Unspoken Truths

A publishing-world satire that's dead on.

- ALISON WILLMORE

WHEN AT REST, Jeffrey Wright's face tends toward the serious. He has a heavy brow, which he likes to accentuate by tilting his head forward and looking over the glasses he frequently wears onscreen. That air of weary authority that Wright so effortlessly projects has, in recent years, been put in service to roles as cops and generals, politicians and journalists, and, in the upcoming film American Fiction, an academic. Thelonious "Monk" Ellison is an author and professor who at first seems like another of these figures of seen-it-all prominence. But despite his depression and bursts of anger, there's a lightness to Monk that soon sets him apart. At a book festival, he walks into a talk being given by Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), whose debut novel, We's Lives in Da Ghetto, is being fawned over by the moderator. When Sintara-an Oberlin-educated former publishing assistant who gets cheers from the crowd by wondering, "Where is our representation?"-abruptly switches to AAVE when reading from her book, Monk's eyebrows levitate up his head. They rise so far that they seem on the verge of forming parentheses that could excerpt him from the whole experience until, with perfect timing, his face is replaced by the rapturous one of a white woman who's just shot to her feet in front of him to participate in a standing ovation.