Stunned that no one recognizes his book as a send-up, Monk refuses to let his true identity be known. There, his frustration with a runaway bestseller written in ghettospeak by a bourgeois black woman after visiting Harlem for a couple of days is fueled by endless rejections of his own new manuscript in a rage he pumps out a parody and sends it under a pseudonym to his agent-who promptly secures a six-figure advance and a seven-figure movie deal. Someone has to take care of Mom, who's showing the first wrenching signs of Alzheimer's, so Monk returns home. No sooner does he return to California than Sis, a doctor in an abortion clinic, is shot dead at work. Monk, is a largely unknown academic novelist who visits hometown Washington, D.C., to give a paper and see his mother and sister. His own generation's version of an invisible man, Thelonious Ellison, a.k.a. Desperation outstrips the satire in Everett's latest exercise in narrative wizardry ( Glyph, 1999, etc.), as a lonely African-American writer faces private torment and instant fame when his parody of ghetto literature is taken as the real deal.
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