Percival Everett is definitely one of my favorite discoveries of the past few years, and I am glad I only came to his writing with The Trees because now I have his impressive backlist to get through with no danger of running out of his books to read anytime soon.
James, a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was particularly intriguing to me, having loved Mark Twain’s books as a child. But also, because Everett shines through his vast knowledge and deep understanding of literary history and his crafty ways of using intersexuality in his work. So, I was immediately prompted to re-read Twain’s novel after finishing this, to get a better grasp of how Everett used and entered conversation with his source material. And it feels like that is truly what it is: a conversation between Percival Everett and Mark Twain, between the past and the present, and one I think Twain would have thoroughly enjoyed for its humour and daring.
The eponymous James is Jim in Twain’s novel, the enslaved man on the run with Huck Finn, and in Everett’s retelling, more often than not, the boy’s saviour. James being the name he gave himself, the claims for himself. James overhears he is to be sold to New Orleans and therefore separated from his wife and daughter, never to see them again. The only way out he sees is to escape, find freedom and eventually the means to buy his family’s freedom, too. That same night, Huck decides to leave home, hoping to escape his alcoholic father’s violence, and when the two fugitives run into each other on Jackson Island, they soon decide their best hope of escaping – and surviving that escape – lies in straying together. Thus begins a wild adventure along the Mississippi, told with great humour, though that never undermines the very real dangers James faces, if anything the contrast renders them all the more harrowing.
We pass many of the familiar milestones of Twain’s tale but told from James’ intelligent and compassionate perspective we are told a whole new story, one that would never have been fully accessible to the white boy. It becomes clear that Huckleberry Finn can never quite grasp what dangers his companion has to face, but Everett paints him with an innate openness, a desire to learn and that leads to some heartfelt conversations between the two adventurers. The get to witness the boy's journey to grasping that the man beside him is much more than “Jim, the friendly slave,” but is in fact a man, and one with a rich interior life and a profound understanding of the reality they inhabit. One way in which Percival Everett does that is his depiction of the enslaved people’s language. They are self-educated and far more so than most of the white people around them, and certainly speak better English. Aware of social dynamics as they are, though, they speak in exaggerated pidgin English, which they deliberately teach their children, knowing that they’d be in the greatest danger should white folk ever fell threatened by them. Language is their secret rebellion. One that Huck Finn slowly learns about, as the trust between the two of them grows.
“White folks expect us to sound a certain way, and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them.”
This is a Percival Everett novel, so obviously it is a celebration of language, providing a joyous experience of witnessing the author’s joy with his craft. Everett’s novel is constructed layer upon layer. Peel one back and you reveal a wholly new picture, unveil a new perspective. His sentences are loaded with meaning and yet never weighed down by it, because his use of language is so playful and light-footed. You can read the novel once on its own and have a fantastic experience, that is at once profound and thrilling. Or you can read it in close conversation with Mark Twain’s text, and gain a deeper understanding of Everett’s witty use of intersexuality. You can read this novel in the wider realm of Everett’s work and find references to his older novels here. Every reading and re-reading will open up a whole to experience, and that is Percival Everett’s great gift.
“With my pencil I wrote myself into being, I wrote myself to here.”
Short-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize!
Published by Doubleday, 2024
Comments