Erasure by Percival Everett

Erasure by Percival Everett, 265 pages, fiction. Our June Book Group title.
In this 2001 novel, written when the Urban Fiction genre was becoming more popular, Thelonius "Monk" Ellison, an English professor and the author of dense, experimental (and unpopular) fiction, finds his life hitting a rough patch. His relationships with his brother and sister change dramatically, his mother's health is rapidly declining, and he finds letters from his late father in which secrets are revealed. At the same time, his literary career has stalled. Angered over the popularity of a new, urban title, We Lives in da Ghetto, and the continued difficulty he has with his own work (books that are parodies of French poststructuralists or re-tellings of Euripides and Aeschylus) being labeled either as African-American fiction, or as "not black enough", he writes his own modernized Native Son, and the consequences both enrich and confound him.
Patrick