The main problem I had with the first half of American Fiction was entirely of my own making. I had read Percival Everett’s Erasure—the novel that inspired the movie—a few weeks before, and I kept getting distracted by the changes Cord Jefferson, the writer and director, made. Granted, some of the changes were rather significant—such as the cause of death of one of the characters—but they didn’t affect the story or what Jefferson was trying to convey in the movie, which is the important part. Once I got past that, I could focus on what the movie was trying to do, as opposed to how it was doing it differently than the novel did.
Essentially, the movie focuses on the most significant plotline from the novel: Thelonious Ellison (everybody calls him Monk; played wonderfully by Jeffrey Wright) is a novelist who writes amazingly crafted novels that nobody is interested in reading, or even publishing, at the point when we see him. He encounters another writer, a woman named Sintara, at a literary festival. She has published a book with all the stereotypes of African Americans, including a wildly exaggerated dialect and a young woman who’s pregnant yet again. Her book not only gets published, but it’s selling wildly. Monk decides to spoof such an approach and writes his own stereotypical novel under a pseudonym. His agent doesn’t just sell it; it leads to a movie deal, as well. Monk pushes the joke as far as he can, even changing the name of the novel to Fuck, but his successes just keep coming in.
There are subplots about Monk’s relationship with his family, which has been distant, at best, and a woman he begins dating, which doesn’t go well, but the main question Jefferson seems interested in is what it means to produce art when one is a member of a minority community. Monk goes to a bookstore to see if they carry his books, which they do, but they are shelved in the African American Studies section, even though he contends that his books don’t talk about being Black. White authors’ works can be about family or selfhood or climate change or anything, while Black authors’ works are always about race, no matter what else they might explore.
Monk’s last name of Ellison evokes this question, as Ralph Ellison (author of Invisible Man) often argued that Black writers shouldn’t attempt to be political and focus on race, unlike Richard Wright (author of Native Son), who was overtly political (he was a Socialist, as well as focused on what it means to be a Black male in the U.S.). In Everett’s novel, in fact, the plot of Monk’s stereotypical novel is largely lifted from Wright’s novel, further emphasizing this contrast in approaches. Jefferson is too good of a writer/director to answer this question for the viewer, and the movie keeps the indeterminate ending of the novel, letting the audience explore the dilemma on their own.
Essentially, the movie focuses on the most significant plotline from the novel: Thelonious Ellison (everybody calls him Monk; played wonderfully by Jeffrey Wright) is a novelist who writes amazingly crafted novels that nobody is interested in reading, or even publishing, at the point when we see him. He encounters another writer, a woman named Sintara, at a literary festival. She has published a book with all the stereotypes of African Americans, including a wildly exaggerated dialect and a young woman who’s pregnant yet again. Her book not only gets published, but it’s selling wildly. Monk decides to spoof such an approach and writes his own stereotypical novel under a pseudonym. His agent doesn’t just sell it; it leads to a movie deal, as well. Monk pushes the joke as far as he can, even changing the name of the novel to Fuck, but his successes just keep coming in.
There are subplots about Monk’s relationship with his family, which has been distant, at best, and a woman he begins dating, which doesn’t go well, but the main question Jefferson seems interested in is what it means to produce art when one is a member of a minority community. Monk goes to a bookstore to see if they carry his books, which they do, but they are shelved in the African American Studies section, even though he contends that his books don’t talk about being Black. White authors’ works can be about family or selfhood or climate change or anything, while Black authors’ works are always about race, no matter what else they might explore.
Monk’s last name of Ellison evokes this question, as Ralph Ellison (author of Invisible Man) often argued that Black writers shouldn’t attempt to be political and focus on race, unlike Richard Wright (author of Native Son), who was overtly political (he was a Socialist, as well as focused on what it means to be a Black male in the U.S.). In Everett’s novel, in fact, the plot of Monk’s stereotypical novel is largely lifted from Wright’s novel, further emphasizing this contrast in approaches. Jefferson is too good of a writer/director to answer this question for the viewer, and the movie keeps the indeterminate ending of the novel, letting the audience explore the dilemma on their own.