‘James’ authors a new spin on controversial ‘Finn’

Everyone should know the name Percival Everett by now. His “Also by Percival Everett” lists read like discographies, revealing more than 30 novels with resonant, sometimes playful titles such as “The Trees,” a Booker Prize contender, or “Dr. No.” “American Fiction,” which just won a screenplay Oscar, is based on his 2001 satire “Erasure.”

His latest, “James,” also playful and resonant, is a rewrite of a deeply controversial classic, Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Today, the novel’s use of racially charged by Percival Everett (Doubleday, $28) language rattles us. One epithet appears more than 200 times in the unsanitized text. (At some point, an attempt was made to replace the word with “slave.”)

Among other offenses are its derogatory depictions of the enslaved Jim, who is rendered illiterate and mostly unintelligible in colloquial speech. Accusations of minstrelsy have also been rightly lobbed at Twain. Where others might see an exercise in humiliation and vexation, Everett, who is Black, sees an opportunity for re-education and redress.

In his rewrite of “Finn,” Everett grants us immediate access to that familiar time and place, right before the Civil War, when it was terrifying to be a Black person in Missouri.

As soon as Jim learns he is to be sold, he flees, leaving behind his wife and daughter. Hiding out on nearby Jackson Island, along the Mississippi River, Jim is joined by Huck, who is on the run from a violent father. Eventually, the two fugitives cast off downstream toward New Orleans.

But there are twists to this new, century-old tale, in which Huck’s story is mostly secondary. Our sole protagonist Jim — or James, as he will name himself — harbors a dangerous secret for a slave at that time.

“I am” he confesses, “a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written.” He also knows how to wield his excellent grasp of language to his benefit.

Down river, Jim manages to grab a notebook, some weighty books, among them, Rousseau’s “Discourse in Equality,” as well as a stolen pencil.

A fast-paced plot reveals the high stakes. Jim’s path to freedom for himself and his family is riddled with tricksters, hideous danger, an unbelievable revelation and some tragicomedy, including being forced to become part of a traveling minstrel group, performing in black face. (Everett has plenty of derisive fun here, dissecting and subverting damaging stereotypes.)

In Jim, we discover a man whose smarts and agency upend the unimaginable indignities of a racist past to help him secure freedom. Ironically, humor and magnanimity also pulse throughout. And, not so ironically, so does Jim’s anger.

For a writer who often plays by few rules, Everett has drawn on what he knows best here — that freedom can be won, one word at a time.

“James”