James

Ten thoughts on Percival Everett’s James; spoilers abound:

1. It’s a compulsive read. I finished it in a day. Everett’s prose is supple without being simple. And he lives up to his reputation: bitterly funny and brutally direct, often one when you expect the other. His racial politics are likewise unpredictable, incisive, and reliably scrambled—that is to say, they scramble the reader’s priors.

2. The worst version of this book would have been a Mark Twain “own”: a simplistic takedown of a “problematic” American classic. Everett doesn’t take the bait. His affection for Twain is palpable. There’s nothing “corrective” on offer here. Which doesn’t mean there’s nothing elaborated, investigated, or interrogated. (Joel Rhone’s is my favorite essay on the novel so far.) In fact, for good or ill, Everett extends or completes the Twainian ethos that, perhaps, Twain elected, or felt compelled, to mute. For example, Twain’s book remains thematically Christian in ways Twain abjured in his own life; Everett eliminates all traces of this, about which I’ll say more below.

3. The second worst version of this book would have been a Huck Finn “own”: not a rebuke of Twain but of the indelible little boy he created. In this case, the trick would be, not to reveal Huck as problematic, but to make him so. Once again, no dice. Everett clearly loves Huck and draws his friendship with Jim with affection and care, deepening a relationship we thought we knew: no longer merely friends—who are, of necessity, equals (I take this to be Twain’s first aim and lasting achievement)—but father and son. This change functions to undermine Huck’s priority in Twain’s tale, a fundamental problem given that Jim is a grown man and Huck is a boy.

4. The paternity twist is clever without being cute for many reasons. At the level of the text, it enables a subtext that Twain never countenanced in the original. It offers an emotionally authentic explanation of why Huck’s dad hates him so much. And it explains Jim’s special bond with Huck, both in Everett and in Twain. Beyond these, it entwines the bloodlines of two of the most famous characters in American literature. In Albert Murray’s words, it makes “omni-Americans” of Huck and Jim both. Huck in particular has a white mother and a black father; in other words, the prototypical good-hearted Southern white boy is now, by the retroactive power of the written word, biracial.

In any other hands, this idea would have been cloying or overwrought. In Everett’s hands, it’s deftly hinted at and masterfully revealed at just the right moment. It forces Huck to face questions of identity and maturity from which Twain protects him, as Wendell Berry once observed; Huck’s transformation in Twain is morally profound, but he never grows up. By the end of Everett’s novel, by contrast, he’s ready to.

5. Now to Jim himself. Even calling him by that name feels like a choice, but I think it’s the right one, since “James” is a name he achieves in and through the narrative, and he does not definitively name himself by it until the final sentence. The power of language and especially of naming is the thematic thread of Everett’s whole novel. With great cost, Jim pockets a small pencil and carries it with him throughout his odyssey, up to and beyond his reunion with his wife and daughter. Having earlier noted a narrative “as related” by a slave, Jim ruminates on telling his own story himself. The implication is that what we’re reading is what he’s written.

6. I was surprised that Everett chose to depart from so much of the narrative spine of Twain’s original. The opening third (maybe half) is Rashomon-like, but from then on there’s not even an attempt to make it “line up” with the Urtext; it’s simply Jim’s story, as written by him, an author rendering himself (his name) on the page.

I wondered more than once whether we are meant to suppose that Huck’s tale is the fiction, filled with some “stretchers”; or whether Jim’s is a kind of private fantasy, an escape from his life on the lam, or perhaps behind bars—a life-saving fiction enabled by the word. I even wondered whether the middle third of the book, or alternatively the final 10-20 pages, were a dream: after all, Jim’s dreams are regular features of the novel; the fiery coda to the story is abrupt and ecstatically triumphant; and the tree under which Jim first dreams on the island, after having been bitten by a snake, is the tree under which he awakes on the same island just before the climactic action occurs. There’s a there there, I’m convinced, but I’m not yet certain what I think it is.

7. I’ve not yet mentioned the brilliant conceit at the heart of the novel, namely the code-switching from slave dialect (in front of white people) to standard English (when whites are absent). Nothing to say here except that, in the hands of a lesser novelist, it would be painful to read, at best imperfectly executed; here, it is brilliant and effective. The trap doors are everywhere, and Everett doesn’t fall into any of them.

8. Except one. The only thing I disliked, even hated, was Everett’s decision—loudly made and consistently upheld—to rob his black characters of all faith, religiosity, and superstition. Every black character knows Christianity is false; superstition is a show for the white man; and atheism is the universal default setting, with one or two characters vaguely allowing that maybe something numinous is real.

To state my criticism as bluntly as I can, this is a failure of imagination on Everett’s part. The problem is not that the decision is ahistorical and anachronistic, though it is. It serves no purpose, unlike the linguistic code-switching. It flattens each and every black character into a single non-religious shape. Why? To what end? Sure, make some characters skeptical of the white man’s religion, of the white gospel or the white church or the white god; but what narrative or philosophical purpose is served by evacuating any and all religiosity as such from the inner lives of black slaves in the antebellum South?

As I read the novel, this felt like Everett projecting himself onto his characters—not just Jim but all of them. Making them all the same instead of vibrantly different is a very strange move, in my view. Moreover, the implication is both absurd and insulting. Am I really meant to nod along, as if it were simply and self-evidently true that black American religiosity in toto, Christian faith most of all, has been one great deception from the beginning—a trick pulled by white Americans on Africans too gullible to know better? Give me a break. Granted: I can imagine a book that does the heavy lifting to try to justify such a claim. James, unfortunately, is not that book.

9. A second shortcoming was the ending. I was caught off guard, underwhelmed, and, finally, unpersuaded. In just eight pages Jim finds an unknown plantation, discovers male slaves without being detected, sets them free, rallies them to his cause, finds the female slaves, including his wife and daughter, then sets fire to the fields, liberates all those held in bondage, shoots the master through the heart, and escapes north with his (apparently unharmed) family. Come again?

Sure, send Jim—James!—off into a sort of sunset, however qualified by the horrors of his time and place. But as a literary matter, the finale is rushed and unbelievable, with James himself as the deus ex machina. Oh well.

10. Best not to leave it there though. Everett’s other brilliant conceit is a character named Norman. Norman is a black member of a minstrel troupe who passes as white, including to Jim. (More than once Jim wonders if Norman is playing him. The self-doubt in his mind is a welcome repetition of frailty in a character who is otherwise heroic and self-possessed from the start.)

The best parts of James are Jim’s conversations: with Huck, with Enlightenment philosophers, and with Norman. And every scene with Jim as part of the troupe makes for excruciatingly compelling reading—laughing through covered eyes, cringing with anger and discomfort while letting out an involuntary snort. (By the way, painting Jim’s face white before applying blackface to the white paint called to mind another recent revisionist tale: Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen, in which Hooded Justice is revealed to be a gay black man—a survivor of the Tulsa Massacre, actually—who applies white around his eyes, dons an executioner’s mask, and fights injustice.)

In any case, because Norman’s character is so well drawn by Everett, his death is all the more bitter when it comes. And tragic, given that Jim must choose to save Norman or Huck, whose paternity we have guessed but do not yet know. One more reason to laud Everett for his wit, style, and wry perceptive slant.

In the end, I didn’t adore the book as much as others did, but I’m glad I read it, and I remain in awe at Everett’s accomplishment. Next time I’d just like to see him let his characters believe in God.