American Fiction is remarkable film-remarkable in its daring satirical humor, its abundant pathos in its portrayal of a family, and its takedown of the American publishing industry. Based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett, which I downloaded to my Kindle after I got home from the movie, it stars Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious (Monk) Ellison, a professor and critically acclaimed novelist who cannot sell his latest book. In frustration at publishing's preference for "ghetto" books, he dashes off a pandering, exploitative novel under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh. The book becomes a huge bestseller and award contender, which complicates his life.

While I will reveal no spoilers, I can speak to the accuracy of the film's presentation of what it means to be a writer. As a professor emeritus and novelist, I did, of course, identify with Monk's frustrations at the direction of his career, the loneliness inherent in being a writer, his talks with his agent, and, having served on so many of them, his time on an awards committee. Moreover, as part of a large family and having had a father die of Alzheimer's, I also identified with the family drama and his efforts to address his mother's dementia. Supporting performances by Tracee Ellis Ross, Sterling K. Brown, Issa Rae, Erika Alexander, and Leslie Uggams are all outstanding.

What the film did NOT do-apart from a mention of declining readership-is explain how our culture has come to this ridiculous point. Fortunately, I believe I have a bit of insight into that. Last weekend's Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me mentioned a study that noted the average person read two books a year-the SAME information I learned at a teacher's conference in 1976. Back then, U. S. publishing turned out about 60,000 books per year, and the average book sold 1,000 copies or fewer. Today, the U. S. publishes half a million to a million books a year, with the Big Five publishers turning out 20% of the titles but earning 60-plus% of the revenue for controlling 80% of the market. With perhaps 300 hundred titles making it to the New York Times bestseller list and 4,000 covered by Publisher's Weekly, thousands upon thousands of books-good, bad, and ugly-are simply overlooked-even titles inside the majors. (I have written before of a writer I know whose mystery novel was published by St. Martin's the same year they published Silence of the Lambs. No mystery where that advertising money went.) The end result of all this is that the average book now sells 300 copies or fewer. Lots of smaller presses go out of business each year, and lots of writers with bigger houses are let go because their ever-greedy publishers want to increase the number of bestsellers in their stable.

The US had 218 million people in 1976 and now has about 340 million. Blame TV, video games, social media, or Google searches that people think equal advanced degrees in medicine, science, law, psychology, and every other field of complex knowledge-but we're still reading an average of two books a year. Even as book banners attack libraries and schools and try to legislate away books they don't like, even as our profound inability to understand history and attempts to erase it make us likelier to repeat its mistakes and overlook its truths, even as evidence means less and less to our national debates. The questions we must ask are WHY and how does selective subliteracy (willful ignorance) impact our lives?

Like The Producers, The King of Comedy, Putney Swope, Being There, and Dr. Strangelove, American Fiction hold up a social mirror too many are unwilling to gaze into. See this film and look hard.