Erasure

I had watched the movie and really enjoyed it, and was interested in reading the novel it was based off of. While the movie left the viewer the ability to hope for something better, the book has no problems leaving the reader in despair.

Funny enough, I enjoy stories that are wiling to go the distance for the sake of the narrative themes, so I enjoyed this book. It had such a wide range in narrative structure. The main character, Monk, is a literary analyst and as a result tries to write novels that avoids the pitfalls that he thinks could diminish its artistic integrity. The author really hammers his point of view by even including nearly a whole article's worth of text written in that overly analytical style criticizing another character's novel, complete with footnotes. I certainly could not keep up with the jargon, and that was exactly the point.

The main theme of the novel focuses on the idea of how POC are treated in the publishing world, back in its liberal leaning days. Publishing companies with majority white staff and audiences both diminish a work by always categorizing it by the race of the author regardless of its themes, while also elevating works that fit its expectations.

The overall message at the end is all too real, leaving only a sense of nihilism. Just be prepared for the despair, and have your positive nihilism book on standby to help you get through the aftermath.

After seeing the movie, I thought I knew what do expect, but I wasn't prepared for the entire My Pafology novella to be included in the book. It was similar to American Psycho where I saw what was happening and it was good and I got it, but that's still a lot of intentionally bad prose to wade through.

I found the family drama rang true.

I naturally found myself comparing the book to the movie, and one thing the movie didn't get across was that Monk's academic/serious writing was just as unreadable as My Pafology.