The film has been receiving stellar reviews and Oscar buzz, so it’s an exciting time to be a Percival Everett fan. Monk reads a review in a major glossy that praises Jenkins's novel for its "haunting verisimilitude".

The first is the satirization of the publishing industry; the second is Monk’s relationship with his family.As the within protagonist ponders while listening to the rich dude's daughter: She say that last part real slow and it make me nervous, wondering what she be meanin, cause I know she be signifyin. E poi ci sono spezzoni di conversazioni tra artisti famosi, Klee, Rothko, Wittgenstein, Derrida, dialoghi immaginari che sembrano appunti per futura scrittura, taccuini letterari. The novel reacts against the dominant strains of discussion related to the publication and criticism of African-American literature. Meanwhile, Monk struggles with real family tragedies—his aged mother is fast succumbing to Alzheimer’s, and he still grapples with the reverberations of his father’s suicide seven years before.

I feel generally out of place," says the protagonist Thelonious "Monk" Ellison near the end of this astounding book. But the two novels have very separate set-ups with different protagonists of different ages and circumstances.I’ve also reviewed other Everett novels , including Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Assumption, and So Much Blue. Although he has dark brown skin and a broad nose, and has been detained by white police officers in three states, some people don't think he's black enough. The first sound viewers hear as the film gets underway is a marker squeaking against a whiteboard and then Monk’s voice: “Okay, let’s begin. Like a ticking time bomb, Monk nears the edge of the emotional cliff where an epiphany suddenly surfaces.

Wilson Harnet, Ailene Hoover, Thomas Tomad and Jon Paul Sigmarsen just looked at me, none of them speaking. Part of the book features the author’s family - 2 siblings who are doctors, his elderly mother who is developing dementia and his doctor father who committed suicide and left behind some secrets. it's hard to discuss the novel without talking about its elaborate plot and book-within-a-book structure. This is now my fifth completed Everett novel and they’ve all blown my mind in wildly different ways. A fan of the novel, I could spend time parsing all the differences between Erasure and American Fiction.I highly recommend this one for readers that are up for a challenge and won't give up because they don't understand everything. Everett’s writing has earned him the PEN USA 2006 Literary Award (for his 2005 novel, Wounded), the Academy Award for Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (for his 2001 novel, Erasure), the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature (for his 1996 story collection, Big Picture) and the New American Writing Award (for his 1990 novel, Zulus).

Everett would have written an accomplished novel of psychological realism just with the story of Monk's family. I ended up impressed with how Jefferson nimbly incorporates metafictional commentary on adapting novel to film. I cannot properly convey how much Everett twists and turns and reshapes and reconfigures these themes over and over until they tell us something entirely original and blisteringly truthful.Family scenes in particular are handled using some of the cleverest and nimblest writing I’ve encountered when grappling with topics such as the early onset of dementia, a late coming out, or feelings of self-awareness and social awkwardness. Ne scaturisce improvvisamente un romanzo (breve) all’interno del romanzo, quasi un Rap scritto da Luigi Nono, che è l’invenzione più dirompente di “Cancellazione”, ma che resterebbe un espediente autoreferenziale se non fosse racchiuso all’interno di un’opera densa di ironia, commozione, rabbia, umanità e malinconia che Everett sa giostrare con grande maestria. The story weaves his youth as a black man in America with his professional family in a most skilful and interesting way. The title perhaps answers any question before it is raised, making it in some sense an anti-title, but a title nonetheless, thus offering the suggestion of negation.