by Percival Everett
This book had me hooked in the first paragraph. I was sampling various “top books of the century” as per the NYT, and I had just sampled about four in a row where the narrator was a writer. One of my peeves. If the narrator isn’t a writer, s/he’s an artist, i.e. a thinly veiled writer. This book opens with, “I am writer of fiction. This admission pains me only at the thought of my story being found and read, as I have always been severely put off by any story which had as its main character a writer.”
This book is very odd, as is its narrator. I’d call it ‘experimental.’ Enough to scare me at little at first. But it was so worth the ride. It’s going to be the best novel I read this year, I can predict. But I’m afraid of its being too politically incorrect to recommend to a lot of the people I know.
“Now a major motion picture!” Which I definitely will not go see.
Main thread: Thelonious Ellison is a writer of abstruse mostly unread books. He is black but uninterested in the fact. He becomes incensed when an atrocious book of denigrating black stereotypes becomes a runaway best-seller and decides to write his own awful book of denigrating black stereotypes, making it a broad parody. But it’s taken seriously and makes him millions.
Another thread: violent deaths of his father and sister, and slow loss of his mother to Alzheimer’s. I can relate to the difficulties of parental decline, simultaneous genuine grief coupled with genuine selfish thoughts.
Thelonious would probably be called “on the spectrum” or “neurodivergent.” Also “brilliant.” The writing is all of the above and I adored it.
Tytania 