American Fiction PEOPLE Review: Jeffrey Wright Is Brilliant in Hot-Button Comedy About a Black Novelist

Jeffrey Wright, best known of late for HBO’s Westworld, has been a grave, intelligent, often quietly heroic presence in TV and movies for three decades — his first film credit dates back to 1990’s Presumed Innocence.  

American Fiction, a freewheeling, hot-button farce about racial identity, is the big breakthrough he’s always deserved. Wright, 58, gives a funny, bitter, sharply controlled performance, fueled by barely suppressed bile and an exasperated incredulity at modern culture. 

At the very least, he's a master of the slow burn. 

In this clever adaptation of Perceval Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, directed by Cord Jefferson, Wright plays Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a respected Black writer whose latest book — a novel dealing with serious, if tedious, intellectual themes — can’t find a publisher. The problem, he’s told by his agent (John Ortiz), is that a Black author, however respected, needs to be writing from a universally acknowledged “Black” perspective.

In short, Monk needs to be more like Sintara Golden (the radiant Issa Rae), who’s written a runaway bestseller called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto. 

Ellison, enraged, dashes off a parody, My Pafology, full of urban crime, poverty and profanity, and gets it published under the name Stagg R. Leigh (an allusion to the old Black folk ballad “Stagger Lee,” about a Black pimp and gambler who shoots and kills a man in a barroom). 

Like Da Ghetto, Pafology is a sensation, praised for its unflinching authenticity — so authentic, it attracts the avid attention of Hollywood. But how will Monk publicize it? What face, in effect, does he dare present to the public?

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In Erasure, Monk (who serves as the book’s narrator) pointedly sums up this predicament: “The irony was beautiful. I was a victim of racism by failing to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial definition.” Nonetheless, he adds, “the game was becoming fun.” 

That goes for American Fiction too. The ending is ingenious.

American Fiction is in theaters now.