Vital reckoning for ‘Huckleberry Finn’
FICTION JAMES
Percival Everett (Mantle, £20)
With his Bookershortlisted The Trees (2022) and the recent Oscarwinning film American Fiction being based on his 2001 novel Erasure, Percival Everett is, at 67, enjoying the kind of mainstream popularity that has eluded him for most of his career.
His new novel, James, is a retelling of Mark Twain’s classic-butcontroversial The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of an enslaved black man in the American South on the eve of the Civil War. It deserves to bring Everett his widest readership yet.
The eponymous James, referred to by his owners as “Jim”, carries two secrets. One is that he can read and write, which is divulged early on. The other is hinted at throughout the book, but only confirmed near the end.
Everett leaves you in no doubt about James’s unremitting agony, fury, injustice and heartbreak as he conveys his interior life in a way that Twain never did.
Huck is the sole sympathetic white character in Everett’s novel, but James still has to pander to the boy and his friend Tom Sawyer because, as James observes on the first page, “It always pays to give white folks what they want.”
Still, when James learns that he is to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter, he runs away and Huck goes with him.
They embark on a terrifying and enthralling journey along the Mississippi River, which involves kidnapping, shipwreck and murder as James tries to reach the free states to the north. There, he plans to raise the money to buy his family into freedom.
Everett’s verbal energy and his political awareness about how the scars of slavery live on in presentday America make this less a historical novel than a contemporary one that happens to be set 160 years ago. He uses the N-word frequently and potently, so that every time it brought me up short. Not because it felt inappropriate or jarring – Everett’s precision as a stylist is unerring – but because I was shocked into reckoning with the violent oppression that the word recalls.
Passages about lynching and rape are so painful that I wanted to look away. “Before I passed out, I was surprised by the realisation that my flowing blood did not at all cool the burning of my wounds,” says James after being beaten to with an inch of his life. At quieter moments, he feels profound sadness: “It pained me to think that without a white person with me, without a white-looking face, I could not travel safely through the light of the world, but was relegated to the dense woods.”
The pain in Everett’s novel is counterpointed by the pleasure of reading his prose, which he has spent the past four decades honing to a sharpness. It means he never wastes a word.
There is also deadpan wit and plenty of comical moments, as in the scene when James is conscripted into a minstrel group and must paint his face to perform. Another character explains: “You’re black, but they won’t let you into the auditorium if they know that, so you have to be white under the make-up so that you can look black to the audience.”
Twain tried to humanise Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but the novel reflected the attitudes of the 19th-century American South more than it challenged them. It reinforced patronising stereotypes about black people and deployed the N-word far too casually.
Everett redresses these failings, giving voice and individuality to James and exposing the stupidity of racism in a horrific story which is beautifully told. He is an essential writer and James may be his greatest novel yet.