Percival Everett

Then and Now.

I’ve now read five of Percival Everett’s many novels and while different in place and character, and tone, all take aim at the social order, or, more to the point, disorder. He has been publishing for forty years – two-dozen novels, four collections of short stories, six of poetry, and a children’s book – although recently “discovered” by more mainstream readers.

He’s has almost always been well-reviewed. One common theme among critics, however, is that his writings are “confounding.” Hmmm. Kafka is confounding. Ulysses is confounding. Everett is complex. Layered. Frequently provocative. Often, disturbing. And, even more often, hilarious. Few writers combine such disparate qualities into one written work, much less so many literary page-turners.

He’s a painter as well. In fact, he started as a fine artist. In his spare time, he repairs and plays guitar. Oh, and did I mention he’s a distinguished professor at USC. Given his latest work, James, which has already been hailed a masterpiece, I suspect the best is yet to come.

It really wasn’t that I wanted her, but that I wanted what she had, a kind of freedom, a purity of spirit. It was a sort of integrity, something that I strived for but had lost through so many years, maybe never had. [So Much Blue.]

I’ve read, thus far, Trees [2021] shortlisted for the Booker prize: a modern mystery of injustice. Telephone [2020] a treatise on what is or is not out of our control. So Much Blue [2017] in which a painter over time struggles to come to terms with who he is and what he wants, driven by the secrets that haunt him. Erasure [2018] the basis for the recent film American Fiction, which satirizes American literary culture and racial bias. And now, James [2024] a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

A common thread throughout the novels is that someone goes missing and/or someone is running away from something, often himself [protagonists are usually male, antagonists or facilitators, female.] In Trees, a dead body disappears and shows up, repeatedly, in tandem with other dead bodies. In Telephone, a geologist runs away from his despair by trying to save someone else. In So Much Blue, the artist leaves his family in the midst of a crisis to seek closure from a long ago personal crisis. In Erasure, a frustrated writer resists personal commitment. And, in James, well, Huck is running away from his abusive father, and James/Jim running to find a way back to reclaim his family and his freedom. The more obvious runaway journey.

You might say Percival Everett gives new meaning to escapist fiction.

And run I did, like only a slave can run. My injuries ached, my feet complained, but I moved at top speed through trees, through dry creek beds, sloshed through branches of the river, climbed what small hills there were and damn near rolled down the other sides. I stopped when I couldn’t see well enough to run anymore. [James]

He also seizes every opportunity to poke fun at genre or characters stereotyped by pop culture. As original as the stories are, characters are often cliché, by design, I believe, in order to set the stage. Police officers investigating the murder and also the townspeople in Trees are direct from central casting. The bandito in So Much Blue might have stepped out of a Clint Eastwood western. The literary agent and publisher in Erasure are trapped in 50s fiction. The geologist in Telephone seems derived from a science fiction epic. Their interactions and their response to the precipitating event are what matters and, because Everett is such a skilled writer, and his prose so meaningful and propulsive, we accept, I would say appreciate, the shorthand.

Amidst the most heinous of crimes, the greatest fears, and the worst human behavior, he also finds the humor, the pathos, you might say. Irony, sarcasm and satire abound. You can almost hear Everett muttering tsk, tsk, tsk, with a wry expression, but with tears in his eyes.

People, and by people I mean them, never look for truth, they look for satisfaction. There is nothing worse, certain painful and deadly diseases notwithstanding, than an unsatisfactory, piss-poor truth, whereas a satisfactory lie is all too easy to accept, even embrace, get cozy with.” [Telephone]

Not surprisingly, Everett studied philosophy as an undergraduate before earning an MA in writing. Because he was first a fine artist, his novels often feel like a painting in progress, the final canvas not necessarily what was originally intended. In Telephone, to emphasize alternatives, he published three different versions, and these split at different times. [I’m still not sure what version I read, but I liked the ending.]

Perhaps, Everett reminds us, there are no absolutes, no certainties, even in fiction.

The world demands that you introduce yourself twice, first as yuou are, and second as you are told to be. The hard, gritty truth of the matter is that I hardly ever think about race. Those times when I did think about it a lot I did so because of my guilt for not thinking about it. I don't believe in race. [Erasure]

What I find particularly endearing, and fascinating about his work, is that within the darkest of circumstance, the most acerbic commentary or ridicule, he rarely fails to elevate love and attachment as the human endeavor – romance and parental commitment, and sexual pleasure, play a crucial role in his stories, as in life, as if to say, over and over again, pay attention to what matters.

Erasure, until James, might be the best known of his works, because it was turned into the popular film. Although that novel focused on with how we sublimate intellectual thought, and humanity, to cultural bias, most of Everett’s novels also include an element of erasure. From the murder of young Emmett Till to a runaway slave called Jim and a man struggling with his daughter’s illness who seeks the answer to one word on a slip of paper in his pocket, ayudarme, [Sherlock Holmes would be tantalized] we are reminded of how western civilization continues to marginalize, if not annihilate, people of color, and, perhaps more than ever, intellectuals.

…the crime, the practice, the religion of it, was becoming more pernicious as he realized that the similarity of their deaths had caused these men and women to be at once erased and coalesced like one piece, like one body. [Trees]

Landscape is also pivotal to Everett’s fiction and in Trees, a town oddly named Money, Mississippi, is set in MAGA country, where white people appear to have been emboldened by Trumpism, openly bemoaning the good-old-days of the Klan.

We don’t do nothin’ now … I don’t even know where my hood is. I don’t even own a rope. [Trees]

Complex, yes, but his themes and stories are Socratic in their simplicity. Every story begs a question. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be black in America, then and now? What does it mean to be an artist, a parent, a spouse? He probes the reader to self-examination as he probes his characters.

I attended to the color of the water and could not name it. It was not green, I thought, and so I knew that there was green in it, but still blue, as green as a blue can get and still be blue. We only ever spontaneously deny the presence of things that are actually there or should be there. [So Much Blue]

As in all great novels, we are left with as many or more deliberations as conclusions.

Where to start? Read James first, as I foresee the bestowing of many awards, quite possibly the Pulitzer. Read it because it is important to be reminded of what matters - what cannot be erased from our collective memory, as well as our tenuous future.

I was determined to focus on backlist in 2024, and I am, and will again, but great fiction just keeps coming, hard to ignore. Stay tuned for more. Cheers.