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”.
