Officers storm a ballroom, releasing a flurry of bullets that pierce through a Black man as he collapses in a pool of his own blood. Monk, American Fiction’s neurotic protagonist, is unarmed, clutching nothing more than an ill-gotten literary award. It could end here. Yet – spoiler alert! – in the final act of the recent Oscar-winning film its writers take us along for the ride as they toy with reaching for a romantic reconciliation with Monk’s disgruntled ex-girlfriend or even fading to black with no resolution.
American Fiction, an adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, sees Monk, a middle-class Black academic, struggle to get his highly intellectual books published because they aren’t “Black enough”. In order to make some money for his family he writes Fuck, a Black working-class struggle narrative laden with violence, crime and pain. He instantly finds fame and fortune and is embraced by the cultural elite, who think he’s brave for being so authentic.
