American Fiction

In American Fiction, an embittered black author, who is sick of having his highbrow material rejected by publishers and neglected by readers, writes a lurid pastiche of urban black life called My Pafology. He submits the new manuscript under a pseudonym. His object is to needle the industry with its own bad taste. And so, following the logic of The Producers, it sells.

This much is made clear in the trailer, which features a pull quote calling the film a “cinematic stick of dynamite.” The advertising emphasizes jokes at the expense of gullible white people whose self-righteous endorsement of representation masks deeply ingrained feelings of racial prejudice.

In a way, the trailer is as lurid as My Pafology, and more perceptive than the satirical elements in American Fiction. White liberals in 2024 are quick to reject negative stereotypes about people of color—but they are extremely credulous when it comes to negative stereotypes about themselves. White self-mortification is used as bait. But the switch is worth the swindle.

At bottom, the film is about a highly cultured, highly dysfunctional black family. The patriarch was a brilliant surgeon and flagrant philanderer; we are given to understand that emotional repression led him to live a double life, which ended in suicide. Thus a spoor of failed relationships stalks his bloodline like a curse. His two sons—including the novelist, Monk (Jeffrey Wright)—flew the coop. In a bitterly accurate detail, Monk’s divorced sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) bears the responsibility of caring for their mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams), whose dementia is becoming unmanageable.

Cord Jefferson, an online journalist turned TV scriptwriter who is making his directorial debut, establishes the filial atmosphere with a finely comic slow burn. This obscures the sheer volume of backstory required to get the satire teed up. But the family drama is what’s substantive. The publishing screed is a classic MacGuffin: that is, an engine for the plot. And though it works on its own in its early stages, Jefferson cannot integrate it into the farmhouse-sink realism—which he acknowledges in his denouement.

I think it is noteworthy that the source material—the novel Erasure by Percival Everett—was published in 2001. It was contemporary with Spike Lee’s Bamboozled and the book that Precious was based on. In fact, I think its gibes have fallen somewhat out of date. The closest real-world parallel to the success of My Pafology that I can recall in recent years is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir Between the World and Me (2015). But even if Coates was, like Monk, surprised to find a vast and receptive white readership, I am hesitant to impugn that readership’s motives. More on that later.

I think that what Jefferson is gesturing toward is the notion that in order for a black creative to have a wide—i.e., white—audience, he or she must perform some form of a minstrel show. I say “gesturing toward” because the movie’s attitude toward this is indefinite. This is manifest in how the film portrays Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), a 30-something, Oberlin-educated black novelist whose bestseller is as laden with blatant stereotypes as My Pafology is. (Monk is driven to write his own inadvertent bestseller out of spite.) At the outset, she seems like a charlatan. Later on, when she serves with Monk on a committee that considers honoring My Pafology—nobody knows about Monk’s conflict of interest—with a soigné award, she is the voice of reason. Golden finds the supposed memoir calculated. But when Monk confronts her for being a hypocrite, given that her own subject matter seems grievously exploitative, her response in enigmatic.

Jefferson’s ambivalence about Golden relates to my wariness to dismiss the white readers who made Between the World and Me a sensation. Even if one wanted to ascribe the book’s cultural impact to the fact that Coates’s life story confirmed his white readers’ biases because they had assumed it was representative of “the” black experience, is it “problematic” that they wanted to hear and empathize with Coates’s perspective? I don’t think there is a simple answer. And I think that Jefferson would agree.

Jeffrey Wright and Erika Alexander

However, I hope that if I say that the director doesn’t have the heart for satire, it is taken as a front-handed insult. What matters is that Monk’s journey serves as a crucible for these ironies. The tender specificity with which he is written and performed confirms—to me—that it does.

A prime example of this is the fact that the movie never explains why its protagonist is called Monk. (His given name is Thelonious.) While he is in Boston for a work trip, Monk visits his family—reluctantly. Like the failed writers in The Holdovers and Can You Ever Forgive Me?, he puts a distance between himself and committed relationships. Monk is often reminded that he was his father’s favorite: the child who took most after him.

But whatever the distance between Monk and his sister Lisa, Wright and Ross quickly close the gap. The way they warm to, and occasionally roast, one another within moments of their characters reuniting is like reading decades of family history off an E.K.G. Their interaction resonates enough that, though Ross has little screen time, when Lisa dies—suddenly—the tragedy behind her hospital door registers in the flopping of her feet.

The funeral recalls Monk’s brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown) to Boston, and, one might think it would set the plot in motion. Neither son lives locally. Neither son—Cliff is a plastic surgeon, but knee-deep in alimony; his ex-wife caught him in bed with a man—can afford Agnes’s medical bills.

But this is where the realism fails to connect with the satire. Monk never expected My Pafology to make money—let alone lots of money. In keeping with his character, he plays this windfall close to the vest; both his family and his girlfriend, a public defender named Coraline (Erika Alexander), are left in the dark. Keeping the ill-gotten money a secret rots Monk from the inside out, but the movie puts curiously little emphasis on how essential this well-timed fortune is for his mother’s care, and so when he comes within an inch of blowing it all, he seems less moral than cavalier.

And yet insofar as American Fiction is a sketch of its main character and his family milieu, lapses like this one are negligible. Alexander can shoot Monk the side eye that is the poison dart of lawyerly forbearance. Uggams walks the tightrope between the comedy and tragedy of Alzheimer’s. There is a family resemblance in Brown’s performance—Cliff is a father pushing 50 who thinks that accepting his sexuality gives him license to behave like an undergrad in Cancun. (Helpfully, Brown has the fermented sass to pull this off, not to mention the body.) Jefferson and Brown, wisely, use this as fodder for comedy—the banter, throughout, is phenomenal—and defer all judginess to Monk. It is clear that Cliff’s excesses and Monk’s reproaches form a toxic equilibrium: the implicit collateral of their social class and upbringing. Wright and Brown spin round each other like a turbine.

Wright is a hugely talented performer who can show a world of pain in a wince. Even in the role of a graying, stocky scribbler, the actor delivers: his physicality is both slithery and crabbed. Toward the end of the movie, at a family wedding, the writer finds himself withdrawn from the joy—captive to introspection. Cliff sees him in this funk. Once Monk acknowledges that he has pushed away another girlfriend, Cliff tells his brother—with equal parts cynicism and sweetness—that people want to love him. And if only from the way those words land on Wright, one knows them to be true.

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