Erasure by Percival Everett

 

This turned out to be a more complicated novel than James was, at least in some ways. Some of that might have been the explicit intellectualism of the narrator, some might have been the insertion of another (much shorter) novel inside it--one probably too short to play as a novel for real, but enough to serve the larger purposes. The story is ... more nuanced than the cover copy, or reviews of the movie made from it, might lead you to believe. The language is well handled, both in the narrator's own voice (so to speak) and in the thing he writes out of some combination of rage and self-sabotage and desperation and pain; the characters all seem very much themselves, with the exception of the character who's slipping into dementia. The novel has a lot to say about a lot of things, identity (both in the sense of racial and in the sense of self) is the primary one, though there's clearly some amount of poking at the literary establishment of the late-1990s, when this was almost certainly written (publishing date of 2001). It's a pretty strong novel, though I can't pretend to understand the vast majority of what the narrator was writing about when he wasn't, erm, narrating.