Percival Everett’s upbeat relaunching of Mark Twain brings center-stage the slave Jim in an apocalyptic, harrowing and amusing novel
From the greater part of his highly productive, 40-year publishing career, Percival Everett has been nurtured by Minneapolis-based non-profit publishing house beyond New York, as the locus usual of the publishing industry for America. In the UK, he was out of print for many years before being picked up by Influx Press, the small independent which in 2022 published his Booker-shortlisted The Trees. But following the success of that novel, both of the big labels on either side of the Atlantic were at the door. Suddenly he’s all the rage: his latest book, James, follows hot on the heels of the Oscar-winning movie American Fiction, based on Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, about a frustrated black writer who decides to live down stereotypical assumptions about his work by penning an anonymous spoof, My Pafology.
If you’ve read Erasure or seen American Fiction, you’ll be prepared for the central conceit of James, a reboot of Mark Twain’s 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, narrated by the enslaved Jim, one half of the book’s runaway odd couple rafting up the antebellum Mississippi. In Twain’s novel, Huck, the narrator boy, who has escaped from home, encounters Jim, his master’s slave, who is running away because he’s going to be sold (“Ole missus. treats me pooty rough, but she awluz said she wouldn’ sell me down to Orleans”). In James, Jim’s speech, like that of all the novel’s African American characters, is an intentional code-switching performance: “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them. The better they feel, the safer we are”, or “Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be”, in “the correct incorrect grammar” imposed by what Jim calls “situational translations”.
There is no denying Everett’s delight in the relentless comedy this generates throughout the book, but the language games also bite, as a literal matter of life and death in a novel where roleplay equals survival. Spinning wild and free with the original Twain throughout, the story unfolds a series of desperate escapes each of which creates more peril, as Jim gets caught up in a get-rich-quick plan by beggars who pose as down-on-their-luck aristocrats or is sold to a minstrel troupe, before pinning hopes of freeing his family on a risky disguise, only for a shipwreck to intervene.
James provides page-turning suspense but also unnerving philosophical picaresque – Jim has dream dialogue with Enlightenment thinkers Voltaire and John Locke to coolly satirize their narrow vision of human rights – before at last switching gear into gun-wielding revenge story when Jim’s vision of white people as his “enemy” (not “oppressor”, which “assumes a victim”) crystallizes with every horror on the way. It’s American history as experienced dystopia, presented in the voice of its victims, but you could guess from The Trees – a novel about lynching that won an award for comic fiction – that it won’t be serious: “White people try to tell us that everything will be okay when we reach heaven. My question is, Will they be there? If so, I might have other plans.”
The novel’s irony midrash, which has given readers unease in different ways over the years, rests on Huck’s unease that it is immoral to help Jim escape, least of all because Jim wants to free (or, as Huck would say, “steal”) his family, whom the prospect disgusts. Everett also employs the duo’s distorted perspective to the purposes of ironic bite in dealing with their relationship with care. See Huck propose to fight in the civil war:
“To fight in a war,” he said. “Can you imagine?”
“Would that mean to be in danger of being killed every day and having to do what other folks want you to?” I asked.
“I reckon.”
“Yes, Huck, I can imagine.”
Gripping, agonising, funny, terrifying, this is multi-level entertainment, a tour de force to the last curtain call. Does there ever come a point of reflection when Jim declares “white people love feeling guilty”, having established on page one that “it always pays to give white folks what they want”? Yes, after half a lifetime as a writer’s writer, Everett is finally coming good, but somehow you suspect he will let somebody get their chances to feel too settled about it.
