Percival Everett is the ironist par excellence of American literature. Who better to take on the responsibility of rehabilitating the imbalance at the heart of what many consider America’s greatest novel — Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”? Everett has described “James,” h is 2024 National Book Award-winning novel focusing on the death-defying resourcefulness of the runaway slave Jim, as being “in conversation” with Twain’s 1884 flawed masterpiece, but not a sequel. Anyone looking for a continuation of the literary status quo in which Jim is basically the superstitious and illiterate sidekick of a teenaged Huck Finn will have to look elsewhere. From its opening pages, “James” reveals a Black man who is more literate and self-aware than those who presume they have the right to buy or sell him as if he were a mule or a patch of farmland.After overhearing plans to sell him to a plantation owner in Louisiana, a move that would permanently separate him from his wife and daughter who are also enslaved, Jim disappears into the Mississippi wilderness until he can come up with a strategy to get to freedom in the north and then return with enough resources to rescue his family.While on the run from slave trackers, mercenaries and a murder rap conveniently assigned to him, Jim encounters his friend Huck Finn who has faked his own death to escape the stifling guardianship of Miss Watson.“James” follows enough of the original plot of “Huck Finn” to be recognizable to those who read it in middle or high school, but departs significantly from that seminal, but flawed novel by focusing on Jim’s actions and his inner life and not Huck’s adolescent narcissism and the privilege endowed by his white skin. In “James,” Huck becomes the bewildered sidekick in Everett’s retelling of the story of their unlikely friendship from Jim’s perspective.The cover of “James” by Percival Everett. In an interview with NEXTpittsburgh, Everett, 68, the author of more than 30 novels and short-story collections, expressed surprise that there weren’t previous attempts to flip the script on the Twain classic given the richness and ubiquity of the source material, which is now in public domain. When the idea of giving voice to Jim’s adventure-filled life occurred to Everett three or four years ago, he did his due diligence and sought out previously published novels that might’ve told the story from Jim’s perspective. To his amazement, he couldn’t find any, though other characters from the Twain literary universe and their story arcs had been explored in recent decades. Jim, despite his importance to the plot of “Huck Finn” has remained a mute stereotype until “James” revealed him as a man who is both liberated and tormented by the ideas of the Enlightenment while remaining a fierce protector of his own agency. Jim acquired his literacy by sneaking into Judge Thatcher’s library to read or absconding with books whenever possible. His literacy also led to his ability to argue with Voltaire and John Locke whenever those Enlightenment philosophers appeared in his dreams. When alone with his wife Sadie and daughter Lizzie, Jim reinforced the power of literacy and showed them the value — and necessity — of code-switching in the presence of white folks who were only comfortable with illiterate Black people. The ability to read was an automatic death sentence for enslaved people because it was considered a contagion presaging rebellion against white supremacy that was too difficult to stamp out once it spread across the plantation.There’s even a lynching of a Black person generated by the theft of a pencil that reminds the reader that every inch of literacy in 19th century America likely cost someone his or her life. Everett never explains in the novel how enslaved people outside of Jim’s immediate family also became expert code-switchers in that community, but it isn’t important to the meaning or larger truth of the book as far as he’s concerned.“What we do know is that people are naturally curious and that they’ll learn when they can where they can,” Everett said in a phone interview. “You learn something and you pass it on. There’s a rich oral tradition to pass along information — and not in a staid, academic way.“In a lot of ways, they were more sophisticated than we are now,” Everett continued. “They would take stories and generate meaning about the world around them. Those things are embodied in the stories people told each other.”When asked whether any of the characters in Twain’s novel would be able to grasp the concept of “structural racism,” he politely swatted the question away. The enslaved people in Jim’s world and community, no matter how learned or illiterate, wouldn’t have understood the term. They were too busy trying to keep their families together while dealing with the existential reality of a constitutionally sanctioned right to own other human beings.“Supposedly after 140 years of so-called progress, we still have people in our culture who don’t understand ‘structural racism,’” Everett said with a chuckle. “I can’t take these characters to task anymore than I can take Twain himself, who was from that world.”He pointed to the example of Twain’s frequent use of the racial slur flung at Black people that courses through “Huck Finn” and is echoed in his own novel as an example of something that doesn’t particularly upset him even though it has led to “Huck Finn” being pulled from school library shelves across the nation.“That’s the world they lived in,” Everett said. “Does that make him bad? No, it just makes him a product of his moment. The important thing about that word is that it tells us about that moment and things we need to know about it in the same way that if someone walked into a room where we were sitting and started using that word, it would tell us about them.”Everett read “Huck Finn” 15 times in a row to get a feel for the novel’s language and internal logic, but confesses that he could’ve stopped after 10 reads when he looks back on that experience.“Being an admirer of Twain’s writing, I needed to distance myself from it, and the way to do that was to become thoroughly sick of it. You do it until it becomes a blur,” he said.“When you have to read something so many times, it’s like repeating a word over and over [until] it starts to become nonsense. It became a big mashup of words, but I knew what happened,” Everett said. There are many twists in “James,” many of which depart from Twain’s narrative dramatically, especially an arc that involves Huck Finn. It would be journalistic malpractice to write about them here despite the fact the book has been a bestseller for a year or more.Everett has told interviewers that his biggest influences have been Twain, Groucho Marx and Bullwinkle J. Moose, an eclectic bench of literary icons if ever there was one.When Everett was writing “The Trees” (2021), a phantasmagoric detective novel about lynching and identity, a fearless black crow used to sit on his shoulder and hop down his arm whenever it needed attention. Everett slyly insisted the crow was his “co-author” on that novel.When asked if he and the crow collaborated on “James,” he laughed and said he had a new collaborator — a big, fat, friendly squirrel that took up residence in a cage under his writing desk.“The squirrel’s name is Grover,” he said nonchalantly. I couldn’t let that pass without asking a very obvious question — why he named the squirrel Grover when his hero Bullwinkle’s best friend was a flying squirrel named Rocky.“My son named him Grover,” Everett answered drolly. At that point Everett riffed in whatever direction he decided he was going to riff, including his answer to a question about his novel in progress. Knowing that writers of his stature never share that information, it was an attempt to see what creative way he would deflect the question.“I can tell you that there are lots of spaceships involved, how’s that?” Everett said, laughing at his own joke. “In fact, it’s called ‘James in Space.’”Everett got the laugh he expected, but he wasn’t finished. “Haven’t you ever wondered why it’s James T. Kirk?”Yes, Percival Everett really is the Steely Dan of literary fiction.Percival Everett will be reading from “James” and signing copies of the book at the Carnegie Music Hall today, Monday, March 24. The event is part of the Ten Evenings series sponsored by Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. It is sold out.The post Tony Norman: With ‘James,’ Percival Everett updates Mark Twain’s most underrated character appeared first on NEXTpittsburgh. ...read more read less