The film dramatizes the quotidian absurdities that many Black writers face during their career.
Who decides what qualifies as a “masterpiece of African American literature”? The question is central to an audacious scheme that unfolds in Erasure, a 2001 novel by Percival Everett about a Black professor of English named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, whose high-concept retellings of Greek classics haven’t endeared him to a wide readership. Monk is beguiled by rave reviews of a novel called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, which earns praise for its “haunting verisimilitude” in depicting the ghetto “in all its exotic wonder.” The author resolves to conduct an experiment: He writes a stereotype-driven manuscript meant to reflect the racist appetite of the white publishing industry, then instructs his agent to submit it to book editors for consideration. And so begins the saga of My Pafology, a ribald anti-bildungsroman about a violent, fatherless 19-year-old whose own mother calls him “human slough,” which Monk publishes under the pseudonym “Stagg R. Leigh.”
Monk’s satirical exercise thrusts Stagg into the literary limelight as the industry lavishes praise on the book’s gritty rendering of an ostensibly authentic Black experience. In American Fiction, a new film adaptation of Erasure, Monk (played by Jeffrey Wright) descends into a spiral of guilt and shame as Stagg ascends into publishing stardom. While the film follows Monk’s tale of ideological rebellion, it dramatizes the quotidian absurdities that many Black writers face during their career. Many of these racial theatrics are outrageously funny, and the film marries the sardonicism of Everett’s novel with an insider’s knowledge of Hollywood-specific inanity: In one scene, an eager white film producer attempts to woo Monk by bragging about a previous project—a slasher called Plantation Annihilation. Beyond the secondhand embarrassment inspired by such declarations, the film suggests, white gatekeepers’ narrow views of Black life really do thwart Black creators’ artistic growth and money-earning potential.
American Fiction repeatedly underlines that publishing is a staggeringly white industry. But the film doesn’t only point out the flawed thinking that can lead its arbiters (and white consumers) to treat “Black stories” as a monolithic category. Critiques of this bias have abounded since at least the early 20th century, when Langston Hughes published “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” an essay decrying the artistic limitations he observed even at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. Later that year, W. E. B. Du Bois argued that all art is propaganda and “the white public today demands from its artists, literary and pictorial, racial pre-judgment which deliberately distorts Truth and Justice, as far as colored races are concerned.”
Refreshingly, American Fiction departs from some of the more facile examples of racial satire in books and visual media whose Black characters are stand-ins for social concepts. The film builds a physical and emotional world around the lonesome Monk that extends beyond the pallid domain of his usual academic conferences, home offices, and literary readings. After an unexpected tragedy, Monk returns home, where he’s forced to contend with his long-ignored familial duties. Foregrounding these complicated relationships grants material urgency to Monk’s literary ploy: It’s not just a vanity exercise to win an imaginary argument, because the well-being of real people depends on Monk’s ability to sell his writing.
By depicting so much of Monk’s life outside his literary pursuits, the film actually presents complex storytelling about Black characters while addressing the barriers that make such stories difficult to produce. In doing so, it offers a corrective, and some of the most striking scenes have nothing to do with My Pafology or the white editors who fawn over Stagg R. Leigh’s work. Midway through the film, as Monk is grieving the death of one family member and struggling to cope with another’s illness, he’s enveloped by unexpected joy: Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor), the Ellisons’ longtime housekeeper, marries a local guard named Maynard (Raymond Anthony Thomas) in a beachside ceremony near the family’s small home on Martha’s Vineyard.
There, outside the deteriorating beach house, the older couple celebrate their union and draw Monk and his estranged brother, Cliff (Sterling K. Brown), into their revelry. It’s one of several tender moments that highlight the kinds of close connection that Monk had long foregone—and the lessons about human nature he still has to learn. For the first time in the film, Monk really listens to Cliff, a divorced and newly out plastic surgeon who has wrestled with their father’s favoritism toward the book-smart Monk. As the wedding merriment continues into the night, Cliff interrupts Monk’s self-pitying to remind him to let other people in sometimes.
In a recent conversation, American Fiction’s director and writer, Cord Jefferson, told me that he didn’t realize how important the wedding scene was until he got pushback from early script readers who told him it didn’t propel the main story forward. “In the vast majority of movies in which you have characters like Lorraine and Maynard, they’re going to be on-screen for all of five minutes to say some expository dialogue, and then they disappear,” he said. But for him, dispensing with the pair that way wouldn’t have served the earnest narrative undergirding the satire: “One of the things that roots the story and keeps it grounded is these kinds of character beats where you sort of live with these people, and it starts to feel like, Oh, I’m watching something that feels real to life. And it’s not just a silly slapstick comedy.”
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American Fiction is riotously funny, though, and not just in ways that skewer the uneasy racial delusions boosting sales of Stagg’s novel, which his publisher wants to release ahead of Juneteenth because “white people will be feeling—let’s be honest—a little conscience-stricken.” The film’s comedy is especially satisfying when Monk and his family members toss barbs at one another: They call him “Detective Dictionary” anytime his pedantry shows up in mundane chatter and mock his new girlfriend, Coraline (the always hilarious Erika Alexander), for finding anything lovable about him. And during one character’s funeral, Monk is forced to read a letter from the deceased that includes the line “Hopefully I expired under the heaving thrusts of a sweaty Idris Elba.” These scenes help steer the film away from the self-serious monotony that can sometimes affect movies and TV shows more interested in proving a point than telling a compelling story.
But American Fiction still has plenty to say about the racism in publishing. When I first watched it, I was reminded of an essay that the critic Lauren Michele Jackson published in the early days of summer 2020’s racial fever dream. Writing for Vulture about the proliferation of the “anti-racist reading list,” Jackson observed that such an incongruous collection of Black writing, “maybe ironically but maybe not, reinforces an already pernicious literary divide that books written by or about minorities are for educational purposes, racism and homophobia and stuff, wholly segregated from matters of form and grammar, lyric and scene.” Many of the white editors and film producers who champion Stagg’s writing lace their adulation with anthropological language: My Pafology is valuable not for its style or artistic merit but for serving as a window into the harsh realities of Black life. Monk’s agent, a Puerto Rican man who grows ever more baffled by the success of his client’s charade, notes that even this assessment is a falsehood: “White people think they want the truth, but they don’t,” he says. “They just wanna feel absolved.”
Monk’s most formidable foil, however, ends up being the Black author he was quickest to denigrate: The literary star Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), the author of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto and the subject of a fictional Atlantic cover story crowning her a “Golden Child.” When the two finally meet, Sintara is reading Jackson’s 2019 book, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue … And Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation. In Erasure, the character on whom Sintara is based lives only through the words she’s written (which were inspired by novels such as 1996’s Push, by Sapphire); Rae’s quick-witted Sintara is a more concrete adversary. In the film, Monk and Sintara meet when they’re both invited to serve as jurors for a book award with a historical diversity problem. Monk expresses frustration with the limiting view of Black life presented in Sintara’s novel during a break in their sessions, and she questions whether he feels similarly about the depictions of white people in books by authors such as Bret Easton Ellis and Charles Bukowski. He doesn’t, it turns out, because publishers and readers don’t consider their work definitive chronicles of the white experience.
I would’ve loved to have seen Monk’s righteous literary indignation explored even further, especially because the two people he judges most harshly are both Black women. But this scene was still a satisfying watch. Jefferson, for his part, recalled wanting some kind of confrontation between the two authors when he first read Erasure. And in early script discussions with Wright, he remembers the actor saying, “Listen, I just want to make sure that you’re not interested in making some Bill Cosby ‘Pull up your pants,’ talented-tenth shit.” Including a new scene in which Sintara gets to push back against Monk’s judgment deepens the analysis that frames the film and steers it away from banal intraracial scolding that colors lesser stories.
Their conversation undercuts Monk’s insular conviction that the only Black creators worth celebrating are those who produce highbrow books more concerned with philosophical theory than with the lives of people experiencing hardship. The scene both upends Monk’s provincial view of art making and unearths some of the emotions he’s been repressing in favor of decrying others’ work. Monk isn’t just haunted by the industry’s expectations of him and other Black writers: He’s crumbling under the weight of grief, guilt, and loneliness that he can’t blame on anyone else, least of all a fellow author whose only apparent sin is her self-assurance in the same professional climate that rattles Monk.
Monk and Sintara’s conversation captures tensions that echo an “emotional growth spurt” from Jefferson’s own life: The filmmaker recalls a time when he, too, would direct his ambient frustration toward creators whose projects he found distasteful rather than the people financing them. But making a living through art is a grueling endeavor, one that resists simple judgments. For Jefferson now, watching Monk and Sintara’s dispute is a reminder that such arguments are most invigorating when they end in a draw. As he put it, “My allegiance changes based on the day.”
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