Book Chat with Bobby: Erasure by Percival Everett

We deep dive the 2001 novel behind American Fiction

Welcome to the 13th episode of Book Chat! It’s an unlucky number for Loki and Jesus, but it feels like a positive one in the tiny world of this podcast. Regular listeners will know the drill: Bobby and I discuss one book per episode (it used to be two but we then got a life), with the only rule being that the book in question has to be more than 2 years old.

Last episode we talked about The Talented Mr Ripley, the 1955 novel by Patricia Highsmith - I still can’t decide if I think it inspired Saltburn, as one listener suggested - and today, we are discussing Erasure, the 2001 novel by Percival Everett.

Erasure is a sly, playful satire on the shortcomings of book publishing in the early 00s and a tender exploration of a family in crisis. Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison is a writer of unreadable literary fiction who, in a pique of fury after being asked yet again by his agent to “write something Black”, pens a deliberately trashy piece of ‘street lit’ under a pseudonym. He titles this book My Pafology but later changes it - simply to agitate his publishers - to Fuck.