American Fiction: Getting to the Inauthentic-Authentic Black Story

AMERICAN FICTION is Cord Jefferson’s hilarious directorial debut, which confronts our culture’s obsession with reducing people to outrageous stereotypes. Jeffrey Wright stars as Monk, a frustrated novelist who’s fed up with the establishment profiting from “Black” entertainment that relies on tired and offensive tropes. To prove his point, Monk uses a pen name to write an outlandish “Black” book of his own, a book that propels him to the heart of hypocrisy and the madness he claims to disdain.

Review:

Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction is a literary dramedy about a joke that backfires on its writer, a dejected literature professor Thelonious Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) who becomes a pen name celebrity when he writes a ghetto potboiler novel that he hates. Ellison who goes by the name Monk, after the legendary jazz pianist and not the obsessive compulsive television detective, is an aloof borderline asshole who writes literary imaginings of Ancient Greek plays, in other words— novels no one will read.

Ellison is black but not the gangsta style black that is au currant in publishing. He gets miffed when he goes to bookstores and finds his tomes shelved under African American Fiction and not mythology. His agent is constantly pleading with him to urbanize his work with rap stereotypes and situations like the successful black writer, Sintara Golden. When Monk goes to one of her readings for In Da Ghetto, the audience can see the detest for the writing boil up to the camera. Her dialogue is groaning Ebonic, the prose a neither here nor there blend of the lyric and cliché. It’s soothingly inoffensive and a nice leveler for the luridness of the dialogue. When his satiric response is published, initially titled “My Pafology” but impulsively changed to the more bestselling sounding “Fuck”, and is inexplicably nominated for a prominent book award, Ellison finds out (he’s one of the judges along with her) that In Da Ghetto’s dialogue was transcribed from her interviews with poor black mothers and that their experiences became the core of the book. She too hates her work but at least it was authentic unlike “Fuck.”. Ellison’s fraud wins the award and Monk is forced to maintain his fake gangsta persona.

The circular inside meta joke of American Fiction — it’s impossible to write about not wanting to write about race without writing about race, especially if you want to sell the book to a best seller list reading audience that’s mostly white. Jefferson delivers this point with zing and sting.

Monk’s non-writing life, i.e. his estranged family, serve as both point and counterpoint. There’s Monk’s quest to get his remaining family more involved both financially and presence wise in the care of his aging mother (Leslie Uggams) after the sudden death of his sister (Tracee Ellis Ross). That means Monk must drop his guard and try reconnecting with his gay plastic surgeon brother (Sterling K. Brown). The satire is wrapped around and into a finely acted naturalistic drama about a privileged black family in crisis, an August Wilson play. The great irony and beauty of American Fiction is that its inauthenticity and authenticity are authentic.

The stitching of these contrasting themes is what creates Monk’s and American Fiction’s soulful reality. There is even an August Wilson surreal moment when his faux black father and son reenact scenes and help create them. Neat example how the inauthentic can turn authentic, showing how life is both parody and reality inside itself simultaneously.