Review: James by Percival Everett
Longlisted for the Booker Prize, Percival Everett’s James retells Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of the runaway slave who is Huck’s companion in the original
Los Angeles-based American writer Percival Everett has written over 30 books. Imbued with wit, warmth, and wisdom, many of them are already considered classics. One of them, Erasure (2001) was recently adapted into the Oscar-winning film, American Fiction (2023), directed by Cord Jefferson. In 2022, Everett was on the shortlist of the Booker Prize for The Trees (Influx Press) and this year, too, he is on the longlist with James. Through James, Everett is giving a nod to Mark Twain— “whose humour and humanity affected” him “long before [he] became a writer” — by retelling the great American satirist’s 1884 novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
In it, Miss Watson’s slave, Jim, runs away on learning that he will be sold off. The poor white boy, Huck Finn, on the other hand, fakes his death to escape his alcoholic and abusive father, Pap. They both end up meeting again on an island in the Mississippi. Soon, Jim learns that not only is everyone on the lookout for him, but he’s also suspected of killing Huck. Through their adventure that has Jim and Huck surviving a variety of ordeals together, Twain explores ontological questions around race, identity, structural violence and notions of freedom, albeit with dollops of humour. This has made the text accessible and has helped it resonate with audiences across generations. In an interview in The Guardian, Everett said that Twain’s book’s great achievement is that it was the first novel that “tried to deal with the centre of the American psyche — race.”
Ernest Hemingway was effusive in his praise: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. It’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” Imagine remoulding this classic, which is exactly what Everett -- he who makes fun of post-structuralists, “satirises satire”, and is unequivocally committed only to his prose -- has done in his nimble, race-conscious book.
Sample the first sentence of James: “Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.” In all its simplicity, this sentence is not only a site of protest but also a claiming of the narrative. Here, Everett is declaring that it is the slave who gets to tell this story, inverting the gaze, disallowing the white and privileged to either look at black existence from a place of perverse sympathy or cast them as the quintessential other, the one who needs to be explained by them. In the hands of any other writer, James might have collapsed, but Everett doesn’t leverage his fiction to critique. Instead, he pokes fun at the powerful and compels them to laugh along with him.
Here’s the exchange between Jim and Miss Watson. The latter is enquiring if Jim had been to Judge Thatcher’s library room:
“In his what?”“His library.”“You mean dat room wif all dem books?”“Yes.”“No, missums. I seen dem books, but I ain’t been in da room. Why fo you be askin’ me dat?”“Oh, he found some book off the shelves.”I laughed. “What I gone do wif a book?”She laughed, too.
This is one of the occasions that reflects what Jim notes halfway through the novel — that “after being cruel, the most notable white attribute was gullibility.”
Everett has remarked on inequality and society and great American lies like democracy and freedom in his other works. In his introduction to Erasure’s 2021 paperback edition, American novelist and short story writer Brandon Taylor notes something that possibly holds for James too, offering an insight into what Everett intended to do with this book. “Everett’s sublime, satirical novel of ideas, Erasure, is animated by the question of whether or not it’s possible for a black artist to create art that is itself ambivalent to the constructedness of blackness. It isn’t so much interested in humanising the black experience, as has often been said of certain novels in the tradition, as it is drawing attention to the absurdities that attend the inherent doubleness of black literature. A doubleness that comes, in part, from knowing that one must perform for an external white gaze.” That’s precisely why Twain’s book was a masterpiece; it possessed that duality, which gave its prose the illusion of moving away from but remaining principally tethered to its axis — race. Everett too achieves this in James.
After reading Voltaire, when Jim turns to the Bible, he finds it “the least interesting of all. I could not enter it, did not want to enter it, and then understood that I recognised it as a tool of my enemy.” The next sentence shines a light on the novelist’s writing and his politics: “I chose the word enemy, and still do, as oppressor necessarily supposes a victim.” Everett refuses to be one, as that would take away from the fact that he is a writer, the master who controls the operations in the world of his imagination.
The three-part novel is especially powerful because of its use of diction, language, and the demotic, all of which play a role in establishing the dominance of one race over the other. And Jim uses them all to dictate his fortune. There is a moment when Jim decides to run away to Illinois (a free state, where slavery was illegal): “I was as much scared as angry, but where does a slave put anger? We could be angry with one another; we were human. But the real source of our rage had to go without address, swallowed, repressed.” There was no avenue to express this anger. Though his reunion with Huck makes things worrisome for Jim, he eventually revels in the sense of freedom he tastes as a runaway. Finding “paper and ink” for the first time in his life, he begins to write. Language comes to him. Words give him a form. He is rebuilt. Here, this fast-paced novel makes a monumental leap, signalling a transformation in Jim’s life, which always existed with respect to and in service of white people. Earlier, he was Jim, the slave, the forever-boy. Now, finally, he is James, “a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written.”
Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.