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Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view * From the "literary icon" ( Oprah Daily ) and Pulitzer Prize Finalist whose novel Erasure is the basis for Cord Jefferson's critically acclaimed film American Fiction
"Genius" -- The Atlantic * "A masterpiece that will help redefine one of the classics of American literature, while also being a major achievement on its own." -- Chicago Tribune * "A provocative, enlightening literary work of art." -- The Boston Globe * "Everett's most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful." -- The New York Times
" If you liked Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver, read J ames, by Percival Everett" -- The Washington Post
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river's banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin...), Jim's agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.
Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a "literary icon" ( Oprah Daily ), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.
Author Notes
PERCIVAL EVERETT is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. His most recent books include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction , the feature film based on his novel Erasure , was released in 2023 and was awarded the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
As in his classic novel Erasure, Everett portrays in this ingenious retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a Black man who's mastered the art of minstrelsy to get what he needs from gullible white people. Many of the same things happen as they do in Twain's original: Jim escapes from enslavement on a Missouri farm and joins up with Huck, a white boy who's faked his own death. Huck is fleeing from his abusive father, while Jim is hoping to find a way to free his wife and daughter. The main difference is in the telling. Jim narrates, not Huck, and in so doing he reveals how he employs "slave" talk ("correct incorrect grammar") when white people can hear, to make them feel safe and superior. Everett also pares down the prose and adds humor in place of sentimentality. When Huck and Jim come upon a band of slave hunters, Huck claims Jim, who's covered by a tarp, is a white man infected with smallpox ("We keep thinkin' he gone die, then he just don't"). Clever additions to the narrative include a tense episode in which Jim is fraudulently sold by a slaver to "Dixie" composer Daniel Decatur Emmett, who has Jim perform in blackface with his singing troupe. Jim's wrenching odyssey concludes with remarkable revelations, violent showdowns, and insightful meditations on literature and philosophy. Everett has outdone himself. (Mar.)
Booklist Review
Huckleberry Finn, acclaimed by many as a great American novel, has also been sharply criticized for its racist portrayal of Jim, the childlike "Negro slave" Huck befriends on their riverboat journey. In an astounding riposte, the much-lauded Everett (Dr. No, 2022) rewrites the story as a liberation narrative, told from Jim (or rather James') point of view. Erudite, a student of philosophy, and a calm strategic thinker, James is adept at code shifting from his normal dignified speech and behavior patterns to the shuffling, aw-shucks demeanor white folks expect, and even gives "speech translation" lessons to the plantation's enslaved children (disturbingly similar to "The Talk" modern Black parents give their children about police encounters). When he is accused of robbery and murder, James flees with an initially gleeful Huck, who only gradually understands the terrifying reality of being a Black man with a price on his head. As Huck comes to acknowledge the depth of his relationship with James, and the "slave's" profound gifts, the boy is forced to recognize the illogic of white supremacy and privilege. Meanwhile James, determined to return and rescue his wife and daughter, takes the story in a completely different direction than the original, exemplifying the relentless courage and moral clarity of an honorable man with nothing to lose. An absolutely essential read.
Guardian Review
For most of his prolific, 40-year career, Percival Everett has been published by a non-profit imprint in Minneapolis, outside the traditional centre of US publishing in New York. In the UK, he was long out of print until being picked up by Influx Press, the small independent that in 2022 published his Booker-shortlisted The Trees. But after the success of that novel, major labels on both sides of the Atlantic came calling. Suddenly he's hot property: his new book, James, arrives hard on the heels of the Oscar-winning film American Fiction, adapted from Everett's 2001 novel Erasure, about a frustrated black novelist who decides to live down to stereotyped expectations of his work by producing a pseudonymous spoof titled 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, the boy narrator, Huck, has fled home, only to encounter Jim, his guardian's slave, also on the run because he's about 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 every black character in the novel, is a calculated code-switching put-on: "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" required by what Jim calls "situational translations". James offers page-turning excitement but also off-kilter philosophical picaresque There's no mistaking Everett's glee in the steady comedy this generates throughout the book, but the language games have teeth, too, as a literal matter of life and death in a novel in which roleplay goes hand in hand with survival. Playing fast and loose with the original Twain throughout, the story unspools a series of last-gasp escapes that each usher in further jeopardy, as Jim is caught up in a money-making scam by vagrants posing as down-at-heel aristocrats or sold to a minstrel troupe, before pinning hopes of freeing his family on a hazardous disguise, only for a shipwreck to intervene. James offers page-turning excitement but also off-kilter philosophical picaresque - Jim enters into dream dialogue with Enlightenment thinkers Voltaire and John Locke to coolly skewer their narrow view of human rights - before finally shifting gear into gun-toting revenge narrative when Jim's view of white people as his "enemy" (not "oppressor", which "supposes a victim") sharpens with every atrocity witnessed en route. It's American history as real-life dystopia, voiced by its casualties, but as you might guess from The Trees - a novel about lynching that won a prize for comic fiction - solemn it is not: "White people try to tell us that everything will be just fine when we go to heaven. My question is, Will they be there? If so, I might make other arrangements." The central dilemma of Twain's novel, whose ironies have troubled readers differently down the decades, turns on Huck's fear that it's immoral to abet Jim's flight, not least because Jim wants to free (or, in Huck's word, "steal") his family, a notion that leaves the boy aghast. Everett likewise deploys the duo's misaligned perception for sardonic punch even as he treats their relationship tenderly. Witness the moment when Huck moots going to fight in the civil war: "To fight in a war," he said. "Can you imagine?" "Would that mean facing death every day and doing what other people tell you to do?" I asked. "I reckon." "Yes, Huck, I can imagine." Gripping, painful, funny, horrifying, this is multi-level entertainment, a consummate performance to the last. Is there pause for thought when Jim says "white people love feeling guilty", having told us on the first page that "it always pays to give white folks what they want"? Yes, after decades as a writer's writer, Everett is finally hitting the big time, but somehow you doubt he'll be giving anyone the chance to feel too cosy about that.
Kirkus Review
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember. This isn't the first novel to reimagine Twain's 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain's epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim's being sold "down the river" and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim's panic. "Huck was supposedly murdered and I'd just run away," Jim thinks. "Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?" That Jim can, as he puts it, "[do] the math" on his predicament suggests how different Everett's version is from Twain's. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters--which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett's telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. "White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don't disappoint them," Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher's library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that's much grimmer and bloodier than Twain's. There's also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense. One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The rules of engagement for Black people encountering white people are brutally clear in 1830s Missouri, a state with enslavement. Don't ever make a white person think you know something he doesn't, or you'll pay. In this virtuoso reworking of Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, it's the enslaved Jim who tells the tale. Heard from Jim's perspective, events look different than they did to Huck, because Jim is living inside a mask: deliberately hiding who and what he is and whatever aspirations he may have. For example, with his wife and family, Jim speaks clearly, even as he teaches his children to only mumble around white people, in order to give them what they like, a moment of correction. As in Twain's original, the action is fast and furious. The characters grab readers' attention and, with Jim and Huck, their hearts too. A twist near the end of the tale changes the nature of Huck and Jim's relationship dramatically. VERDICT Everett (English, Univ. of Southern California), author of The Trees and Erasure, has written an even richer and penetrating Adventures than Twain's already rich masterpiece. It will fly off library shelves.--David Keymer