James—the latest novel from the prodigious (and finally widely-read) Percival Everett—is many things: a relentless code-switching satire, a meditation on the constructedness of racial identity, a love letter to the written word, and, yes, I suppose, a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Before reading James, I imagined this review would likely hone in on the various harmonies and dissonances between Twain’s and Everett’s texts, and I have no doubt many reviewers will find great joy working through these tensions. Twain has once again, in recent years, become a fraught figure in literary and academic discourse. On the one hand, Huckleberry Finn continues to be challenged in schools across the United States. For others though, Twain is simply difficult to enthusiastically embrace, whether that be for his work’s gratuitous use of the n-word, or the reasonable desire to place other voices at the center of literary canon when it comes to novels so explicitly about race.
It’s not like Twain is newly fascinating to critics… In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison writes that if we release our reading of Huckleberry Finn from “nostrums about … the fundamental innocence of Americanness … it becomes a more beautifully complicated work that sheds much light on some of the problems it has accumulated through traditional readings.” Even of the novel’s critically derided and ill-imagined final act, Morrison explains that “in the hell it puts its readers through at the end … it simulates and describes the parasitical nature of white freedom.”
Considering its endorsements and detractors alike, I could easily understand why Everett—a writer never afraid to challenge current literary orthodoxies and pretensions—would find a worthy subject in Twain’s portrayal of the enslaved Jim. What I did not expect was the extent to which this book can be read and enjoyed and written about without the slightest nod to its predecessor.
So let’s play that game. In James, we are introduced for the first time to a character named Jim: a cerebral narrator, fiercely loyal father and husband, and enslaved man living in Missouri before the civil war. Jim is an expert in “[giving] white folks what they want”—speaking in a heightened (*cough* Twanian *cough*) diction and pretending to be unable to write or read. “What I gone do wif a book?” he says to the white Miss Watson, never mind the fact he is writing the very book the reader holds in their hands.
Jim hallucinates Voltaire and John Locke. He instructs Black children on how to speak the “correct incorrect grammar” to their white tormentors. And when he learns that he is about to be sold–separated from his wife and daughter–he runs away from Miss Watson and travels down the Mississippi River alongside a young white boy named Huckleberry Finn.
Throughout their on-again-off-again journey, Huck becomes a fascinating foil against which we begin to understand Jim. Huck is characterized with a gnawing desire for adventure but also an innocence that seems borne more from his station in life than it does from his being a child. When Jim attempts to explain that because of their leaving around the same time, Huck is likely believed to be dead and Jim the murderer, Huck is mystified:
“‘I never thought of that,’ Huck said. ‘I never dreamed I could git you into trouble. Why would you want to kill me?’
‘Dat don’t matter none to white folks.’
‘I don’t like white folks,’ he said. ‘And I is one.’
In moments like these, in spite of its historical setting, James appears interested in contending with contemporary sensibilities. Huck’s innocence is more put upon than a child’s innocence. It reads as a performative guilt (“White people love feeling guilty,” Jim later writes) or an exercise in self-flagellation performed by white people in the service of their own self-image. Huck, like many, thinks he can exonerate himself by implicating himself; it’s only a matter of time before he considers a career as a personal essayist.
And yet, in what can feel like a mystery, Jim remains devoted to the child’s safety. In a book littered with performances (Huck’s, Jim’s, Daniel Decatur Emmett’s), Jim’s fidelity to Huck is not one: Everett resolves any confusion here with a rich and canon-shaking revelation. He launches into a thriller for the book’s final act. Percival Everett has always been highly regarded for his preternatural ability to slip in and out and between genres, but by the end of James, when the curtain falls and blood is spilled, you may need a reminder the majority of the novel is played in the key of farce.
Take, for example, when Jim is sold to the “Virginia Minstrels” as their newest tenor. It’s Everett at his finest—acerbic, insightful, and larger than any source material he might have borrowed from:
“Never had a situation felt so absurd, surreal and ridiculous. And I had spent my life as a slave. There we were, twelve of us, marching down the main street that separated the free side of town from the slave side, ten white men in blackface, one black man passing for white and painted black, and me, a light-brown black man painted black in such a way as to appear like a white man trying to pass for black.”
It probably won’t surprise any longtime Everett fans that he spends James lampooning the constructedness of racial identity and its various expressions (literary, linguistic, etc.). Not unlike in Erasure or its more recent reincarnation, American Fiction, these constructions read like a theatre of the absurd—an endless matrix of performances so immersive that Everett’s characters once again lose themselves inside it.
Reading James, I remembered when a working director once explained to me that the goal of the theatre-artist (her goal, at least) was to create a performance where the audience could sink so deeply into the material, they might forget for a moment they are watching a play. It saddened me: the limits of working with text on a page, the understanding that novelists might not be able to do the same. The good news is that while James may only be a novel about performance, it is a novel where the reader can sink in so deeply, they might forget it’s a reimagining.
FICTION
James
By Percival Everett
Doubleday Books
Published March 19, 2024
