Stronger than Fiction: Jeffrey Wright’s Oscar favourite has more to say than your average author film

The satirical comedy is hotly tipped for an Oscar next year, securing its place in a long lineage of brilliant films about neurotic writers, from Barton Fink to The Shining. But, as Geoffrey Macnab argues, ‘American Fiction’ has a humour and pathos that transcends the genre

Jeffrey Wright is being praised for his wonderfully sly and affecting performance as Monk: a thoughtful, middle-class man simmering with explosive resentment (Claire Folger)

Political correctness doesn’t come easy to Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, the anti-hero played by Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction, Cord Jefferson’s coruscating new satirical comedy adapted from the 2001 novel Erasure by Percival Everett. Monk is a talented author who hasn’t completed a new book in years. For that reason, he is also a professor – one with a knack for offending his students. He’ll ask the German ones if they’re descended from Nazis and he horrifies the snowflakes by writing the N-word in big letters on the blackboard during discussions of Southern Gothic writer, Flannery O’Connor.

More than anything, Monk is infuriated by the condescension shown toward Black authors by the white cultural establishment. All publishers want from him are stories about gangs, poverty, pimps, single mums, drug addiction, and Black oppression.

“They want a Black book,” his agent offers by way of explanation as to why editors have once again turned down his latest work; it doesn’t reflect the authentic “African American experience”. Monk growls back, “They have a Black book. I’m Black and it’s my book.”