“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” wrote Ernest Hemingway. Percival Everett’s response is getting similarly rave reviews, and is being heralded by some as the literary event of the year. Does it, can it, live up to the hype?
The titular James is, of course, the enslaved Jim from Twain’s classic, who joins with Huck on a journey down the Mississippi River during which they grew close and run into a series of adventures. The character has long been controversial due to his portrayal as uneducated and superstitious. Though Twain said he had gone to painstaking lengths to render slave dialect accurately, the very fact of a white author writing a black character in such a way has come in for criticism.
What then are we to make of Everett’s James? He, like many of his fellow slaves, puts on a show for the white folks to keep them comfortable, but in private he’s an eloquent, learned man, having taught himself to read from books stolen out of Judge Thatcher’s library. It’s a fairly pointed jab at Twain, or any white man who thinks he knows about black people from observation, without realizing that their presence is in fact altering the phenomenon. Everett may enjoy it a little too much, however, as such passages as James interrogating a dream vision of John Locke or discussing with a fellow slave the different types of irony are sure to make many readers bemoan the lack of realism.
By putting the story in James’s first-person perspective, Everett heightens the tension from the original story. It’s somewhat shameful to say so, but as I read the original I didn’t fully think through how perilous and terrifying the events of the book would be for Twain’s Jim. Everett’s James, by contrast, lays it out plain for the reader. Not only is he a runaway slave, he also is undoubtedly suspected of Huck’s kidnapping or murder. Not only that, but he is forced to look out for a white child while running for his life. James’s predicament is at the forefront at every step of the way. When Huck goes off on his adventures, just like in Twain’s original, we stay with James as he thinks through his situation and tries to reason his way out of it.
Eventually, though, Everett veers far off the course of Twain’s novel, sending James off on his own adventures while the story more familiar to us carries on, off the page. And then Everett goes further, taking over the narrative entirely, ignoring Twain’s plot and inventing one of his own. He makes major changes to the fundamental aspects of Twain’s novel.
These are big, daring swings that, honestly, don’t really work all that well for me. I may admire the confidence to try to take one of American literature’s most famous stories away from its author, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to love what Everett does with it.
I feel a little inadequate to the task of properly evaluating the novel. On a prose level, Everett is clearly a master. He writes with grace, establishes the world of the story with ease, and captures character in varied and nuanced ways. His writing is suspenseful and provocative, and everything, from the stuff I loved to the stuff I very much did not, was clearly completely thought out and deliberate.
Still, I have my reservations. Perhaps I am too loyal to Twain’s novel, one of my first favorite books and one I still love despite its detractors. Perhaps I would have preferred that Everett stick more closely to the original, allowing me to see the plot I know so well from a different perspective, as opposed to entirely new events. Or perhaps I am not capable of appreciating Everett’s genius the way that I should.
This was my first time reading a novel by Percival Everett, and I am curious to read more. I encourage people to read James, as whatever reservations I have about it, it is still definitely a work of art worth grappling with.