KARL KRAUS WROTE THAT EVERYTHING FITS WITH EVERYTHING ELSE. Maybe. Maybe everything in an artist’s corpus, no matter how incongruous, reflects, repeats, rhymes. Yet this is not the case for Percival Everett. No thematic or formal schema is suitable. He climbs the stairs sideways. His patently ridiculous conceits seem like challenges to his own mischievousness, bids to marry his uniquely sweeping curiosities to a bardic impulse. Charmingly, he’d never admit as much. “I know nothing,” he said in a recent New Yorker profile. “I’m just a dumb old cowboy.” Sure. It remains a considerable feat for Everett to have remained eccentric in the increasingly rational and prefabricated business of literature. He has his prevailing modes—racial satires, Westerns, crime procedurals, retellings of ancient myths, despondent autobiographical metafiction—but all of them are in flux, appearing in different admixtures. It’s hard to imagine another author pulling off, or even attempting, Glyph (1999),a novel about a toddler with a farcically high IQ; in Everett’s hands, the gambit is hilarious, bone-dry, and tragic. Erasure (2001), a canny parody of writers and racial fetishization, is even more affecting as a portrait of senescence. I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), a hysterical abuse of Ted Turner, the media, and various social structures, is also a repudiation of Everett’s previous work. (About Erasure, the author-character, Percival Everett, remarks, “I didn’t like writing it, and I didn’t like it when I was done with it.”) To apply superficial categories is to miss the point; Everett understands that each person is witness to a series of absurd debacles, and his fiction poses the question: What, if anything, is there to be made of our continued looking?
Publishing often resembles a dating agency, with writers, editors, and agents attempting to match aesthetic, moral, and political supplies to their corresponding demands. Close your eyes and imagine a warehouse full of sectionals, all of them taupe. Everett has refused the ready-made object, too busy building gardens out of heavy metal, deserts out of phosphorous, anything to avoid artistic stasis. Regrettably, in his latest novel, James, the writer’s ego has outstripped his curiosity, perhaps because it is the first of his novels intended to be manifest, discernible, and aimed at an audience. Unlike any of his other works, James has been accurately described in a single sentence fragment: a reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim.
At first, James is logistically faithful to Huckleberry Finn. The plot hits the same opening beats. Jim flees his owner, Miss Watson, after discovering she aims to sell him to a man in New Orleans, which would separate him from his wife and daughter. Huck, escaping his abusive sot of a father, fakes his death and finds Jim on the nearby Jackson’s Island. Huck and Jim’s simultaneous disappearance puts Jim under suspicion for Huck’s murder, and so the familiar pair head down the Mississippi River. Where James immediately breaks from its source text is in its narration: we are getting the story from Jim’s point of view. Jim presents himself to white people as Miss Watson’s big and affable slave. But this is a ruse, you see, because Jim is James, and James is, we now know from Everett’s book, a genius. James is a thoughtful writer and a better read than a modern graduate student. His mind often accordions open, revealing impressive, implausible bellows. In an early scene, Everett uses one of Twain’s most memorable set pieces, the rattlesnake bite, to substantiate James’s intellect. In a venom-induced delirium, James hallucinates a quarrel with Voltaire about inherent morality.
“Let me try this,” I said. “You have a notion, like Raynal, of natural liberties, and we all have them by virtue of our being human. But when those liberties are put under societal and cultural pressure, they become civil liberties, and those are contingent on hierarchy and situation. Am I close?” Voltaire was scribbling on paper. “That was good, that was good. Say all of that again.”
About the conception of James, Everett has said he was surprised that no one had set out to write from Jim’s perspective before. Perhaps he hasn’t read Counternarratives by John Keene, which opens with just such a story, “Rivers.” In “Rivers,” Jim remains Jim; the story shapes the character within a plausible framework. Though “Rivers” is speculative, there is no wish fulfillment on Keene’s part. Everett’s novel is an attempt to give Jim a different voice, to reanimate him in accordance with Everett’s own understanding. He throws out Jim’s reality, replacing the thoughts and hopes behind Jim’s eyelids with his own, curtailing them as he sees fit. Formally, Everett abandons his trademark and discursive polyphony for aphorisms like this one: “A man who refused to own slaves but was not opposed to others owning slaves was still a slaver to my thinking.” Again and again, we are subjected to these didacticisms: “But he would not be able to pass through the throng of white people on the decks above us—though they could never identify him as black, they would see him as something worse, a very poor white person.” The book eventually reads like a monologue delivered to what the actor knows will be a sympathetic audience.
Similarly, the dialogue is too self-aware and uninterested in what Jacques Rancière suggests is the artist’s responsibility, which is to reveal “what can’t be seen, what lies beneath the visible.” In James, the artist’s responsibility is rehabilitative, so many passages serve to rectify an imaginary ledger. Everett writes as if he is ethically obligated to do so; this is a responsibility that is plainly passed to his narrator. Here is a conversation between James and another black man about a stolen pencil.
“I reached into my pocket and pulled out the pencil, showed it to Easter.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.
“Young George stole it for me,” I said.
“You can write.” It was not a question or an accusation, more a discovery, perhaps a call to duty.
“I can write,” I said.
“Then you had best write.”
“I will,” I said.
In the search for justice, Everett blurs the divisions between the past and present, which is perhaps why James is aware of Kierkegaard, who wouldn’t be translated into English until the next century, and why he considers the Dane when thinking about the probity of immortality. Everett is sermonizing, pulling all manner of references, but often forgets his novel is set in the 1860s. Here is Huck, who is confused upon hearing James’s perfect English for the first time:
“Why are you talking like that?”
“Are you referring to my diction or my content?”
“What? What’s content?”
The reality of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, while comedic, is cold: the drafts of racism and human ugliness lash. James’s reality is straight and searing: vengeance delivered at gunpoint. It is a strange book to behold, a stomach without a navel, with little tethering it to James’s life as it might have been lived. There are few sounds, smells, or coincidences, and there is no boredom. There is little mimesis. The ambiguity that might give some soma to James’s psyche is in the moments that interrogate his connection with Huck, the cause of it, and what their bond might suggest about him. He writes, “I looked away, realizing that spending time with Huck alone had caused me to relax in a way that was dangerous.” This, too, is undercut by a late revelation about their relationship, one that makes perfect sense within Everett’s narrative construction in that it turns the complexities of their father-son dynamic into a fable; it also absents the novel of any human bewilderment.
James is ultimately a chronicle of Jim’s moral endeavor: save my wife, save my daughter, free the world.
SO MUCH BLUE (2017) could have been read as the beginning of Everett’s late style, a raring attempt to capture a spirit on its way to evaporation. An aging artist working on his opus, which he refuses to show even to his family, meditates about a decades-old affair and his tangential involvement in the Salvadoran Civil War. It evokes a particular melancholy, one of connectionlessness and regret. So Much Blue is a departure from Everett’s earlier work; it is new territory that is wholly his own. As was Telephone (2020), a novel about a geologist whose daughter’s debilitating medical condition drives him to an insane but marvelous attempt to rescue a kidnapped woman. There were three endings to Telephone; they are each differently ruinous. One gets the feeling while reading these novels that the author has taken a train to its terminus and is now wandering the station, teasing out what matters and what doesn’t—or can’t. James suggests the author is buying a new ticket altogether.
Ideally, writers live and work under the tyranny of one. It is inadvisable to consider readers, critics, contemporaries, literary trends, or, God forbid, “the market.” Curiously, when talking about Bradley Cooper’s Maestro,Everett remarked, “I liked that the movie accepted it was a movie.” Put differently, isn’t that also to appreciate the scale and reach of the cinematic form—how and why films come to last in our collective consciousness, whereas novels, of which Everett has written dozens, are lost to time? This is conjecture on my part, obviously. But about The Trees (2021),which is the closest to James thematically, a detective narrative attending to racial violence in an alternate, contemporary Missouri, Christian Lorentzen wrote: “It has all the right beats for the big screen, except that it’s too profane and obscene to be green-lit in Hollywood, even for the likes of Quentin Tarantino.” It is likely a coincidence that American Fiction, a sly but schmaltzy film adaptation of Erasure, was released the same year as James, though some critics hailed it as “perfect timing.” I have the opposite feeling, as James is neither too profane nor obscene to be greenlit in Hollywood; it’s all too perfect for an adaptation, almost certainly written with that eventuality in mind. One hopes Everett, the writer, has not replaced the tyranny of his own mind with those in the darkened gallery, the movie theater. Fittingly, Voltaire wrote: “A despot always has some good moments; an assembly of despots never has any.”
In his acknowledgments, Everett gives a shout to Mr. Twain. “His humor and humanity affected me long before I became a writer. Heaven for the climate; hell for my long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain.” Perhaps, then, Everett is choosing to rhyme, repeat, and reflect an American monument, which is why James reads like a memento mori of sorts, a novel willed into existence to mark a career and make the writer a part of a country’s cultural history—even if he already was.
Zain Khalid is the author of the novel Brother Alive (Grove Press, 2022).