Run, Don’t Walk Toward Your Nearby Remote

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Someone suggested that I watch American Fiction, a 2023 film about the writing life and the current world of publishing.

And so I did. It is the story of my own life, at least for the last decade. I wish it were fictional but, alas, it's all too true. Yes, it is about what kind of fiction is selling in America these days, and it is about the plight of all serious writers, with the usual lucky exceptions.

The film is described as a romantic comedy, but I found nothing out-and-out funny about it. Written by Cord Jefferson, and based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett, it is about a politically incorrect author/professor, Thelonious ("Monk") Ellison, expertly played by Jeffrey Wright, whose views have offended his "woke" students and his own department. He is advised to take a leave of absence. Back home in Boston, Monk connects with his sister, Lisa, a physician (played by Tracee Ellis Ross); his mother, Agnes (played by Leslie Uggams); and his brother, Cliff, also a physician (played by Sterling K. Brown). All the players are superb as are John Ortiz, Issa Rae, Adam Brody, and Erika Alexander.

Monk cannot bear it when he sees a crappy novel, filled with fake ghetto non-English but written by a well-educated woman, become a best-seller. Its title is "We's Lives in the Ghetto." In Monk's view (mine too), this is just a new version of minstrelsy or, rather, Black Face but as performed by genuinely Black people. This seems to impress the incredibly dumb-ass White folk who run publishing and Hollywood because they think it's the "real deal" and because it pleases them to have Black folk depicted as lowlifes, losers, and criminals.

Suddenly, Monk needs a lot of money fast, and so he writes a lowlife book filled with Black gang shootings, absent fathers, and drug dealing sons, which he titles “My Pafology” but then retitles "Fuck." His pseudonym is Stagg R. Leigh. (Get it?) Publishers go wild. He is offered a $750,000.00 advance. Hollywood offers four million dollars for the screen rights. His literary agent, played by John Ortiz, is ecstatic about the money. And why not? Monk's high-quality fiction barely sells.

Is this exaggerated? I fear not. Am I happy about the way in which White Publishing Folk are depicted? Not exactly but it's not far off from the truth. What sells--what publishers take on and market well--is all too often pretty much crap. It has to be written by a person of color, preferably from outside America but, if an American, someone who can deliver words in broken Black English. Better yet. Someone trans, a sex worker, a pimp, a gangster, a single mother of millions, an incest victim many times over--these are the preferred stereotypes.

Yes, sometimes a work with such characters can be a work of quality, but most often it is not. Have you ever tried to read Fifty Shades of Gray? Or any of the bodice-ripping Romances? They command millions of followers. Publishers are just giving the people what they so clearly want.

Like Christians versus lions in the gladiatorial ring. Or public hangings.

The fact that the entire cast is African American (other than Monk's department colleagues and the benighted Hollywood folk) did not even register with me as hugely significant--and why? Because the film addresses a problem that an increasing number of writers of all colors have. Yes, Monk’s relatives are all professionally accomplished and sophisticated. Monk's brother is gay. Their mother is homophobic, and their father committed suicide. Everyone has gotten divorced. Might as well have titled it: A Typical American Family....

I was riveted by the insanity of the "wokesters" who were outraged by Monk's rather sane, and therefore unacceptably conservative, views.

Five years ago, I published a piece at Tablet that I titled The Writing Life. Here's a brief part of it:

Today, a feminist cannot be “politically incorrect,” not even in a book with that precise title. In this very work, I was not allowed to write at length about my 21st-century preoccupations, which include the rise in antisemitism and anti-Zionism; the failures of feminism; 9/11, Jihad terrorism, and Islamism; the dangers of identity politics; the nature of honor-based violence, including honor killing.

I had no cause for alarm. I had worked happily with the same editor and the same agent.

I don’t think what happened to me was unique. I believe this was and still is happening to many other authors, too.

Here’s what happened next: I had to do mortal combat with 4,000 editorial challenges and demands (yes, I counted them up) made by at least two, but probably by three different editors. No one editor had seen what the other two editors had to say. This felt like a prolonged assault. It did not improve the writing so much as provide the editors with an opportunity to knock the work down, not elevate it.

This was beyond exhausting, frustrating, even insulting. Junior people were asking foolish questions. Of course, some comments/queries/challenges were useful. I wish there had been more of them.

A chapter in which I critiqued identity politics was rejected outright. Well, maybe it was not a perfect or even a final draft, it needed work, but the publisher was afraid of legal, critical, and perhaps even violent repercussions. I questioned, no, I deplored identity politics. I questioned the use of gender over sex. I viewed this as dangerous. I went through every one of my own “identities” to reject each one. In my case, I concluded, you might only be able to find me in my books—but once I finished a work, I was gone, I was no longer there.

My work was not done after wrestling the 4,000 challenges to the ground. The manuscript was then submitted to two outside “sensitivity” readers, one for race, the other for gender. Had they only been as literate as I was, it might have been acceptable, but both lacked my knowledge base. These were terrifying and demoralizing experiences.

One of the two or three editors—I’m not sure which one—demanded that I attribute the song “Embraceable You” to Nat King Cole or I’d be seen as an ignorant racist. But the song had been written by two white Jewish boys (George and Ira Gershwin); Ginger Rogers first sang it in a musical in 1930, and the divine Billie Holiday made it her own in 1944, all long before Nat King Cole’s mellow rendition ever appeared. No matter.

The ultimate indignity: The gender editor removed what I’d written about a custody case that I myself had worked on and substituted her own version of reality which included quoting from the poor woman’s ex-husband, who ranted on and on at a fathers’ rights website.

Wearily, I insisted on my own version. As I’ve written: Everything was a fight.

Some truly bad things continued to happen. My editor was “let go” for corporate reasons. This orphaned my book. The editor who inherited the work barely read it. She was also too busy to talk to me. She had an option on my next book which she swiftly declined. My agent then refused to represent this and any of my future work. She fired me.

The editor who inherited me chose to rush it out with a lead time of about two or three months, and with a pub date of Aug. 28, a time of year when everyone is away.

Unbelievably, the printer managed to drop 40 pages of a science fiction novel right into the middle of my book. I only found out about this when a few readers who knew me reached out to me. The publisher shrugged it off. “This happens.” Although they paid me to read for the audiobook, they chose not to publish a paperback version of this title.

And then the publicist told me, with great disappointment, that it was too late to book readings at Barnes & Noble—and that only one bookstore was even willing to have me at the end of August.

“What bookstore is that?”

“The Rare Book Room at the Strand.”

Oh, I was in heaven. I may have spent a quarter of my life browsing there. The venue had sentimental value to me and it represented a love of books that is missing from the chains.

At the last moment, I managed to fill the place with more than 100 people and I hope that a good time was had by all. It aired several times on C-SPAN. I also read at a wonderful store, Book Culture, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where a spirited Q-and-A took place.

That was it. No editor ever appeared to greet me, support me, see me in performance, take me out for a drink.

What may we learn from this? I’m really not sure. Wait for better times? Form your own publishing company? Take up needlepoint? Write like hell and never stop, just keep going?

In these times, every author, not just me, faces such ordeals. It does not matter if you’ve been a bestselling author or a legendary pioneer. Nothing will spare a writer from such nervous scrutiny.

Look: Walt Whitman had to self-publish. Herman Melville was very negatively reviewed and had to work as a customs inspector. I could go on. You get my point.