Content area
Full Text
Erasure, by Percival Everett. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. 256 pages. $24.95.
Percival Everett is an experimental novelist and an English professor at the University of Southern California. Erasure is his thirteenth book of fiction. He has bounced from a major New York publisher in 1983, when he was a promising young African American writer, to small houses and university presses, his face glowering from his book covers more unhappily every time.
He's never fit. Often you can't tell if his characters are black or white. Often it doesn't matter-except that black novelists are supposed to write about black subjects. To illuminate the condition of the African American in the United States at this time. To be a credit to their race-or, at the least, to be their race.
Everett has had a lot of fun with this-in 1997 in Frenzy, his delirious romp with the likes of Dionysus and Tiresias; in 1999 in Glyph, the Tin Drum-like story of a superliterate but resolutely mute baby, a gang of academic kidnappers, and Roland Barthes ("I'm French, you know," he says to cover for himself in any situation); and as far back as 1983 with Suder, where the third baseman for the Seattle Mariners, batting under the Mendoza line, turns himself into Icarus.
"Have you to this point assumed that I am white?" baby Ralph asks in Glyph, after many pages of note writing ("Would you explain to me what Lacan means by the sliding signified and the floating signifier?"-Ralph's father, a pathetic academic, is desperately trying to make it in the deconstruction game), footnotes, and dialogue between the likes of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. "In my reading," Ralph says of the books his mother piles in his crib, "I discovered that if a character was black, then he at some point was required to comb his Afro hairdo, speak on the street using an obvious, ethnically identifiable idiom, live in a certain part of town, or be called a nigger by someone. White characters, I assumed they were white ... did not seem to need that kind of introduction, or perhaps legitimization, to exist on the page." That could be the complaint building in Everett's fiction up to Erasure, in which Everett blows his...