It's not until fairly recently that I became aware of Percival Everett. Never mind that his first novel came out 40 years ago and that he's written over thirty books. Sometimes, somehow, you just don't come across a writer no matter how good that writer is. It was on some website a couple years ago that I happened across a piece on his novel Erasure, published in 2001, and the description of the book's plot so grabbed me that I kept it in my mind afterwards, and when I heard that a film adaptation of the novel was coming -- American Fiction -- I decided to read Erasure before seeing the film. I did both in the last month and was not disappointed in either. The book is a very funny look at race, stereotypes, the writing world, and a few other things, and it is also a sharp and poignant family drama. The film, with Jeffrey Wright as the main character, the novelist Thelonious Ellison, is an excellent adaptation. It's a film that is faithful to the book and that condenses some plot points from the novel well. It also, in one important character at least, adds a bit of nuance that is appropriate to a story taking place now, not twenty odd years ago. A success on all counts, in my view, as is the book.
After finishing it, the book, I mean, I had that pleasing feeling you get when you've read someone who to you is new and who you want to explore further. And in this case, as I said, there's much to explore, since Everett has been and continues to be prolific. What's better for a reader than that? You've found an author you didn't know about, like that person's writing a lot, and see that you have so much more of their stuff to choose from. And Everett is nothing if not protean. You look through his list of titles and the descriptions of what the novels are about and you see a startling level of variety: satires, western-set stories, plots involving crime, fictional biography, and narratives derived from Greek mythology, to name a few. There's much genre mixing and, clearly, a refusal to hew to conventional forms and reader expectations. My only dilemma after Erasure was where among all this to start. But after a visit to a bookstore and some browsing among his books on the shelf there, I chose So Much Blue, a novel of his from 2017.
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