In a burst of frustration, and having just watched a bit of Get Rich or Die Tryin’ on a hotel TV, he scribbles out a compendium of over-the-top clichés about urban suffering under the pseudonym Stagg R.
They rise so far that they seem on the verge of forming parentheses that could excerpt him from the whole experience until, with perfect timing, his face is replaced by the rapturous one of a white woman in the audience who’s just shot to her feet in front of him to participate in a standing ovation.Īmerican Fiction is an adaptation of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, a dark comedy about how Monk is unable to find a publisher for his own latest manuscript, a reworking of Aeschylus’s The Persians, because it’s deemed inadequately Black. When Sintara - an Oberlin-educated former publishing assistant who gets cheers from the crowd by wondering “Where is our representation?” - abruptly switches to AAVE when reading from her book, Monk’s eyebrows levitate up his head. At a book festival, he walks into a talk being given by Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), whose debut novel, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, is being fawned over by the moderator. But, despite his depression and bursts of anger, there’s a lightness to Monk that soon sets him apart. Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is an author and professor who at first seems like another of these figures of seen-it-all prominence. That air of weary authority that Wright so effortlessly projects has, in recent years, been put in service to roles as cops and generals, politicians and journalists, and, in American Fiction, an academic. He has a heavy brow, which he likes to accentuate by tilting his head forward and looking over the glasses he frequently wears onscreen. When at rest, Jeffrey Wright’s face tends toward the serious. Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut, American Fiction, is a sharp comedy about racial commodification anchored by a terrific Jeffrey Wright.
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