Erasure by Percival Everett

Erasure doesn’t ask for your polite opinions. It dares you to notice what you reward, what you excuse, and what you call “authentic” when a book is marketed as the real thing. We talk through Percival Everett’s blistering literary satire and why it lands like a joke you laugh at first, then replay in your head when the discomfort kicks in.

We start with Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, an Ivy-educated novelist and professor whose work gets ignored because it won’t perform the version of Blackness the publishing industry knows how to sell. Then the fuse catches: Monk writes a stereotype-stuffed parody as a pure act of spite, only to watch it become a bestseller with massive money attached. That twist lets us examine reader bias, cultural representation, and the economics of storytelling without hiding behind easy villains. The system matters, but so does the audience.

From there we get into Everett’s craft and structure, including the journal-like frame, stories inside stories, and the way philosophical conversations about art and literature deepen the satire. We also connect Erasure to Everett’s James and the idea of language as power, especially how dialect and narrative control can erase real voices in plain sight. And we don’t skip the personal erasures: Alzheimer’s and memory, family secrets, sexuality, grief, and the final award-scene irony that makes identity feel like a costume you can’t take off.

If you like book discussions that treat literary fiction as a live wire, listen through and tell us where you felt called out. Subscribe, share the show with a reader who loves sharp satire, and leave a review so more people find the conversation.

Transcript

A Satire That Targets Us

SPEAKER_00 0:50

Welcome back. There are books that ask polite questions. And then there are books that kick the door in and dare you to answer honestly. Erasure by Percival Everett is not here to comfort you. It's here to expose you, to peel back the layers of the literary world, the publishing industry, and even our own reading biases. Because when Monk Ellison sits down to write a novel that plays into every stereotype he claims to despise and watches it become a massive success, we're forced into an uncomfortable realization. The problem isn't just the system, it's the audience. It's us. This is a novel about performance, about who gets to tell which stories, and what happens when authenticity becomes something you can manufacture, package, and sell? It's satire with teeth, it's humor that cuts so deep you don't realize you're bleeding until after you've laughed. And here's where the fire starts to spread. Is Everett exposing a broken system or participating in it? Is satire powerful enough to dismantle harmful narratives, or does it risk reinforcing them? And maybe most dangerously, do we reward the very stereotypes we claim to reject? Because erasure doesn't just critique the publishing world, it interrogates identity, authorship, race, and the economics of storytelling. It forces us to sit in the discomfort of contradiction, where truth and performance blur, where outrage and consumption coexist. So tonight, we're not just reading Erasure, we're stepping into the flames it lights and asking whether we're willing to get burned by the answers. All right, Liz, I'm sure glad that this time the onus to summarize this book falls on you. Go for it.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

Well, this is a difficult book to summarize, but I'm gonna go at it from this perspective. So it follows our main character, Thelonius Monk Ellison. He's a highly educated novelist and professor. He is very frustrated with the literary world around him, with his work life, with his life as a novelist and a writer, because of the expectations that are put on him as a black man, the expectations of what he should be writing as a black man and how he should be writing as a black man. Despite his intelligence, his craft in writing, he struggles to gain recognition because his work does not fit the narrow expectations of the publishers and the audience about the stereotypes and what his writing should be talking about, the raw black experience that they expect to hear. Instead, Monk is writing about things like the Persians and the ancient Greeks and different stories that he wants to tell based on the things he studied because he is this intellectual human being. So there's that struggle. And as we go on in the novel, he's definitely getting a little angrier and angrier with the frustrations he has in the literary world and with the prejudices and the stereotypes and just the hypocrisy that goes on that he faces on a daily basis. Additionally, he's just a human being struggling with family issues. His father is deceased. He's got an aging mother who is struggling with some of the maladies that age brings. He's got two older siblings who have struggles and they have interpersonal struggles and trauma between one another, and he's dealing with those things that are going on. He does not have a significant other, and there are some reasons for that. And we see some struggles in his life about developing relationships in the midst of the anger and the professional frustrations he's having. And then at a point in the novel, he decides to make an incredibly ironic choice out of frustration and anger that kind of drives us through the rest of the book. I think that's probably the best way that I can get us into a summary without spoiling the rest. Does that work?

SPEAKER_00 4:51

That works for me.

Why Monk Feels So Real

SPEAKER_01 4:51

Okay, so I'm gonna leave it there, but it is a beautifully written work. This is, of course, from the author who wrote James, which we reviewed in an earlier episode. And when I read this book, Erasure, I just fell in love with it. This is now my favorite book that Percival Everett has written, and I'm just so excited to talk about it. So we're gonna dive right into the copile part of this episode. So talking about characters, I love Monk. What do you think?

SPEAKER_00 5:19

I love Monk too. And I think he is the strongest character in the book. He is very complex. He's the most complex of all the characters, and we're inside his head, and the way that he feels conflicted about the world and his decisions and the guilt and different priorities, like needing money, but also not wanting to live life as a sellout and all the things that he goes through. I really like I was fascinated by his journey, his intelligence, his creativity. I love the fact that Percival Everett has him constantly coming up with these really interesting sounding short story ideas, and he just throws them in there. And I'm like, I I would read that. I would like to do that.

SPEAKER_01 6:00

I'm going with that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:01

But they don't meet the expectations of his audience. Or maybe I would say the white publishers and the broader white audience that they're going to try to appeal to of a black writer's novel or book or whatever they. So that's the struggle that he has. And I thought that beyond that, it was interesting to get a brief glimpse of his sister and also the very slow and sad deterioration of his mother throughout. Otherwise, most of the other characters in it are very secondary. And very, very shallow, of course, because here they are. They're just eating up all this raw black experience. And I, you know, they're ridiculous human beings.

SPEAKER_01 6:41

They become deplorable in a lot of ways, and you see them through his eyes, and you feel the same frustration that he does with the vapid kind of stereotypical racist deplorability of a lot of their perspectives. We also have his brother that we get to know to a certain extent, but we really are living in Monk's head, and that's where we get all of our experience. And I absolutely come to love him as a human and feel like I can talk to him and understand him. And I just want to sit down in a room with him and have a conversation. Although I have a feeling it would be frustrating because he's so fed up with human beings that he probably wouldn't want to talk to me very much. But still, I like him very much as a character.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

I do too. And I will also say this I don't see him as a perfect person. No, not or completely right in his opinions.

SPEAKER_01 7:38

Right.

SPEAKER_00 7:39

Because although he has this strong sense of a false portrayal of the black experience, he also really only has a strong sense of his own experience.

SPEAKER_01 7:48

Right.

SPEAKER_00 7:49

And it all the other things are foreign to him, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're all wrong. They're all wrong. He's just insulted by the fact that he feels like it is the prevailing idea of black people within the white narrative. And I'm with him there.

Setting Mood And Prose Craft

SPEAKER_01 8:00

Right. I agree. So the atmosphere that's set up, one of the other things I love about the way Percival Everett writes is that I really do feel he's got a beautiful sense of realism and a beautiful sense of painting pictures that really puts me in the placement of every situation that Monk is in. I feel everything from the brownstone building to Washington, D.C. as a location, to the beach house, to the studio with the talk show host that's just annoying as all get out, to the interior of his novel. I feel all of the atmospheres he sets up, and they're distinctly different. And the tone changes and the mood changes. And I feel like that's just woven beautifully, and that's going to work us right into his writing style in a second. But the atmosphere is just very uniquely created and smoothly transitioned one atmosphere to the next.

SPEAKER_00 8:58

Percival Everett is a brilliant writer.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

Brilliant.

SPEAKER_00 9:02

His prose are amazing, but also his way he crafts the narrative and inserts these conversations between different artists and philosophers about whatever the subject of the book is about. In erasure, it's about art and literature. And so he has all these famous artists and these literary geniuses.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

He breaks into these random philosophical discussions between artists and historical figures. And you get this sense of the fact that as Percival Everett is writing, he is writing the way Monk writes with these incredible intellectual moments where he reveals his vast knowledge of history and culture and art. And he infuses that throughout his novel. And you have to stop and you have to go, okay, where are we now? But it is really beautiful. It's amazing how you pop in and out of those moments.

SPEAKER_00 9:54

And it's his style. He does it in James as well, except in this case, the philosophers are talking about their views on slavery and race.

SPEAKER_01 10:01

And then the other thing about writing style in this one is that of course we get a book within a book. We get stories within stories. And we won't go too far into that, but there is definitely this moment in the text where suddenly Monk starts writing another book in the middle of Everett's book. And we get chapters where we are in a whole different story. And that is really fascinating. When I was listening and reading at the same time in my enhanced reading experience, my husband walked in and he's like, What on earth are you listening to? And I'm like, Okay, wait, for the record, the character in the story is now writing another book. This is not the original book I was listening to, because it suddenly takes this dramatic turn. But it's all so well done that you just have to roll with it and take it all in as he's going through the process. So the writing style is just truly, truly phenomenal. And that plays into the plot. It makes the plot so dynamic and so sophisticated.

SPEAKER_00 11:05

And in the midst of that, it's not just that situation. He's dealing with so many different things. He's dealing with discoveries about secrets in his family that he didn't know, his mother's slow relationship problems with his siblings and everybody, pretty much.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

Right. And so all of this is woven together. So many plots at one time that are beautifully intermingled. And then at the same time, all those moments with the philosophers and the historical figures and all the things that are happening. I mean, and it all happens smoothly and it all fits together and it all rises and falls and just develops this beautiful, complex story. And so the plot is just wonderful. And the intrigue? Absolutely. The intrigue is building the entire time because of the horrible situation he's created for himself, as far as the literary world is concerned, which we will not spoil for you yet. So that situation is definitely building the intrigue. Every digression into the philosophers and the historical figures kind of builds intrigue. The family situation.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

And logically, people don't really act logically entirely in this book because I think this whole world is sort of satirical in a way.

SPEAKER_01 12:23

Right. But it's still logical as far as human beings are.

SPEAKER_00 12:27

But they're emotional extremes. Everybody's kind of dealing with some kind of emotional extreme. People carry their pain really evidently, I think, in this book.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

I think so too.

Plot Intrigue Without Spoilers

SPEAKER_00 12:35

And so uh they're emotionally irrational at times. Right. But there's a reason for that because he's touching on various ways in which we deal with erasure of identity, of sexuality, of masculinity, our memories, everything. Right. And so he uses his own kind of logic to touch on all those issues.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

Correct. And I think that really does work. But it just brings to the surface the things that we tend to hide underneath. And I think in that, in that way, the logic is there, but in an unnatural way in that we tend to hide those things under the surface.

SPEAKER_00 13:11

This book was thoroughly enjoyable.

Spoiler Zone Begins

Lit On Fire Merch Break

SPEAKER_01 13:13

Oh, yeah. I enjoyed it from beginning to end. I mean, it was painful in some places, to be sure, but there is humor there. He has a wonderful way of breaking up the trauma, the tragedy with a sense of humor, with that comic relief, with his inner dialogue that really takes you through that entire experience in a very enjoyable way, even though when you sit with it afterwards, you realize you've been profoundly impacted by the story. So that's our copile, and now we get to transition to the part where we really get to hit you with all the spoilers. Okay, quick pause. Because if you're still listening, you clearly have excellent taste or questionable judgment. Either way, we've got something for you.

SPEAKER_00 14:16

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SPEAKER_01 14:22

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SPEAKER_00 14:30

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SPEAKER_01 14:35

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SPEAKER_00 14:50

So Liz and I recently had the privilege of going to see Percival Everett speak at the University of South Carolina and then do a short QA afterwards. And he was primarily speaking about his newest novel, James. And we learned some fascinating things about the research that he did, and that led to the reasons why he made certain changes to the story of Huckleberry Finn and to the direction that James went and how things progressed. And I thought that was really, really interesting. So I want to address a couple of them here because, in some way, James and Erasure both deal with the same issue, which is how we manipulate language to manipulate expectations or to maneuver within a group of people that we might not be able to maneuver in within without sort of learning the lingo. And so both these books kind of deal with language as a means to power or to either increase or diminish your power within society.

SPEAKER_01 15:45

Right.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

One of the fascinating things about James is that we learn early on that James and the other slaves are actually quite intelligent, particularly James. He's well read and he sort of teaches philosophy and poetry and things like that to his fellow slaves. But whenever they're in the company of their white slave owners, or even Huck, they change to this slave dialect. And at the time when we were looking into that, there wasn't really any solid historical evidence that that occurred specifically. But Percival Everett brought up a really fascinating bit of research that he did. He went to the Library of Congress and he found these recordings of slaves being interviewed and talking about their experience. In the interview, they spoke just like James does around his fellow slaves, or as Percival Everett speaks and how I speak. They just, you know, they're just talking. But then these interviews were also transcribed. And he discovered that when he looked at the transcripts, the transcribers had changed the dialect to sound as though the interviews were done in traditional slave speech. And he had completely changed it to that kind of dialect that James switches to when he's in front of the slave owners. And so that bit of evidence that there is sort of this false narrative that's being controlled by groups of people who want you to perceive black people a certain way is why he used that as a means for James to sort of meet the expectations of the slave owners, diminish his presence, sort of erase himself in some way. The flip side of that is an erasure, in which by relying upon racial expectation stereotypes, the real diversity of the black community is kind of erased.

SPEAKER_01 17:31

Right. And that's why reading Erasure was so important. And I have to say that Percival Everett does something here with James that I think was so much more apparent after I read Erasure. And I'm going to say something here that is going to be wildly unpopular in some ways with people because I feel like a whole new generation of people, and maybe just a whole bunch of white people, have suddenly become huge fans of Percival Everett. And we are new to this Percival Everett bandwagon because we've all read James. I think Percival Everett did something with James to bring a bunch of white people in because he referenced something that we're all familiar with: the adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It's something we learned in school. It's something, you know, Mark Twain is a famous white American writer, and he took something that was very familiar with us. And while he subverted the image of Jim in Huckleberry Finn, he still played on something that was familiar.

SPEAKER_00 18:34

Twain watered down the true brutality of slavery. Right. And turned it into a white savior narrative.

SPEAKER_01 18:40

Yes, that's what Mark Twain did. And then Percival Everett takes that and he flips the script and he shows it in a more honest way. And of course, he shows James to be this intelligent man that had to put on this act for his white captors. But he draws the white reader in this way. And I feel like that says something about us. I got drawn in to read James. I'd never heard of Percival Everett before. I have to be completely honest about that. But then I didn't stop there. I wanted to read Erasure. David Hutcheson, the owner of the book Tavern, said, You guys really need to read Erasure. I think it will show you something about this novel. And we did, and it really does. And I have to tell you, like, I wasn't overly thrilled with James. I liked it, but I was like, you know, I don't know. I don't know how I feel about it 100%. He's a good writer, but eh, you know, it's good.

SPEAKER_00 19:32

But Erasure is so much better.

SPEAKER_01 19:34

Erasure is better.

SPEAKER_00 19:35

And I'm willing to bet that if we read his entire body of works, that James would be at the bottom for me.

SPEAKER_01 19:41

Right. And so I guess what I'm trying to say is that he wrote a book in James that got a heck of a lot of attention because we were comfortable with it, because it was a bridge into something that we knew. But reading the rest of his work, that's where the gold is. And maybe we wouldn't have normally picked it up because it's got all this other stuff in it. And maybe it seemed uninteresting at some point. But Nerasure is something so far and above, I just can't quite put it, I can't quite put into words how much I enjoyed this book. But I feel like we have to examine our own biases as readers because I think we're comfortable with that slave archetype and reading about the slave experience. And we like to look at these stereotypes still. And I think that Percival Everett is calling us out on our shit.

SPEAKER_00 20:35

Yeah, I wouldn't go so far as to say that he pulls a felonious monk and is just messing with us and he wrote a book that he absolutely hates.

SPEAKER_01 20:45

No, I don't think he wrote a book he absolutely hates either.

SPEAKER_00 20:48

But he did say that he had resisted writing anything about slavery because it's an expectation of a black author.

SPEAKER_01 20:54

Correct.

SPEAKER_00 20:55

And so he does it in a kind of compromise for us and then sneaks in this subversive narrative that kind of flips it on its head. Right. Which is fascinating. Ironically, though, the popular reception of it proves his point.

SPEAKER_01 21:08

It does.

SPEAKER_00 21:09

Of erasure.

SPEAKER_01 21:10

And the jokes on us.

SPEAKER_00 21:11

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

So and I think we have to own that. So if you listen to our James episode and you've read James, I think you owe it to Percival Everett, but you just owe it to yourself to read Erasure and really take the time to do that. So we've referenced it a couple times that he pulls a Thelonious monk. So let's talk about why that is.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

So what better place to begin talking about Erasure than in the beginning? So I want to read to you how he begins this book, real quick. He says, My journal is a private affair, but as I cannot know the time of my coming death, and since I am not disposed, however, unfortunately, to the serious consideration of self-determination, I am afraid that others will see these pages. Since, however, I will be dead, it should not much matter to me who sees what or when. So the first thing that we learn is that this novel isn't really just a novel, it's actually a journal. This is him writing a journal. So it's a book within a book within a book. So already we don't know how much he's fictionalizing about this. And it also explains all the times when we switch to short story ideas and random scenes with the game show and the philosophers and the artist discussion. So it's all just kind of this train of thought journal that he's writing. And he even says here, he suggests that he may make up aspects of his life so as to present himself the way that he wants to be presented. So I think that's fascinating first and foremost. Then we get more on his ideas of what it means to be black. I have dark brown skin, curly hair, a broad nose, and some of my ancestors were slaves. And I have been detained by pasty white policemen in New Hampshire, Arizona, and Georgia. And so the society in which I live tells me. I am black. That is my race. He goes on to say, I'm not athletic. I don't like popular black music. I cannot dance. I'm good at math. I went to an Ivy Lee school. I did not grow up in the inner city, etc., etc., etc. He says the hard and gritty truth of the matter is that I hardly ever think about race. Those times when I did think about it a lot, I did so because of my guilt for not thinking about it. I don't believe in race. I believe there are people who will shoot me or hang me or cheat me and try to stop me because they do believe in race. Because of my brown skin, curly hair, wide nose, and slave ancestors. But that's just the way it is. And then he inserts this review that I will read, and then Liz, you can pick it up from there. The novel is finely crafted, with fully developed characters, rich language, and subtle play with the plot. But one is lost to understand what this reworking of Aeschylus, the Persians, has to do with the African American experience.

Publishing Erasure And Bookstore Shelves

SPEAKER_01 23:40

Thelonius Monk has been erased. His work has been erased in so many ways by the publishing industry. He is so well spoken. He is so well read. His father could tell from a young age that he had a mind that was set apart. And he has been writing for as long as he can remember. And so he's written book upon book here and published them. But they have been relegated in the bookstore to African American studies. His books have nothing to do with that. The only reason they've been relegated there is because he himself is black. They aren't purchased by people. You know, he has not become famously successful in that he's a published professor, but he's not a famously successful author. He speaks at lectures, he but he hasn't achieved that true success because there's no quote market for his books. And so in a moment of just sheer frustration, and in a moment of just anger and irony and satire, he writes this total parody of a novel of the raw black experience about this character named Go or Van Gogh is his name. And he lives in the ghetto.

SPEAKER_00 24:56

Which was a playoff of his own name being named after a felonious monk.

SPEAKER_01 25:00

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 25:00

You know.

SPEAKER_01 25:01

And so he he lives in the ghetto and he's just this really deplorable human who has been kicked around. He has no father on the scene.

SPEAKER_00 25:12

He has four babies by four different women. And he's angry at everything.

Writing A Parody That Sells

SPEAKER_01 25:15

He's just banging everything in sight. The language is awful. The drug use or the alcohol or the I mean, it's just full of every trope about the inner city, black male who is just hasn't finished high school and is living a life of crime and can't keep a job and you know has all his baby mamas. And so he cranks this thing out. Then he gives it to his agent and he says, send this in. And his agent's like, This is this is just awful. Like, this is ugly. Am I sending it in with any qualifiers? Like, is this supposed to be a parody? Is this supposed to be? And he's like, send it in raw, no qualifiers. And it's basically his, you know, FU to the publishing industry.

SPEAKER_00 26:02

He even titles it Buck.

SPEAKER_01 26:03

He sends it in and he doesn't really expect anything at all. And then Random House wants to pay him in advance of$600,000 for this book. Then suddenly a movie maker wants to pay him$3 million for the movie rights. And this book takes off, and it is being taken as gospel truth. And he has written it under a pen name of this supposed ex-con who has written this book and based on the experiences that he's seen, and now he has this role to play as he's erased his intellectual persona and betrayed his literary standards, and now has achieved the true wealth and quote-unquote success in the literary field with this dribble that he finds reprehensible.

SPEAKER_00 26:56

And all of this happens at a time where he is very vulnerable.

SPEAKER_01 26:59

His mother's dying.

SPEAKER_00 27:01

His sister, who worked at an abortion clinic and was constantly under threat, finally was killed by one of the protesters. And she was the main caretaker of his mother. So now, for the first time in his life, he has to be the sole caretaker of his mother. And she is succumbing to early onset Alzheimer's. He is not very successful as a writer. He does not have a ton of money set aside, and there aren't a lot of jobs for him to lecture. And there's this other novel that has come out called Wee's Lives in the Ghetto. It's by this black female author, and it too is getting wild acclaim and has got the movie rights and everything. And he is just so bitter about this novel that in this angry he decides to write one himself, basically.

SPEAKER_01 27:46

Right.

SPEAKER_00 27:46

The funny thing to me was is we get little bits of blurbs from Wheeze Lives in the Ghetto, and it's so awful. It's so it itself makes a better satire than the book that Monk writes. Because I think he's just too good of a writer to undercut himself well enough to get his message across. This is satire, people. Because I'll be honest with you, I was into the story. I was into it. As awful as it was, I was, I was into it. I was ready to, I was watching. I mean, it was terrible, but I was I was watching the train wreck. And I can't personally say that if I saw a movie of that story, at the end I would have been like, ah, that was really good. You know what I mean? I hate to say, I hate to say that. I do hate to say that. But I also I also know that Monk's experience as a black person is not everybody's experience as a black person. So, you know, a horrible, tragic story like that can be appealing to watch sometimes. But where that comes from me as a white person, you know, I have to reflect upon that. I just don't think I would have automatically hated it.

SPEAKER_01 28:51

Right. Well, he writes it really well.

SPEAKER_00 28:53

Yeah.

Success Money And Self-Disgust

SPEAKER_01 28:53

And not only does he write it really well, but when I say write it really well, there's symbolism in it, there's a beautiful symmetry and kind of a great plot line, and he really just brings it full circle. There is some humor, but then there's just awful tragedy in it as well. There's there's so much going on there that he just writes way too well for his own good. And Wheeze lives in the ghetto is not written well at all. So yeah, I I he puts it out there and it is way successful, and he is tortured by it, and he hates himself for it. At the same time, he needs the money, and now he knows what it's like to be rich and to actually have the money he needs to help other people, and he does. He helps people along the way, he takes care of his mother, he's able to put her in a place where she can be taken care of, he's able to do things for other people without stressing about it, and he's able to live relatively comfortably, but he keeps asking himself at what cost?

SPEAKER_00 29:54

One of the things that I love that Percival plays with throughout the novel is this accusation that black intelligence makes white people feel deeply insecure.

SPEAKER_01 30:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:07

And that really being the reason why he's being rejected by all these publishers. Because he goes to make a lecture at this university, and this paper is just off the charts, so intellectual, I couldn't understand a single word of it. But at the end, this white writer stands up and goes, you know, he like shakes his fist at him. He throws his keys at him and says, You asshole! And and feels and feels as though the paper was written to personally insult him and his style of writing and threaten. And it even comes to the point where the guy tries to come to blows with him a couple days later, and it's just ridiculous. There's this other moment where he tells the story of this satirical game show experience where this incredibly genius-level black guy comes onto this trivia show to go up against this other white contestant whose last name is Dollard.

SPEAKER_01 30:54

And so fitting.

SPEAKER_00 30:55

He's being the Dollard is being asked questions like name a primary color. Who was the first president? You know?

SPEAKER_01 31:01

And he can't get any of them right.

SPEAKER_00 31:03

And but the the black contestant is being asked these ridiculously difficult questions, like to explain my anaphase and and different classes of these insects and things like that. And he just does it, like an encyclopedia. The white host is like stressing because the audience isn't enjoying it because if they don't want this contestant to win. Because he's black. Yeah. And now the whole audience is feeling insecure because of this intelligence of the spike.

Intelligence As A Threat Satire

SPEAKER_01 31:27

Well, the audience dies. In the in the imagined scenario that goes on, it says as the audio, the audience gets quieter and quieter, the audience stops breathing, and then the audience is dead. And whether he's talking metaphorically or literally, there's no there's no noise anymore, and the audience is dead. And the game show host is absolutely angry and exasperated, and then the dullard guy is like completely, you know, face in his hands, you know, and totally defeated and and totally freaking out. And the black man's name is Tom, which I also think is not a mistake. So we've got Tom, who doesn't really have a last name, and he has to kind of make up a last name that he takes from a Native American word, and he throws that on the end of his name, and then we've got the dullard guy, and he has to walk forward almost like he's on a game board. And this is all within Ellison's imagination as he's going through these motions himself, and he's stepping forward one square and then another square as he's answering these impossible questions. And the audience dies a little bit more each time he takes a step forward. And it's also terribly symbolic of the black journey and the effort, not just the insecurity of the white people and the anger, but the lengths to which a black person has to go to prove their intelligence. And then the fact that they faced rejection even when they do it, that no one wants to reward them for it. That it is begrudgingly at the end, the game show host has to say, okay, you win the whatever prize.

SPEAKER_00 32:58

Right. The other thing, of course, that's important to the novel is the title itself, the idea of erasure and what that means. First and foremost, dealing with the erasure of cultural identity, the erasure of the diversity of lived experiences.

SPEAKER_01 33:12

Right, the individual identity that people have outside of the collective identity that we create for them.

SPEAKER_00 33:18

And even the erasure of self as peop as other black people are attempted to conform in order to succeed. Right. With the conform to the expectations in order to succeed. Because one of the things that he frustrates him most is when he runs across other black readers that think Wheeze lives in the ghetto and his own book is brilliant too.

SPEAKER_01 33:40

Yeah, and to illustrate how much that bothers him, he is literally about to engage in sex with a woman he's actually interested in. This is the first relationship, like legit relationship he has begun to form like for a very long time. And you think maybe this is gonna be the romance in the book. This is gonna go someplace until spoiler alert. No, because he's they're on the bed together and he looks across the bed and he sees a copy of Wheeze Lives in the Ghetto on her bedstand, and he stops and he's like, Have you read that? And she's like, Uh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:18

What did you think about it? What'd you think about it?

SPEAKER_01 34:20

I mean, she's like, wait a minute, what are we doing right now?

SPEAKER_00 34:22

Like the intensity. And he's even saying in his in his in his own brain, I I'm messing this up, but fuck, I can't stop myself. I know he's seeing him seeing the train wreck in his mind, but he's just so he just has zero respect for anyone who could not see what an awful stereotypical.

SPEAKER_01 34:40

And this is a woman he's enjoyed hanging out with, he's kissed her, this is the whole thing. And by the, you know, by the time he's done grilling her about what she thinks of this book, um, she's like, you have to leave, you know, and she basically throws him out of her place and he's done with her anyway because she actually liked it.

SPEAKER_00 34:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:58

So I mean, that is the length to which he is just so disillusioned with people, black people and white people, because she is black and she is ready to sell out to this idea as well. I thought it was good. I thought it was very well written. I thought it was fun, it was a good book. And he's like, There is nothing fun about this. It is racist as fuck, and I'm upset that you like it.

SPEAKER_00 35:20

Right. Yeah. I thought that was that was really funny.

SPEAKER_01 35:23

But it was it was sad and funny all at the same time. I was like, oh god, oh god, stop. Oh, what are you doing? Oh, okay, you went there. Okay. But I mean, he is that committed to how he feels about this issue.

SPEAKER_00 35:36

And then there's of course the erasure of one's memories in the form of his mother's Alzheimer's and how she slowly loses herself and her recognition of all the people in her life.

Family Loss Memory And Identity

SPEAKER_01 35:48

But she was a terribly tragic f figure because I felt like she'd already been erased in her marriage. Yes. Because even before long before she lost her memories, when the father was still alive, we find out that he was really in love with someone else, and she was never really his true love. His true love. And so, in the midst of her three children, in the midst of her larger-than-life husband, because he was a doctor and his father was a doctor, and the Ellison name, and she was not from a wealthy family. She was kind of from a rough around the edges farming farming family, you know, and they were the Ellisons. And so she married into a much larger, more refined family. And his father was in love with a white woman. She knows it. She finds out about it, she reads the letters, and that has to be so much that's an erasure as well.

SPEAKER_00 36:41

Yes, and it's an erasure of the idea that she had about her marriage and her husband.

SPEAKER_01 36:47

And not only did he love this other woman, but he had a child with this other woman. And so there is this different life out there that he chose not to live because he stayed with his wife and children, but there is definitely that erasure there. And eventually she loses her memory through Alzheimer's. So she is slowly erased as a human being. His sister and all the good work she's doing at the women's clinic is erased. The women's clinic is erased.

SPEAKER_00 37:13

And part of that is because we have changed the narrative of what women's clinics do to be one thing, and that is it's an abortion clinic.

SPEAKER_01 37:23

Right.

SPEAKER_00 37:23

Never mind all the free health care and the care for children, the prenatal vitamins, and protection and all that stuff, and the and the testing for STTs and stuff that those clinics provide. It all boils down to this idea, this stereotype.

SPEAKER_01 37:38

Yeah, there are abortions done there, and so these extreme anti-abortion people are protesting, threatening, and then one of the true extreme people kills the sister. And when the sister is killed, the other doctors don't want to work there, and that socioeconomically depressed area loses what little help they had as far as medical care was concerned.

SPEAKER_00 38:01

And then there's this continuing guilt that Monk feels having overshadowed both of his siblings.

SPEAKER_01 38:07

Right.

SPEAKER_00 38:08

Because he experiences favoritism from his father explicitly, but also his mother implicitly.

SPEAKER_01 38:14

Right. Because he was the writer, he was the intellectual, he was set apart, he was the youngest, he was set apart from his other siblings, and there was some kind of connection, and he developed a lot of his father's personality and the process. And I think his mother kind of then transferred some of her devotion to her younger son. And there are a lot of complex, you know, intergenerational traumatic kind of burdens that get passed, passed down in that way. His sister goes on to become the strong black woman who becomes a doctor like her father. The brother also becomes a doctor like the dad, and you would think there'd be a connection there, but it is broken because the brother is gay. And that is something that is unacceptable. And that brings up a whole different element in the black family and in the nature of that type of trauma as well. So the brother is erased by the father because of his sexuality. The brother marries a woman, has children, tries to erase that aspect of himself, then that implodes on him. That becomes a whole part in the background going on here that really adds to the tension in the family.

SPEAKER_00 39:26

Really, what this book is about, apart from just the erasure of individual identity and the diversity within cultural identity and language of cultural identity, Monk, the main character, really experiences not just an erasure of his own identity, but his entire family one by one throughout the book. He already lost his father, has barely any relationship with any of his family because of all the secrets that they're hiding and the different resentments that are at play there. But his sister gets erased when she is murdered, then his mother gets erased as she loses all of her memory and recognition of him. And then his brother gets erased because the brother being gay and Monk not being quite comfortable with that, not rejecting his brother, but the brother can sense that he doesn't know how to respond to him and have a relationship with him. He just pulls himself out of Monk's life and never speaks to him again. So at the end of the story, Monk has no one, no relationship, no real friends besides his agent. And then he doesn't even really have his writing left because he's sort of given it away to this other caricature, and and he ceases to kind of exist in his own mind. The who he is begins to start to blur at the end, and he almost is starting to develop almost a multiple personality.

SPEAKER_01 40:41

Right. So at the end, in the height of ironies, he's asked to be a judge for the National Book Award, and fuck ends up winning the National Book Award. He is the one judge that votes against it and vehemently argues against it, but the other judges are unanimous.

SPEAKER_00 40:59

And they all shame him.

The Award Ending And Mirror Twist

SPEAKER_01 41:00

They shame him. As a black person, how could you not be so happy that one of your kind has succeeded in the And they say it that way, and it makes me want to scream like all the rest of them are white, and they're like, How can you not be happy for one of your people representing your people? And it's just like he's sitting there going, Oh my god, like stop. And so he is at the awards ceremony as a judge, sitting there with all these famous people and people from corporations and publishing houses and all these people. And the head of the judging group gets up there to announce the winner and looks around and says, I hope that Mr. Stag R. Lee has made it, and Monk knows he needs to stand up. And so he does. And he says, My steps were difficult, and my head was spinning as if I had been drugged. Cameras flashed and people murmured, and I couldn't believe that I was walking through sand, through dream sand. To my left were my father, my mother, and the woman I knew to be Fiona on the other side of him, and behind them my brother, sister, and half sister. There were others I knew but failed to recognize, and they all pressed around me, urging me forward, and the camera flashes blinded me and made the room black during their moments of absence. Ah, here comes one of my fellow judges, Harnett said. Perhaps Mr. Ellison has heard something about the whereabouts of our winner. I was halfway there. It's a black thing, maybe, Harnett said, laughter. The faces of my life, of my past, of my world became as real as the unreal Harnett and the corporations and their wives, and they were all talking to me, saying lines from novels that I loved, but when I tried to repeat them to myself, I faltered, unable to recall them. Then there was a small boy, perhaps me as a boy, and he held up a mirror so that I could see my face, and it was the face of Stag Lee. Now you're free of illusions, Stag said. How does it feel to be free of one's illusions? I know those lines, I said aloud, knowing I was saying them to no one. And incidentally, that line, those lines are from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which is a novel about a young black man who feels like he's been made invisible by both the black community and the white community. So it's very fitting that those would be the lines in this moment. So he walks up and Harnett's like, What are you doing? And he's like, he's looking at Harnett and he says something to his mother, who is of course not there. None of those people from his family are there, but he sees them standing there. And he ends by, I looked at the mirror still held by the boy. He held it by his thigh, and I could only imagine the image the glass held. I chose one of the TV cameras and stared into it. I said, Egads, I'm on television. And then it ends with this phrase, hypotheses non-fingo, which means I will not frame a hypothesis.

SPEAKER_00 43:52

I thought it was interesting that it was egads, I'm on TV was a riff on the final line of the character from his book, Fuck. When he's finally being arrested and cuffed, and he's on the ground and the cameras are all around him, and he says, Look, I'm on television.

SPEAKER_01 44:09

Yes. And so there's this parallel between him and his terrible character in that terrible book. Really interesting stuff there at the end. Very symbolic, very kind of existential as we look at that, and he's grappling with himself and who he is and whether or not he has erased himself there in the end, and all that's left is the stagly character. There's a lot there.

SPEAKER_00 44:33

And I think the question that we all have to ask ourselves at the end of this white or black, gay or straight, man or woman, are you letting everybody be who they really are in your own mind and when they're around you? Or are you trying to erase them and create an idea of who they should be or who they are in your own mind? mind.

Final Question And Next Read

SPEAKER_01 44:50

Or are you trying to erase yourself in order to fit an idea in their mind? And what you think will make you successful, what you think will make you acceptable and palatable in a world that has so many opinions about who we should be. And I think that's a question we all have to ask ourselves. All right, Peter, what are we reading next time?

SPEAKER_00 45:10

Well, we will be making my wife incredibly happy by finally taking her suggestion to read her all time favorite book by Madeline Miller, Circe.

SPEAKER_01 45:19

I've already started it. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 45:21

Excellent. I'm looking forward to talking about it.

SPEAKER_01 45:23

Yep. All right. So until then, keep reading. And keep thinking and we'll talk to you soon.