After reading Percival Everett's new novel, James, I can't decide whether Mark Twain is too busy rolling over in his grave to be envious of Everett's clever reimagining of Huckleberry Finn.
Percival Everett is having a moment. His 2001 novel Erasure inspired the 2023 film American Fiction, which won Cord Jefferson a bunch of awards, including the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. While the reclusive Everett struggled to avoid the Hollywood limelight, his new novel James arrived on the scene, sparking the kind of attention rarely lavished upon an author of clever literary fictions that generally appeal to a niche audience.
Erasure dealt with racial passing and so does James, but this time the passing occurs on multiple levels too complicated to unravel without spoilers. Every review I've read discusses how Everett plays with slave dialect. In Huck Finn, Twain uses dialect to mark Jim as part of a subservient, ignorant, infantilized class while allowing his basic human decency to shine through; in James, enslaved characters speak standard English amongst themselves but assume typical slave dialect in the presence of white people, who are happy only when they feel superior. This disparity creates amusing moments, such as when Jim tutors his children in proper pronunciation and deference. At the end of the lesson, the children recite, "The better they feel, the safer we are," which one child translates thus: "Da mo' betta dey feels, da mo' safer we be."
Intelligent people passing as ignorant to ensure their own safety: these passages are wryly comic until it becomes clear that such safety is ephemeral. At one point James gets separated from Huck and sold into servitude with a group of white men who perform minstrel shows in blackface; to appear on the stage, James must be disguised as a white man wearing blackface, which works well enough until an audience member insists on touching his hair. Here, his mastery of slave dialect can't save him and in fact only makes the danger more dire.
As the novel goes on, James encounters very un-funny dangers of the sort that Twain mostly elided: whippings, lynchings, rape, child rape, murder. James emerges at the end with his own name, family, pencil, notebook, and story, but each gain comes at great cost in pain and suffering.
What would Mark Twain think of this book? On the one hand, Everett has fleshed out Jim's story in a way that feels true and convincing, providing some laugh-out-loud moments and insightful critique of aspects of the era that Twain didn't feel comfortable including. On the other hand, he introduces some plot twists that may permanently alter the way we read Huck Finn.
Everett's characters take a very different kind of journey from the one Twain provided them, but in the end I believe Twain would appreciate the way Everett shines a new light on the world Twain illuminated. Everett ends the acknowledgments with this line: "Heaven for the climate, hell for my long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain." After reading James, I'd love to be a fly on the wall to hear that conversation.
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