American Fiction and The Holdovers find beauty in quiet, personal drama

“You know that all successful writers are tormented by their families,” Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) says when his dean encourages him to take a break from teaching and visit his family in an opening scene of American Fiction (directed by Cord Jefferson and adapted from Percival Everett’s novel Erasure). After students complain about Monk’s abrasive teaching style and lack of sensitivity, he has no choice but to take his dean’s suggestion when he is placed on a mandatory leave of absence. Monk is angry at his students, his colleagues, and the entire reading public for their inability to appreciate his brand of esoteric literary art: he reinterprets ancient Greek literature for the modern world, writing densely crafted sentences and carefully observed characters. The only problem? He’s Black.

“What does a reinterpretation of Aeschylus’s The Persians have to do with the African American experience?” a publisher asks in the most recent of a long line of rejection letters. “They want a Black book,” his agent tells him. “They have one. I’m Black and it’s my book,” Monk shoots back. Monk grows increasingly irate at the limited expectations for Black art when “the Black experience” is confined to a spectrum between slavery and poverty, with no room for the nuances of his Black experience: upper-middle class, overly educated, a bit neurotic. In a fit of ire, he bangs out a novel full of cliches (“deadbeat dads, rappers, crack—that’s Black, right?”) under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh. He insists his agent shop the book as an act of protest, throwing back in the faces of the White literary establishment what they say they want from Black authors.

The book sells instantly, with a multimillion-dollar movie deal fast behind. Hilarious hijinks ensue, as Monk discovers just how far he can push his new Black prerogative.