Published in 2001, this novel was adapted for film in the movie, American Fiction, winning several awards for the adapted screenplay, including from the Academy. After enjoying the film, I was motivated to read the book— and I recommend you do so, too.

The novel is much more complex and multilayered, something more easily done in a book than a movie. Thelonious Ellison, familiarly known as Monk, is a middle-aged English professor and author of experimental, highly intellectual novels, living in California. Under stress when his most recent novel is rejected by publishers, he learns of first time black author Juanita Mae Jenkins and her hot new bestseller, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a gritty depiction of black urban life that checks every stereotypical box, and everyone is raving about it. This deeply offends Monk, and in his rage he writes, in about one week, a similar ghetto novel from a man’s perspective, under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, titled My Pafology. Monk sends it to his agent, who, once he confirms that Monk is serious, sends it out to publishers and is quickly offered big money for his “brave” novel. Thus begins one track of Monk’s life.

At the same time, when Monk comes to Washington, D.C. to deliver a professional paper at a conference, and to visit his mother and sister, he is caught up on the mental deterioration of his mother, who is in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and the financial and life strains experienced by his sister to care for her. Monk’s sister is a medical doctor in D.C., serving the poor in a clinic she runs together with two partners, and is recently divorced. His brother is a plastic surgeon in Arizona, has recently come out as gay, is divorced and struggling with challenges to his parental visitation rights as a result. The family also struggles under the burden of the loss of their physician father seven years prior, a suicide. When Monk’s sister is tragically murdered at her clinic, the care of his mother falls on his shoulders.

In addition to the fact that he was the youngest in the family, and his father’s obvious favorite, he has always been a social odd duck. Raised by highly educated and cultured parents, Monk always embraced and enjoyed difficult literature, art, and music, engaging in black culture only in an effort to fit in socially. It never felt right— he admits he never could use slang correctly, never physically engage appropriately, couldn’t even play basketball well. Dealing with his mother’s rapid decline, overt hostility from his brother, and loss of his sister, Monk learns that the father who so admired him, and to whom he looked for approbation and approval, led a double life, carrying on an affair with a white nurse, and fathering a daughter. The woman corresponded with his father, but disappeared when she revealed her pregnancy.

Everett expertly maneuvers Monk between each of these challenging situations, much like watching a man spinning plates on sticks—we wait to see which will crash. An added treat is the pseudonymous novel is included in this book. I won’t share how Everett choses to bring these various situations to closure, but that really isn’t the point. The situation Monk has created, his response to the Jenkins’ book, is really the heart of the matter. If he felt compelled to write this sort of book, even as a protest, why create the persona of Stagg R. Leigh? While it is clear that the book is not his lived experience, neither are his other books— why does it lack authenticity coming from a black scholar of literature? It is clearly a parody of other supposed authentic ghetto novels— does the author have to be a black ex-con to be accepted? The response of the mostly white publishing industry is ridiculous and believable— falling over themselves with unbridled high praise, that reeks of guilt. What does Monk’s family, his life choices, and the ghetto book all say about blackness?

This is a great book for the current moment, as America struggles with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and so-called anti-racism. It brought to mind R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface, another satire of race and publishing. Everett’s novel does an even better job of skewering publishing, as well as society writ large, and how race is thought of, responded to, by whites and blacks alike. Highly recommend the book and the movie.