Percival Everett has breathed fierce life into one of American literature's iconic characters in James, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the runaway slave.
James' conceit is that Jim is secretly literate and can speak with perfect diction. Twain's "painstakingly" studied "Missouri negro" dialect is a put-on that Jim and other slaves use to deflect white anger and suspicion. Everett is a sly writer, and he loves to employ this code-switching and the fictions of race for subversive comic effect.
