Stunned that no one recognizes his book as a send-up, Monk refuses to let his true identity be known. There, his frustration with a runaway bestseller written in ghettospeak by a bourgeois black woman after visiting Harlem for a couple of days is fueled by endless rejections of his own new manuscript in a rage he pumps out a parody and sends it under a pseudonym to his agent-who promptly secures a six-figure advance and a seven-figure movie deal. Someone has to take care of Mom, who's showing the first wrenching signs of Alzheimer's, so Monk returns home. No sooner does he return to California than Sis, a doctor in an abortion clinic, is shot dead at work. Monk, is a largely unknown academic novelist who visits hometown Washington, D.C., to give a paper and see his mother and sister. His own generation's version of an invisible man, Thelonious Ellison, a.k.a. How Monk deals with the personal and professional fallout galvanizes this audacious, hysterical, and quietly devastating novel.Desperation outstrips the satire in Everett's latest exercise in narrative wizardry ( Glyph, 1999, etc.), as a lonely African-American writer faces private torment and instant fame when his parody of ghetto literature is taken as the real deal. Leigh-and soon it becomes the Next Big Thing. He doesn’t intend for My Pafology to be published, let alone taken seriously, but it is-under the pseudonym Stagg R.
In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off a novel meant to be an indictment of Juanita Mae Jenkins’s bestseller. Thelonious "Monk" Ellison’s writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been "critically acclaimed." He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Meanwhile, Monk struggles with real family tragedies-his aged mother is fast succumbing to Alzheimer’s, and he still grapples with the reverberations of his father’s suicide seven years before.
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