine and tender than much of Everett's previous work, but no less impressive intellectually: a high point in an already substantial literary career.
Everett's latest is an over-the-top masterpiece about an African-American writer who 'overcomes' his intellectual tendency to 'write white' and ends up penning a parody of ghetto fiction that becomes a huge commercial and literary success ... Percival's talent is multifaceted, sparked by a satiric brilliance that could place him alongside Wright and Ellison as he skewers the conventions of racial and political correctness.
Erasure is the kind of book that inhabits its subject completely. When you read the novel, you experience the slippages, fits, and false starts of the psychology of America’s original sin.
What elevates this novel beyond simple satire, though, no matter how vicious and clever, is the burgeoning human heart at its core ... Everett is much more than just a bitter novelist with an ax to grind and a wicked sense of humor. He's also a gifted writer capable of deftly delineating the troubled emotional ground of his protagonist ... Erasure is a book that deserves to be read, and talked about, and argued over, by everybody.
The novel takes a turn when Everett inserts several chapters of My Pafology into the novel. I almost cackled while reading this section as I was on the subway for my morning commutes ... The book is very well-written and moves at a swimming pace. Everett plays with the ideas of the dual identity in Black artists, the myopic view that America has of Black people, and the limitations of our expression as we push towards greater recognition.
