By David Iscoe
I don’t read as often as I want to anymore, although I can’t quite remember the last time I ever did. I grew up with the internet, and the internet grew alongside me, began grabbing more of my attention even as it sparked less wonder. It’s not just me, and maybe not just the internet. Some time in 2022, I picked through a used book shelf at my favorite local record store and found Watt by Samuel Beckett, and the shopkeeper’s eyes lit up at someone reading his favorite author. When, after a year, I finally took it off my shelf, I came back excited to talk about it.
“I haven’t read Beckett in years,” he said. Then, “I can’t read anymore.” This is a thoughtful former musician with a gray beard, not some millennial. He’s not extremely online; he barely checks his email. But whatever noise is in the air has gotten to him too.
I say this all because no book exists in isolation; each book we pick up is a book that has reached a reader, or rather the reader has reached the book, and sometimes this reaching requires fighting against many of the baffling forces of noise and distraction that get between our minds and what our minds want to be doing. It is in this context – this effort to sort through the noise – that I first fell in love with the writing of Percival Everett.
At the time I was living in one of the boroughs of New York City, trying to grow up. A mildly famous bookstore had opened up within walking distance of my basement apartment. One day I went in there to get something. I didn’t know what. I’d been out of school a few years, I didn’t keep up with literary news; some of my friends read, but not the kind of stuff I loved. Everett’s short story collection Half an Inch of Water was on the “recommended” shelf. I bought it. The stories, focused on quiet, introspective characters in the American West, were good in a way I couldn’t pin down. Each started with a sense of routine and place, focused on detail, and ended up undermining the reader’s assumptions in a different direction.
I went to work. I got busy. I stopped and started a few books in between. Half a year later, I ordered two more of his books and devoured them in a few days each. In the eight years since, I’ve widened my reading scope, but I keep coming back to Everett, cracking a fresh one a couple times a year. He’s what I read when I need to enjoy a book but for it also to mean something. The prose is crisp and quick enough for my attention-fractured mind to pick it up smoothly, but builds to a complexity that keeps me engaged, that builds that slow focused attention that the buzz of my life doesn’t always encourage. And while I know those qualities will be constants, the world and genre of each Everett text is different. None of the others are much like Half an Inch of Water on the surface: I discovered high-concept absurdist comedies, genre parodies, deeply reflexive experimental work, epistolary novels, mysteries, fast-paced thrillers, even a realistic novel about a brooding painter working on his marriage (the kind of thing you’d make fun of it wasn’t for Everett’s ability to elevate any form). But each contains traces of a common narrator.
The second Everett book I read, Erasure, is a dark satire containing an embedded novel, mixing elements of Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Everett’s own experience with racism and commodification in the writing industry. But like Half an Inch of Water it also contains a lot of passages on fly fishing. The more Everett books you read, the more of these echoes you pick up. Some lines and ideas seem almost like direct repetitions, but on re-examination are transformed by the context. Critics marvel at Everett’s range, and rightly so, but by the time I was studying him in grad school, another dimension was what impressed me most. “This fucking guy keeps writing the same book again and again,” I told my writing instructor. It was a complement. The wonder is how far this one story can go.
Where I did not expect it to go was back to my childhood.
When I was young, Huckleberry Finn was my favorite book. First my parents read it to me, and then I read it myself, and re-read it, and finally read it for school and wrote an essay about it for Mr. Hughes’s class in 7th grade.
Each time, I got more out of it. First, the funny narrative voice, the wild adventures, the lines that were funny, and the ones that were sad in a way that made me feel better because they said something was hard to express. As I got older I appreciated the writing style, the spirit of exploration, the deep friendship, the comic sensibility, and this thing Huck had: a resistance to growing up into a position of respectability in an unjust society, even as he needs to grow up in other ways. I don’t recall learning too much from Huck Finn about slavery except I hated it, which, if you’re going to learn one thing about slavery, isn’t the worst thing to learn. It didn’t occur to me what exactly was missing. Then, I found other books. I did other things. I haven’t read Huck Finn since.
And then, last fall, I saw that Percival Everett had a new novel called James; it was billed as a retelling of Huckleberry Finn, from the perspective of Jim. I hoped it would be something better: another retelling of Percival Everett’s career-long novel, in yet another manifestation.
He pulls it off.
James not only lives up to Twain’s Huckleberry Finn – capturing the core of what it had and containing much of what it missed – but it lives up to the standards of the best of Everett’s work, which has been elevated to new heights in his recent run of novels. The key to getting out from Twain’s sizable shadow is simple: Huckleberry Finn was never Jim’s story, just the story of someone who cares for Jim. Between what Huck doesn’t see because he isn’t there, and what Huck doesn’t see because he can’t, Everett has a lot of room to operate. He wastes no time cracking open that space and showing how much room exists in the gap.
The first scene of James is the same as Jim’s first appearance in Huckleberry Finn. “Those little bastards,” Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, “were hiding out there in the tall grass.”
“We could see him pretty clear, because there was a light behind him,” Huck narrates in Twain’s text.
But in Everett’s James we see the other side, as “the moon was not quite full but bright, and it was behind them, so I could see them plain as day, though it was deep night.”
The scene procedes, with Jim clocking the action all the way, but never letting on that he knows. He begins tricking the boys into believing they’re tricking him, because “it always pays to give white folks what they want.” By the end of the first page, the rift is clear. In every interaction, Jim’s apparent gullibility (already ambiguous in the original) is explicitly a strategic product of an intelligence invisible to white people. We see this not just in the description, but in the manner of telling. While Huck narrates in a folksy, simple style of speech, Jim has the voice of a thoughtful professional writer. Yet when he speaks to white people, or anyone he can’t trust, he not only takes on the dialect we see from Twain’s Jim, but often exceeds it, “[playing] up the slave bit,” as Everett’s Jim puts it. Within a few pages, we see the layers of his deployment of this speech deepen and deepen; he even runs a school for slaves, using an academic’s exacting linguistic analysis to teach children exactly how to affect subservience and ignorance for their own protection.
This is the heart of Everett’s work. It feels like everything he writes – from a novel to a short to a chapter – contains a reversal of some form, an assumption gone wrong, a hustler being hustled. Though it repeats, it never means the same thing. In interview after interview (and often directly in his texts) Everett has talked about his obsession with identity – in the mathematical, not the social sense. One recent reiteration of the idea was with the LA Review of Books in August.:
“I’m interested in the fact that A is A is not the same thing as A equals A, and even as I say it, it gives me a headache,” Everett said. “But that’s at the root of almost everything I make.”
The great thing about centering a mathematical truth in fiction, which is the pursuit of truth, is that a mathematical truth is true. There is arguably nothing objectively truer. Plus, it is infinitely reusable. It’s nothing but can describe everything. Numbers, for example, do not exist on their own, but the existence of numbers of things can be found throughout existence. This relates to another one of Everett’s animating principles: his ongoing goal to write an “abstract novel,” analogous to abstract art, but runs into the problem that “the constituent parts of [his] art, namely words, are representational,” as he wrote for the Yale Review. He has never written an abstract novel (or has he, he wonders)because he always encounters particular meaning, and care about what is represented. James is not an abstract novel. The representational investment is clear from the beginning, but the fundamental abstract strokes materialize as in other Everett works, and here they pay dividends, creating space for an entirely separate story inside the frame of Huckleberry Finn. The events may be the same from Huck’s perspective, at least as first, but Huck’s perspective takes almost none of the space in James, because the boy cannot see the core action taken by the man who lives in a world he can’t reveal. James is a novel, at least in the beginning, about manipulating language and stereotypes to reverse power, and while it is a story Twain might appreciate, it is not the story Twain told.
Everett’s play with language and reversals continues and deepens throughout the text, but the novel finds a new gear when Jim departs more fully from Twain’s tale. The subversions of Huckleberry Finn scenes give way to wholly new scenes, and Jim finds himself not in the underside of Twain’s world, but alone in Everett. He has time to think. He wants many things: to survive, to protect his family and community, to protect Huckleberry, and to realize his freedom even with the whole world against it. He also wants to tell stories, and to read and to write – acquiring and keeping books, a pencil and paper is part of his essential drive. He retains all the virtues Twain ascribed to him – loyalty, courage, kindness, integrity – but he is also as intellectual, stoic, and weird as a typical Everett protagonist. He dreams of conversations with Voltaire and Locke, and wonders about what Kierkegaard would do. He puzzles with contradictions and finds that particular version of swift decisiveness that only comes with after long spouts of overthinking. He has a knack for fishing.
He also lives in an Everett world, coming face-to-face with American peculiarity, cruelty, and contradiction of a different flavor than Twain’s. Everett excels at something I might call “American Kafkaesque,” where characters begin to feel the shape of the forces that constrain, dehumanize, and disempower us in ways this country prefers not to name. Jim, who has escaped his enslaver but cannot escape the shadow of slavery, is in the sort of societal hell this form was built to illustrate. “So I’m in a free state?” he asks. “Boy, you’re in America,” comes the reply. Everett (characteristically) gives us many variants on the theme. In one episode, a man who insists he is not an enslaver “hires” Jim to work in a minstrel show, from which job he cannot quit without risking re-enslavement; in another unforgettable scene, he encounters a man so protective of the space he carved out from his enslavement that he recreates his condition absent any master. After experiencing these liminal forms of slavery, the depictions of its more extreme - and widespread - manifestations hit harder. Everett has often expressed distaste for slave stories that dwell on prolonged suffering. “Ah, slavery novels!” he told The Rumpus. “Yeah, slavery was bad. I get it! Who doesn’t get it?!” But he finds subtle ways to make even those who get it think more deeply. In a scene at a sawmill, one poignant line (watch for “twenty yards” as you read) says more to evoke the horrors of slavery than fifty pages of vivid brutality would.
But the Kafkaesque realm is the middle act for Everett. Through all the bafflement, contradiction, and nuance, the confrontation of the unsolvable problem, there also emerges a sense of clarity: a decisive action the characters must take. On one level, this is the typical heroic climax. But it also resonates with the mathematical-philosophical aspect of the work: at the end of all the figuring of the tangled equations, there is an objective answer. So too is there an answer to the moral atrocities the works describe. Because James is not a boy’s coming-of-age story, and stares slavery directly in its face, both Jim and Huckleberry cross a line of no return that means they must go far beyond Huckleberry Finn. But this departure is, in some ways, a return to Twain, a winnowing to the core of the characters I knew and loved as they go beyond a coming-of-age story into an adult engagement with America’s most violent institution. In the greatest and most enduring moment of Huckleberry Finn, the boy faces down everything he is told about how to act in regards to slavery, and weighs it against everything he actually feels and knows. “All right, then, I’ll go to hell,” he says. In James, the parallel moments of courage belong to a different protagonist, weighing different complexities, but cut through in the same direction. And though he does not make Finn the hero, Everett gives him a moment just as emotionally resonant, in which he must make one concrete choice about slavery. He decides “agin’ it.”
Everett told Publisher’s Weekly that he “read Huck Finn 15 times, for the purpose of becoming sick of it and abandoning Twain’s story.” He has always been a thorough researcher. He says he writes to have an excuse to learn. While he is clear-eyed about Twain’s limitations (“Jim is a significant literary figure who never had any agency,”) it must have taken Everett some effort to get properly sick of it. He frequently cites Twain as one of his favorite writers, and in 2017 told the same publication “I loved Mark Twain’s humor, his freedom of expression, individual thinking, and not being afraid to make fun of something. “I smiled a little as I read this. He has taken much from his influence: freedom of expression, individual thinking, not being afraid to make fun of anything, even Twain.
I haven’t read anything 15 times. I still haven’t re-read Huck Finn since I was a kid. Many days, through the bustle and noise of my life, I don’t read anything at all but e-mails and snippets of the internet. But Everett reminds me why it’s worth continuing to fight through the fog.
David Iscoe is a writer, teacher, and part-time museum worker based in New London, CT, where he lives with his spouse and dog.