The Great American Adaption
How American Fiction Turns Literature into Movie Magic
The Year of Adaptations
As we previewed the Oscars and drew parallels to the world of books last week, we noted that 2023 was a particularly strong year in film. It also happened to be an incredibly strong year of book-to-film adaptations. Books in their many forms (picture, graphic, comic) are the silent backbone to the film industry—where a lot of readymade, fully-fleshed-out ideas come from. But while books provide a large share of the inspiration in Hollywood, great adaptions have always been about taking underlying material and changing it.
Stephen King famously disliked Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, largely considered one of the best horror movies ever made, because it didn’t adhere to the themes of his book. But that’s precisely what makes The Shining a special movie—Kubrick took all of bones of King’s book (the hotel, the isolation, the haunts) and imposed his own vision and emphases on it. One of the biggest Oscar snubs of this year was Martin Scorsese and Eric Roth’s adapted screenplay for Killers of the Flower Moon. Scorsese and Roth (spoiler alert) take David Grann’s narrative nonfiction whodunit about the murder of Osage Native Americans for oil money, and invert the premise of the book entirely: we know exactly who the murderers are not even halfway through act one of the film. Scorsese’s bold choice to transform mystery into character study transforms the book into something different and something special as a film.
There are exceptions that prove the rule of course, especially in the crime genre. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (adapted by Gillian Flynn) is one. The Godfather is another example that comes to mind. The greatest film adaptation ever might be No Country for Old Men, in which really excellent filmmakers (and writers) just put visuals to exactly what’s on the page in book (it’s very funny to watch film analysis online of No Country, where the person heaping praise onto the movie doesn’t realize all of the best scenes and lines are lifted directly from the book). But for every perfect 1:1 adaptation there are dozens more that are mediocre or just plain bad. Most books aren’t written to just be visualized scene-for-scene, and most of the meaning that comes across in a novel becomes watered down when rough sketched onto the silver screen.
American Fiction challenges this paradigm, or at least shows a third way. The film adapted and directed by Cord Jefferson, and nominated for five Oscars including best adapted screenplay and best picture, is neither a full transformation nor a carbon copy of Percival Everett’s audacious, metafictional novel Erasure. Today, we examine how one fantastic novel can become a fantastic movie without being changed in essence.
Erasure by Percival Everett
Published in 2001, Erasure is about a professor of English, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a super intellectual novelist who is also Black (very likely auto fictional). Monk’s race is no small impediment in his life, largely because he’s always seen as Black first and not as the cerebral, outsider, artist weirdo he actually is. The obscure literary novels Monk writes are shelved in “African American Studies” and he can’t sell his next book to a publisher because it doesn’t speak to the Black experience. After seeing the runaway critical and commercial success of another Black novelist’s lowest common denominator story, We’s Live in Da Ghetto, Monk hatches a plan: to mockingly copy this latest bestseller (a hugely popular genre in the late 90s that has since waned) in the most blatantly offensive way possible. The title of the fictional book? My Pafology, written under the pseudonym “Stagg R. Leigh.” He forces his literary agent, who resists, to send it out to publishing houses. You can guess what happens next (it’s a runaway success).
The novel is excellent, but not for the faint of heart. Most of the novel, like the film, is slyly a more traditional—a moving family story about grief, aging, and acceptance, with the publishing drama on the side as a plot engine. However, what makes Erasure an absolute in-your-face achievement is that Everett includes about 60-80 pages of the fake novel My Pafology within the novel. Just like the fictional Monk, Percival Everett is smart enough to know what you do and don’t want as a reader, and is unwilling to spare you from his intellectual exercise. Everett’s Krauss, his novel-within-a-novel, is done with supreme earnestness and without any winking—it really is a version of those kinds of 90s novels not a straight parody played for laughs. But Everett’s satire is also not one-sided, there’s a separate section earlier in the book where Monk gives a lecture on one of his literary theories. If you were wondering why no one reads our protagonist’s novels, your doubts are put to rest: Monk’s lecture is so densely academic that it’s the only part of the book that is more unreadable than the fake novel.
These incredibly brave creative choices that Everett makes remind me of a speech Monk’s literary agent gives in the film. There are three tiers of Johnnie Walker whiskey, he says (which he pulls from his literary agent bar cart, another A+ authentic detail). He tells Monk that he can write Blue Label, the highest form of literature, but that most people don’t buy Blue Label because it’s so expensive. He says, also, that Monk is so talented he’s proven he can also write Red Label, the lowest form of literature that fills people’s base desires, which also happens to be Mr. Walker’s bestseller. Everett, in Erasure, truly does prove he can write in all vintages from rough, to smooth, to the acquired taste.
The Magic of American Fiction
There are many moments like the agent’s Johnnie Walker speech that show the brilliance of Cord Jefferson’s adaptation. He hasn’t so much changed the core material of Everett’s book as brought it to life in 3D with a dynamism between actors that is rare even on screen. What’s already joyful in the novel is even more fun in the movie as the rapport between Monk, played by Jeffrey Wright, and his brother, sister, and mother—Sterling K. Brown, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Leslie Uggams, respectively — is infectious, heartfelt, and hilarious. Likewise, Monk and his literary agent (typically the kind of profession that’s portrayed as unflatteringly vampiric on screen) get into hijinks together with the genuine thrill of a buddy comedy.
In the film, the most challenging pieces of the book are greatly condensed— Monk doesn’t give his convoluted speech on literary theory (thankfully); instead, we get to watch him be put on a leave of absence because his white student is offended by the n-word. Without spoiling it, the way the content of Monk’s prank novel is portrayed (Cord does not make you watch 30-40 minutes of it on screen, thankfully) made one of the people in the theater behind me say out loud, “Wow that’s brilliant.” As a testament to the magic of Cord’s adaption, I can’t remember which moments in the film — like the Johnny Walker speech or the classroom scene — were taken from the book and which Cord wrote without having the book in front of me to double check, such is his simpatico with Everett on the humor, satire, and understanding of the characters. The two versions stand next to each other like two seasoned comedians riffing off one another.
Inside Fastball
Miraculously, American Fiction still stays true to all of the ideas Everett’s novel, even while the writer/director, actors, and craftspeople build and expand on those ideas. American Fiction is still a movie about a certain type of racism pervasive in publishing and other creative fields. Even if the film adaptation wasn’t so bold as to change the type of white guilt novel that would be exploited in 2024 (versus when Erasure was published in 2001)— it still has plenty of specificity to sting. The details are biting, down to the RBG posters on the wall behind the publisher and one of Monk’s fellow award judges, a writer from Brooklyn, expressing excitement to read a novel about the “Black carceral experience” (the precision to use the word “carceral” here, chef’s kiss). Cord also goes after the world of film: taking a plot point in the book and giving us a white director who wants to buy Stagg R. Lee’s film rights whose latest film in production is a slave revenge story entitled Plantation Annihilation.
What is so powerful about the novel and the novel-as-film two decades later is that both are too smart and considered for the message to turn into white people are racist and publishing is bad and racist (although plenty of viewers who want to see it that way probably will). From publisher, to Brooklyn writer, to book publicist, to film director, American Fiction has plenty of scathing takes on a specific brand of progressive racism and appropriation, but never tips the scales to being didactic. Both Black and white characters like Monk’s fake book, the Black novelist of We’s Live in Da Ghetto played by Issa Rae justifies her own novel by saying she did “the research”, and the drumbeat of the entire book/film is that many of Monk’s problems have more to do with his dyspeptic personality than the color of his skin.
Everett and Cord make us laugh, cringe, reflect. Showing us this is the way it is. We can all do better, which is also very much the spirit of this brilliant and generous adaption.