A literary Ali G

Thelonius "Monk" Ellison, the narrator of Percival Everett's very funny and very angry new novel, is an ex-Black Panther: a race radical turned vegetarian academic, now scratching a living from teaching, furniture-making and avant-garde writing.

After Monk's seventeenth experimental fiction is rejected by mainstream publishers, his agent tells him his prose just "isn't black enough". This maddens Monk, who loathes racial stereotyping of any sort, and who is already furious at the success of We Live's in Da Ghetto, a best-selling novella about the urban "African-American experience".

But times are tough: Monk's mother is dying of Alzheimer's and the bills are mounting. Avant-garde novels won't bring home the tofu, so, half in rage and half in despair, Monk raps out a 70-page ghetto parody called My Pafology. It stars Van Go Jenkins - a 19-year-old "sorry ass muthafucka" - and consists largely of pseudo-ghetto repartee in all its inventive glory.

Monk has his agent submit the manuscript of My Pafology under the pseudonym Stagg R Leigh. It immediately attracts a six-figure offer from a Random House editor, who finds it "magnificently raw and honest". The F-word appears between 10 and 20 times on most pages, and so Monk decides to rename his fricative little faux-masterpiece Fuck - a decision which, unsurprisingly, only stokes the book's notoriety.

Once in the marketplace, the book provokes uniform ecstasy among the pundits. White reviewers chorus their patronising approval, particularly praising its authenticity. One critic declares that "the energy and savagery of the common black is so refreshing".

Then Kenya Dunston, host of a prime-time chat show not unlike Oprah Winfrey's, picks "this gripping and truly realistic tale" for her Book Club, sending sales through the roof. The significantly named Hollywood mogul, Wiley Morgenstein, sees a new market in the "African-American community" - "They go to the movies now, these people. There's an itch, and I plan to scratch it" - and pays $3 million for the film rights. Finally, however, Monk's pseudonymic hoax catches up with him. He is asked to judge a literary prize for which Fuck is on the short list, and has to decide precisely where his principles lie.

Erasure's book-jacket promises a "skewering" of "the conventions of racial, political and social correctness", and for once a book-jacket's promise is entirely upheld. On the long thin story of Monk's hoax, Everett neatly kebabs one after another of contemporary America's race cliches: designer tribalism, gangster chic, hood-speak and what Everett has called "the bogus notion of authenticity that bedevils music and fiction made by black people".

While Erasure is unmistakably an angry book, it never quite replicates the furnace-blast wrath of Philip Roth, America's most vigilant, merciless and immediate satirist. But this is a strength, not a weakness. The problem with most satire - Roth's magnificent tirades aside - is that in its haste to blame, send up, stooge and caricature, it ends up forgetting to be sympathetic to anyone. It demolishes without suggesting where reconstruction might usefully begin.

Everett, however, manages to be simultaneously tender and sharp. What he demonstrates, with an appealing mixture of wit and acuity, is that the very concept of race is a dangerously restrictive one, and that even well-meaning attempts to celebrate the "true" or "authentic" voice of a minority culture might end up not emancipating that culture, but boxing it in, instead.