American Fiction: Jeffrey Wright shines in this smart racial satire on the American publishing industry

Given the (still surprisingly prevalent) opinion that, to quote the critic and biographer Anne Chisholm, “films cannot show thought or writing”, it might not come as too much of a surprise that the novels of Percival Everett have not been considered likely candidates for cinematic adaptation. A professor of English at the University of Southern California, Everett writes wry semi-postmodernist fiction that combines wild humour with academic savvy; his work delights in the kind of literary allusions and narrative and linguistic game-playing that are often quickly dismissed as uncinematic.

Kudos, then, to Cord Jefferson for being the first person to take up the challenge of bringing Everett’s self-reflexive work to the screen. Jefferson, a television writer whose credits include The Good Place (2017-19) and Watchmen (2019), here makes his directing debut with an adaptation of Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, a stinging satire on the American publishing industry and, in particular, its pigeonholing of Black authors. If the end result ultimately simplifies the satire and sentimentalises the elements of family drama in Everett’s text, the film remains a creditable debut, and boasts a raison d’être in a terrific performance by Jeffrey Wright, here clearly relishing his best lead film role since Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat (1996).

As Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison, Wright plays a (deliberately) thinly disguised version of Everett himself: a California-based African-American academic and writer whose dense, allusive novels are ignored by the public and deemed ‘not Black enough’ by publishers (yet still end up in the African American studies section of bookstores).

The film’s more confident first half (set up with the coolest of credits sequences) is adept at conveying the expectations and frustrations that lead Monk to an aberrant action. Under a blues-referencing pseudonym, he pens and submits a stereotypical ‘ghetto’ novel initially named My Pafology which gains immediate critical and commercial success. Monk’s efforts to maintain this literary deception as fame and a film deal come his way are interwoven with various personal issues. These include the declining mental health of his mother (Leslie Uggams), conflicts with his freshly out-of-the-closet brother (Sterling K. Brown), and a budding romance with a neighbour (Erika Alexander).

One of the pleasures of Everett’s novel is the way it places the reader in its protagonist’s conflicted, creative headspace. In its most astute moments, Jefferson’s film also achieves this: the sequence in which Monk begins creating My Pafology – the characters appear before him, arguing with each other and talking back to him – is great, but sadly this remains the only dramatised insight we get into the content of the pastiche novel. Mostly, a sense of interiority comes from Wright’s performance, which raises big laughs from the incongruity of Monk’s code-switching – performing his surly, ‘fugitive’ literary alter ego for publishers – but also digs into the frustration, defensiveness and anger that motivated the hoax in the first place. Monk’s sense of outsiderness within his own family is also well conveyed, even if the family tensions emerge rather broadly. 

As American Fiction progresses its intentions also become more transparent. The film’s insistent target is the knee-jerk fawning over narratives of Black trauma by the liberal white literary establishment (and its Hollywood counterpart). But where Everett stacks up reverberating ironies that lead the protagonist to an existential crisis, Jefferson resorts more to sitcom-style shorthand. The central joke is stretched thin, especially in the late scenes of Monk’s interactions with a mostly white literary jury; more problematically, the satire seems to express scepticism about interracial-relationships at the personal level. (“I’m glad you’re not white,” Monk’s mother tells his lover, to which the inevitable response is: “Me too.”) At times it feels like Jefferson has uncritically filtered Everett’s novel through the prism of Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). A braver approach, in contrast, might have updated the satire to address not only the clichéd depictions of slavery and contemporary urban life highlighted here, but the extraordinary appeal to white audiences and critics of a film such as Peele’s.

Jefferson fashions a boldly meta climax that expresses some of the eccentric energy of the source material on its own, very cinematic terms. Such a wilder, more consistently risk-taking stylistic approach would have been to the film’s benefit, but, despite the evident compromises, if American Fiction kicks off a belated run of Everett adaptations, American cinema will be all the richer for it.

 ► American Fiction is in UK cinemas from 2 February.