An essential reading guide for fighting racism

In the tail end of 2019, as I was gearing up for our most anticipated books of 2020 list, my editor Karolina dropped the novel Telephone on my desk, said, "Percival Everett has a new book," and the meaning was clear — this one should be a priority. Everett wasn't on my radar at the time, despite his having published thirty books, but the book hooked me as soon as I began, and I only became more interested as I started reading up on Everett himself. I was especially intrigued by this 2018 Los Angeles Review of Books essay about him. (Fittingly, it opens, "You may not have heard of Percival Everett, and he would probably prefer it that way.") The piece specifically praises Erasure, Everett's 2001 novel about a writer fed up with a publishing industry — and, as sales would suggest, a majority of readers — that's only interested in black authors if they're writing about suffering. I ordered it that day. (For those wondering — Telephone made our most anticipated and best of spring lists.)

And, yes, Erasure is excellent. Its protagonist Thelonious "Monk" Ellison is a professor and writer in a rut: His agent keeps telling him publishers are disappointed that his books aren't "black enough;" on top of that, his mother is dying from Alzheimer's and her decline is stirring up lingering trauma from his father's suicide seven years earlier. His anger peaks as he witnesses the massive success and breathless reviews of We's Lives in Da Ghetto, a debut novel by an upper middle–class black writer, based on the few days she spent in Harlem visiting relatives. Spurred by that anger, he writes a satirical novel called My Pafology under a pseudonym, but its intention sails over the heads of critics and readers as it soon becomes a massive success, leaving Monk to grapple with the decision to either stick to his principles, or say fuck it, take the huge advance he's now being offered, and lean into an identity the rest of the country so desperately wants to believe in.

Erasure is biting, poignant, meta, and very funny, but it's also experimental — My Pafology is included, in its entirety, within the book, and Everett also weaves in letters, writing exercises, and imagined conversations between historical figures — and the structure itself is a challenge of mainstream narrative expectations. (Everett continues this with Telephone, which was quietly published with three different endings.) It's a thought-provoking and invigorating exploration of authenticity, racism, and grief — and it is, disappointingly, as relevant an indictment of the publishing industry today as it was nearly 20 years ago. Get your copy now. —Arianna Rebolini

Author to Author:

Diane Cook chats with Lydia Millet

L-R: Diane Cook (credit: Katherine Rondina); Lydia Millet (credit: J. Beall)

Lydia Millet's new novel A Children's Bible is about 12 teens who are on vacation with their parents at a lakeside mansion when a massive storm turns their comfortable world into apocalyptic chaos. Here, Diane Cook — whose novel The New Wilderness is out this August — chats with Millet about Eden and dystopia, how the powers-that-be are failing us, and our power to bring about change.

I’ve long admired Lydia Millet as a writer and as a person in the world. She writes fantastic books and also uses her writing skills at an environmental protection nonprofit for her day job. She makes writing and the greater environment around her inextricable from one another. I got to read her newest, A Children’s Bible, in the hard midst of the pandemic, and it was an eerie and exhilarating experience. The “children” of the title (really, more surly yet charming teens) begin the book sequestered in a large crumbling rental mansion for the summer, and end up living in various states of quarantine and lockdown due to a storm brought on by climate change that devastates the east coast region. It’s a stunning book — ferocious, damning, and often hilarious, and I could not recommend it more. I sent some questions to Lydia over email about where it came from and what it means to her. –Diane Cook

Diane Cook: I loved how the first chunk of the book seems like a teen summer romp. The children have free rein; they meet hot, rich kids on the beach. Then things suddenly get dangerous. It’s like you’re lulling us into a sense of complacency, akin to our social complacency right now, before unleashing the danger around us, which, in the book and in life, is climate change. Did you always know the story needed a sharp turn?

Lydia Millet: There’s one around every corner…the world has always been Eden for some and a dystopia for others. The Book of Genesis frames that as a movement through time and out of God’s grace, but it’s also a persistent social condition — and in recent years many of us have been living in Eden and dystopia simultaneously. In an endless summer where our personal lives unspool as usual and catastrophe is elsewhere, and within a looming dread that’s imparted to us by science and the news. We’ve had Katrina and Sandy and Maria, a few raging wildfires. We’ve heard about the island nations being swamped by the ocean, the corals bleaching and the ice melting. In this particular moment, also brought to us by our abuse of the wild, we have the COVID-19 pandemic.

But as a culture we’ve already fallen from grace — we’ve eaten the fruit of knowledge. In the U.S. the schisms resulting from that fall are everywhere, between the power elites and the intellectual elites, the protected and the exposed, the young and the old. The power elites, in this case the current president and his buddies in Congress, are gaslighting us all: There was no fruit of knowledge and hell no, they never ate it. Knowledge of the future simply doesn’t exist, is what they claim. Climate change isn’t manmade; mass extinction is perfectly natural. So don’t fuss! Keep buying stuff! Stuff will bring us a happy ending. Because for power elites, barring a few fitful little revolutions, happy endings are an entitlement. The rest of us are hostages to that willful denial.

DC: There’s a moment when the young people realize the storm they rode out in the summer house devastated most of the Northeast. You write that the visuals from hurricanes usually took place elsewhere. “Now it claimed to be closer locations. Pine trees whipping around instead of palms.” What did it mean for you and the story to set it on the East Coast and populate it with characters living a life of relative privilege?

LM: The East Coast because it’s the economic and cultural-production epicenter, along with California, where the hot, rich kids in the book come from. Privilege because this story’s about young people’s contempt for middle-aged, upper-middle-class smugness and passivity. Mainstream Americans have had the complacency you mentioned since about the end of the Civil War, the last large, bloody conflict here at home. With a few blips like the Great Depression, Vietnam — where war entered our living rooms through brutal news footage and images of dead young men and civilian massacres — and the shock of 9/11.

In the 20th century, Americans gave politicians a blank check to prosecute foreign wars and other imperialist misadventures, but collectively lived at such a safe remove from large-scale suffering and disaster that we’ve come to think we’re insulated from them forever. Stopped believing in our own vulnerability. Moved so far away from entertaining the possibility of social breakdown, and buried our heads so far into the quicksand of market capitalism, that many of us now claim to reject the idea of government itself. Until we desperately need that government. To, say, contain a contagious disease. For that we need a government that’s rational and sane. And come to find out, Oh look! We don’t have one.

DC: Who the real villains are in this book was an interesting question for me. Some textbook villains show up eventually, but there’s already a kind of menace present in the slothfulness of the parents.

LM: I think there are at least two brands of bad guys in the book. To the children the guilty are the parents, at first — they're soft villains, ideological villains. Villains in that they've failed to live up to their duty. Failed to safeguard the future. But over time, as chaos flattens out into isolation and the tedium of daily survival without a social structure to turn to, the kids come to see the parents with pity instead of rage. They even try to take care of them — not only by giving their own blood, when the parents are sick, but by becoming parents themselves in the aftermath of the undoing. Becoming protectors.

The men with guns are hard villains, I guess, not soft ones like the parents are. Obvious, criminal, violent. I see them as a bookend to the arty, ineffectual parents, characters who hurt you though their passivity — these guys just hurt you by hurting you.

In real life the true villains are the entrenched interests of wealth: fossil fuel, electric utilities, the livestock industry, the auto industry. The inertia of their sprawling machine, the amorality of the politicians they bankroll. There too, we’ve been gaslighted into thinking it’s our fault: we don’t recycle enough, maybe. Tsk tsk, you regular people need to change, not the powers. In fact it’s both, our systems and our habits do need reforming, but that’s not possible unless law and policy lead the way.

DC: The novel contains biblical allusions throughout. Perhaps because of that, there’s a bit of the miraculous or magical at work at times. I couldn’t help but feel it was a message to the reader. Like, at this point in the story we’re going to need a bit of magic to get out of this mess. It made everything a little… scarier, if you read the book as an allegory. Because, of course, we won’t be able to count on magic when we need it.

LM: Hey, but I think we do have magic. If we decide to use it. The magic of social pressure, the kind that rises up and forces political will. The magic of transformation. That’s the only miracle we can’t do without. ●

Get your copy of A Children's Bible or The New Wilderness.

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