Jeffrey Wright Takes the Literary World to Task in ‘American Fiction’

At a time when genre movies are so dominant, any chance to sit down with a small film that just wants to talk about regular life is more than welcome. Such is the case with writer-director Cord Jefferson‘a American Fiction, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on Friday. The movie, adapted from Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, intends to have a good, long chat, one that stimulates and entertains even if it ends without any concrete resolutions.

Jeffrey Wright plays Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a novelist and university professor who, like many a novelist character, is down on his luck. He’s written some respected novels in the past, serious works of the highest literary order, but they haven’t sold well. No publishers seem interested in his latest manuscript, a high-minded reimagining of Aeschylus’s The Persians, and the administration at his university have grown fed up with his hard-nosed resistance to the progressive (and, at times, aggressive) pieties of modern academia.

He’s put on a leave of absence and returns to his native Boston, to attend a depressing book festival and to reunite with his semi-estranged family—seemingly well-to-do folks with a large Victorian house in town (maybe Jamaica Plain?) and a beach cottage on the South Shore. (These scenes were filmed in Scituate, for the Massholes reading this.) Monk is from a clan of doctors: his late father was a gynecologist; his sister, Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), works at a Planned Parenthood-esque clinic; and his brother, Cliff (Sterling K. Brown), is a plastic surgeon in Tucson. Monk is the odd man out, grumpier and snobbier than his siblings and not terribly attentive to his elderly mother, Agnes (Leslie Uggams).

Monk is also unmoored in his industry. He observes, with disgust, that where Black authors are concerned, white-run publishing houses are interested only in ornate litanies of horror: brutal stories of inner-city gang life and drug addiction. An up-and-coming author, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), is finding great success with a novel called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, feted at conferences and spoken about in reverent tones. It infuriates Monk, who sees books like hers as staggeringly narrow in their view of Black life, pandering to white people’s prejudices, their noxious and alienating liberal pity. In a fit of pique, Monk writes a pseudonymous novel called My Pafology, a supposedly autobiographical chronicle of violence and poverty meant as a prank on publishers, who surely would never actually publish it. Of course, it instead becomes a lucrative and widely praised bestseller.

American Fiction is a skewering of that literary climate and a rambling, funny-sad narrative about Monk’s struggle to connect with his family as it begins to fall apart. (There’s also a love interest, played sweetly by Erika Alexander.) It’s an old-fashioned movie in a way, a coming-home film with a particular topic on its mind. There’s an air of James L. Brooks wafting through American Fiction, an echo of that filmmaker’s witty and discursive approach to matters of the brain and of the heart.

Yet the film’s satire and its rumpled humanism don’t always agree. The arch high comedy of Monk’s publishing misadventures break the spell of the film’s more grounded domestic passages. Jefferson, an Emmy-winning writer making a promising directorial debut, blends these two modes together where he can, but the seams are a little rough to the touch.

Perhaps one cause of that discordance is that Everett’s novel was published in 2001 as a parodic rebuke of novels like Push (later adapted into the award-winning film Precious), which Everett saw as a prime example of the urban misery porn that Black writers were being railroaded into writing by market demand. That trope has certainly not died out, but Everett’s indictment of it perhaps had more pertinent bite in its own day. White culture’s appetite for Black stories has not necessarily improved since then, but it has evolved into new complications.

Jefferson attempts to update the references to converse with the recently emergent shapes of smarmy white interest—laden with academic terms learned online and often misunderstood, neurotically self-conscious and arrogantly heedless at once—but he’s still tethered to the specificity of Everett’s My Pafology, its particular condemnation of a style that is no longer exactly de rigueur. American Fiction, a sharp and clever film, could be all the more so if it felt better connected to the present tense. As is, the reflection is a bit warped; contemporary subtleties are missing.