You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.
JAMES, a novel by Percival Everett is a reading gift. When JAMES is mentioned, it is immediately noted that Everett wrote this amazing work, basing it on a well-known volume: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, published in 1884. But Tom Sawyer was more of a romp, with fence painting and other tricks. Huck Finn became Twain’s way to probe and reveal aspects of slavery that many people simply wanted to deny. There is no denial in JAMES. There is laughter, but also section where the reader is turning pages to see how Jim will survive and outsmart the crazy white folks he meets on the river.
THE NOVEL
I read JAMES and encourage all to read it. Everett is 67, this not his first novel. And he wanted readers to know that JAMES is not a reworking of Huckleberry Finn or redressing the certain literary wrongs of that era.
Everett states: “I think people assume because I am revisiting Twain, I am correcting. I love Twain’s novel. It (my work) doesn’t arise from dissatisfaction. If anything, I am flattering myself thinking I am in conversation with Twain. No, I read it 15 times in a row before writing this! I finished, then started again at page one right away, again and again. I wanted to inhabit that world, not the text. I didn’t want to just repeat the novel. So I read it until it became nonsensical to me—and then never looked at it again when I was writing. Everything you are reading is a memory of that world. The flow of the writing worked better that way.”
A reviewer in the Chicago Tribune, Christopher Borrelli writes: “Everett’s book should come packaged with Twain’s 1884 novel, but you don’t need to know Twain to appreciate the humor, the adventure and the release of Everett.” Then Borrelli reminds us of a famous quote from Ernest Hemingway: that all American literature stems from “Huck Finn.” And because he has spent a great deal of time reading Mark Twain, Everett shared something I didn’t know, but something that clarifies that rather confusing statement: so please keep reading…
“Huck Finn? Are you kidding? That’s a kids book.” Well no, it is not. The critic, Lionel Trilling wrote: “…the novel is one of the world’s great books and one of the central documents of American culture.” Trilling knew that the book grew and became more important because of its many readers. And because this is a Percival Everett novel, his narrator runs his every public utterance through what he calls a “slave filter” to make himself sound ridiculous and gullible, to pacify the white people around him.
An example: here is that practice in action, as James explains to a group of enslaved children in a cabin…how to survive. The children said together, “And the better they feel, the safer we are.” (they meaning their white owners.)
And when James finds himself in Judge Thatcher’s library: I had wondered every time I sneaked in there what white people would do to a slave who had learned how to read? What would they do to a slave who knew what a hypotenuse was, what irony meant, how retribution was spelled?
This is how Everett brings this story into the present, so that it leaps off the page.
MORE REASONS TO READ IT
This is Everett’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful, Dwight Garner writes in the New York Times. “…below the packed dirt floor of Everett’s moral sensibility, James is an intensely imagined human being.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates in BETWEEN the WORLD and ME wrote that slavery is not “an indefinable mass of flesh” but a “particular, specific enslaved woman whose mind is active as your own.”
Everett more than lives up to that prescription, even though he does stick to the broad outlines of Twain’s novel. The New York Times review also states that the book flows inexorably like a river, with short chapters and situations that keep you reading. And yes there are familiar scenes that echo Twain, but also many scenes that speak directly to our modern world, teaching us what slavery truly was…not a trip down a river, but a shore that Black people had to find for their safely.
FINAL THOUGHT…
Mr. Garner writes: Everett does not reprint the famous warning that greets the reader at the start of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
Motives, morals and plot are here in abundance, of course. And Everett shoots what is certain to be this book’s legion of readers straight through the heart.
“… yes, Huck Finn, the character, he does represent an adolescent America, moving through the landscape, trying to reconciles himself with his friend, who is both property and a human being.”
THANKS FOR READING
3 Responses
I read this book several months ago, and I would also highly recommend. Your information gave me so much added insight into the author’s process that I enjoyed the book all over again from memory.
So kind of you, Alana. I found parts of it even hard to read…but even though it is fiction, I am sure sure horrors did happen too
African Americans, especially WOMEN.
Embarrassed to say I never read Huck Finn, but want to pick it up now! Even more compelling, is how it was written so long ago.