Review of JAMES

Jim rescues Huck

The eponymous James is Jim in Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Percival Everett is the African American author of the book the award-winning film, “American Fiction”, is based on. Percival Everett is, ironically, a version of 21^st century Mark Twain. Writing in a time where indignation can be served cold without garnish, Everett rewrites Twain’s troubled classic and leaves it and us naked, vulnerable but alive.

I read this book in three days. I was afraid to since I taught Twain’s NOT perfect novel for 20 years and though I never much liked its second half, I feared that its contextually understandable but offensive language and stereotypes would leave it in our brave new world’s literary retirement home. Whether he intended to or not, Everett’s beautifully realized, shockingly visceral and very funny rewrite may actually save Twain’s equally (for 1876) shockingly realistic and funny foray into race and what we are, as Americans and humans. It is a must read for anybody who has read Twain’s novel … a drop what you are doing must read.

It is written from Jim’s point of view. It dips in and out of Twain’s narrative. Huck is as complex in James as Jim is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The river remains a majestic metaphor. There are creative tricks and liberties employed by Everett that seem a bit forced until they aren’t … until you feel (uncontaminated by too overtly manipulated artistic melodrama and rage) the chilling, uncomfortable legacy of your whiteness in the racial narrative of this country. Twain might have written this book today. He would have admired its cleverness and use of language and humor. He certainly didn’t differ from Everett in his disgust of white America’s blindness and matter of fact cruelty. Even so, his efforts would fall short because James  - the book and the character - is a black man’s retelling of our still too defensively acknowledged holocaust. A retelling employing, with genius and perspective, many of the puppets and tropes from the canonical minstrel show that Hemingway famously claimed was the start of the Great American Novel.

James

Percival Everett

2024    320 page

s