American Fiction

Cord Jefferson (dir)
USA 2023

When my daughter was very young (she is now an adult), the mother of one of her friends asked me if I worked in a Chinese takeaway in Newport. I smiled and said ‘no’, but she insisted, ‘but I saw you there, and someone told me you worked there too.’ There was some back and forth before the increasing awkwardness of the exchange made us both halt, and I avoided her for the next few years even when my daughter kept her daughter as a friend. The strange thing was my daughter’s friend’s mother was herself also Chinese.

American Fiction is screening at the DCA until the 22 February. Based on Percival Everett’s 2001 satirical novel, Erasure, it follows Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison at a crisis point in his life. Ellison is a published African American novelist who is critically but not commercially successful. He writes literary and esoteric novels such as a retelling of the story of Euripides and a parody of the work of French Post-Structuralists. His agent tells him that he needs instead to write a ‘black’ book to which he replies in exasperation, ‘I am black, and this is my book!’ Ellison rages against the prevailing expectations of what black novelists should write about and how, and as a result his publishing and academic career has stalled. For what sells, his agent and publishers tell him, are ‘authentic’, gritty stories of down-trodden black ghetto life, full of pain and trauma, written in an urban black vernacular… for the chattering classes. Ellison, of course, wants literature to be literature, and stands his ground.

Early in the film, he meets exactly who the readers, the publishing and literary establishment want: Sintara Golden—sassy, articulate, educated at an Ivy League University—whose novel, We's Lives in Da Ghetto, a runaway bestseller, is taken to be the ‘authentic’ black experience. Golden’s presence at the same literary conference as Ellison has effectively siphoned away all of the audience from his own presentation, leaving Ellison distinctively put out. Later, we see him ask a bookshop attendant querulously why all of his books appear in the African American Studies shelves (labelling and genre is determined by the bookshop chain, the young man shrugs his shoulders). Ellison then hauls his small pile of published novels over to the fiction section where he is confronted with a large display of his rival’s bestseller.

Jeffrey Wright as Ellison is acutely funny; bewilderment and rage are evident in his character’s various deliciously pained facial expressions, and the numerous times he holds his head in his hands in despair, or bangs his head on a pile of books. American Fiction is a smart, updated version of the classic comedy of a small man railing against the system that is blind, simply ludicrous and surreally so. We, of course, side with the small man; we empathize with him but we also enjoy his frustration.

In an act of revenge, Ellison writes exactly that version of blackness the public ‘want’ but as an exaggerated parody. Allowing Ellison’s fictional characters from ‘My Pafology’ to come to life on screen as their author mulls over their dialogue, and also allowing them to discuss both their characterisation and storyline is a metafictional stroke of genius. Later, in a bid to ramp up the absurd nature of his enterprise, Ellison demands that his book ‘My Pafology’ is renamed ‘Fuck’, as a deliberate dare. His publishers agree after a brief hesitation— justifying the title change to themselves as a signifer of authorial authenticity! The more Ellison as Stagg R Leigh ramps up the exaggeration, the more publishers and critics like what they see. The result is scores of interested publishers, producers and critics who queue up to publish this new work, to offer an obscenely big advance, a film contract, and to award him a literary prize. Ellison now has to pretend to be Leigh, replete with ghetto traits, including a dodgy and criminal past, and also speak in the same stereotypical black vernacular which he objected to earlier. Wright’s attempt to inhabit that stereotype, which he as Ellison can only do intermittently and haltingly, is gloriously funny. To make matters worse, Ellison is asked to be a judge on a literary award panel, to make up ‘diversity’ numbers.

In the meeting of the award panel, we get a sharp satire of the literary establishment, the horse-trading around prizes, as well as the liberal exoticisation of experiences very different from their own. But the film’s awards sub-plot allows a meeting to be engineered between Ellison and Golden where they have a conversation about black literature, authenticity and typecasting and, of course, what sells. Ellison castigates Golden for inauthenticity, for pandering to white audiences; but while she is equally scathing about the mainstream lauding of ‘trauma porn’ (and how white audiences have received her book) she is unapologetic about her commercial success, predicated on ‘giving audiences what they want’. Ellison’s line about holding a mirror up to all of the black experience, not just a narrow band, is at the heart of the film’s satire. (I dearly wanted this conversation about commerce, art and exoticised ‘othering’ to be more searching, but I suspect that to do this would transform the comedy into something else which, at present, it isn’t equipped to do).  Stagg R Leigh is awarded the literary prize, compounding Ellison’s difficulties as to whether he should reveal all or keep shtum. We are then offered three metafictional endings by way of the Ellison’s (re)shaping his story for Wiley, the executive producer of the absurdly named Plantation Annihilation company that makes Blaxploitation films. Wiley chooses the last one, and Ellison shrugs his shoulders as he drives off with his brother.

On one level, the film is about the contemporary cultural politics around race played knowingly and exuberantly for laughs, in order to offer some home truths about cultural tourism for liberal middle class readers, and also the business of books. But American Fiction possess a lot of heart too, and no more is this true than in the parallel story of Ellison’s troubled relationship with his own family and sibling rivalries within. We meet his mother on the verge of dementia, his feisty doctor sister—played by Tracee Ellis Ross who makes her mark with some of the most wildly funny lines in the film but, alas, exits far too early—and his feckless plastic surgeon brother only recently out of the closet. The latter, Cliff, played by Sterling K Brown, surprises Ellison late in the film by very gently reminding him of the need for honesty so that those that love him can love ‘all of him’. Coraline, a lawyer, and Ellison’s romantic interest shows him just how snobbish, intellectually pretentious and unpleasantly prickly he can. High achievers in their respective professions, the Ellison family (despite their divorces and medical expenses) are more or less comfortably off. The only other characters who aren’t middle class affluent in the film are Agnes, the live-in maid, and Maynard, the policeman who marries Agnes; but both provide a solid sense of a future union that is caring, patient, unshowy and unneurotic, which Ellison will learn to appreciate despite all his cleverness.

Which returns me to my opening anecdote about the Chinese takeaway. What riled me about being mistaken for working in the local Chinese takeaway—if I had the presence of mind to admit it to myself then—was less the stereotyping (though it was that as well) and more the questioning of my status. (What… me, a respectable academic and lecturer at a local University?!!) American Fiction is sharp as a tack on the cultural politics of race but less concerned about class, or the ways race is lived in different socio-economic groups. For the Ellison family are from the professional middle classes; the world they move in can’t be taken to be ‘the breadth of the black experience’, which Ellison castigates Golden for not representing. While being poor and black isn’t the sum total of the black experience that it is sometimes taken to be, neither is being the professional middle classes. But then again, a two hour screening should not be expected to ‘cover’ everything. Instead, we should have many more films that touch on the black experience in myriad and distinctive ways, including ones that aren’t popular, not mainstream, or that are surprising and might not sell. This then might be just one film out of very many representing the black experience. Yet it certainly would be very churlish of me to grumble about what is an uproariously funny and enjoyable debut by Cord Jefferson. As with other films adapted from books that I’ve seen of late, I’m off to read Percival Everett’s Erasure.