Newsnight Review discussed Erasure by the American academic Percival Everett.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

EKOW ESHUN:
It's a great book. It is all about inversions and parodies. What it is fundamentally saying is it is asking readers to look through black eyes. It is talking about the duality of black experience and saying that when you are black you get to look through your own eyes and skin, but equally look through white eyes and how white people tend to see black people upon the colour of their skin and assume they know who they are, that they know had they are about. That is the position that Monk Ellison is in. He is taking it merely his body and skin colour, so he tries to push against it and the novel plays with the whole form. For instance, the fact that he's called Monk Ellison partly in relation to Thelonious but also in relation to Ralph Ellison, who wrote The Invisible Man and this is a take-off of Native Son and it is the same sense of that duality. So the book in its ideas is playing with the whole thought of the physical and mental. It is philosophy and the outside of the body and that is what makes it so clever.

PAUL MORLEY:
I felt it was an interesting treatment of a great book, but it is seemed very sketched out and as a piece of writing in terms of the potential post modern construct and the playing around with form, I felt it was the first 10% of something that could have been quite interesting but it didn't follow it through. Whether he was referring to Bartez or going into the Jerry Springer world . He could have disguised that and say that the book wasn't written with full research, but I didn't get lifted away. There was a little hint of a great piece of writing.

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
He's ambitious with the form, but part of the problem that for me it does seem to be over literary and over self-conscious in the wrong way. It reads like every creative writing exercise that has ever been set.

LAWSON:
Except much funnier?

WINTERSON:
Yes, it is a good read. Take it in the bath and you'll drown yourself. It is entertaining and clever, but whether or not it has any transformative power, I doubt. It didn't take me to a place I haven't been before.

LAWSON:
It made me think that, how about you?

ESHUN:
You are missing some of the point of the book. It isn't just a conceptual exercise. It works in two ways, level of ideas in terms of the way of trying to think beyond, but equally it is a very human book. It is how he begins to construct his own world and comes alive as a human being beyond the gaze of other people, both white and black.

WINTERSON:
Can we trust a guy who said there is something wrong with the world out there, but not wrong with the world in here?

LAWSON:
The thing that impressed me is he can do the emotion. There is a scene with the old family maid and he asks her what she will do after the mother is dead and she said I am going to look after you and that is real writing.

WINTERSON:
I feel he pulls back from the emotional writing. I don't know whether it is lost or he's scared.

ESHUN:
Equally, you are talking about anger and I think a lot of the anger is justified. It is bitterness against the world and he has channelled all the frustration he sees, not at his career and not the books of his that haven't sold, but more about the books that do sell. More really about how blackness and culture is seen generally by the world around it, as something that fundamentally is troglodyte and childish.