Film Review: American Fiction digs deep into issues of race and identity

Erika Alexander and Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction.

• American Fiction
• ★★★★☆
• Cinema release

Never judge a book by its cover, they say, but what happens when an author is judged by the colour of his skin? 

American Fiction (15A) stars Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison, an author whose career has stalled because he has no interest in writing about the ‘the African-American experience’.

When Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) becomes a best-seller with a ghetto-porn novel, Monk decides to retaliate with a parody, My Pafology, only to see his self-proclaimed ‘trash’, written under a pseudonym, become a publishing sensation.

Adapted from Percival Everett’s metafictional novel Erasure, and directed by Cord Jefferson, American Fiction is a scathing satire on contemporary publishing that employs the expectations and stereotypes of a semi-literate publishing world to dig deep into issues of race and identity. 

‘Never underestimate the stupidity of the reading public,’ advises the literary agent Arthur (John Ortiz) as he tries to persuade Monk to play along with the money-spinning scheme; Monk, who comes from a comfortable middle-class background, and is creatively influenced by the Greek classics, can continue to write his serious literature under his own name, while simultaneously milking the publishing world for all its worth. 

That Monk is the least ‘street’ individual you can imagine adds another level to the satire: as he flails about trying to sound tough and squeeze himself into his lavishly feathered pigeon-hole, Monk is obliged to confront his own perceptions of what it means to be a Black writer. 

Jeffery Wright fully deserves his Oscar nomination with this multi-layered performance, and he gets terrific support from Erika Alexander as Coraline, who forces Monk to confront the truth of his own self-mythologising, and Sterling K. Brown as Monk’s wayward brother Cliff.