Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is a middle-aged black humanities professor in Los Angeles, roundly disliked by students and faculty colleagues, who is the author of many intellectually demanding and commercially disastrous novels based on classical myth. Depressed by his career and by money worries – including an elderly mother needing residential care for dementia – Monk is finally triggered by the bestselling triumph of a new novel by black author Sintara Golden, entitled We’s Lives in da Ghetto, which apparently panders to all the illiterate black-victimhood cliches beloved of white cultural gatekeepers. Enraged, Monk writes a spoof hood-violence novel, My Pafology, by the supposed convicted felon Stagg R Leigh, and sends it to his agent, assuming the obvious crassness will signal its satirical intent. But then … well, those acquainted with the Broadway career of Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom might guess what happens next.
American Fiction is the highly entertaining new literary comedy from film-maker Cord Jefferson, a TV writer making his feature directing debut with his own emollient adaptation of the metafictional masterpiece Erasure by Percival Everett, published in 2001. Jeffrey Wright is an excellent Monk: sensitive, morose, prickly and idealistic in a gloomily self-harming way. Tracee Ross Ellis is his shrewd physician sister Lisa; Sterling K Brown is his cosmetic surgeon brother Cliff, who has just come out as gay; Leslie Uggams is affectingly dignified as Monk’s mother Agnes; Issa Rae is Monk’s nemesis, Sintara Golden. It all works very enjoyably, despite Jefferson sugaring the original a little, including changing the specific kind of medical practice that Lisa has.
