Percival Everett

Baffling murders, gruesome and apparently vengeful, are troubling the small town of Money, Mississippi---two White men, found separately, each strangled with barbed wire, each emasculated, each with a battered and dirty Black corpse nearby. Both White men have a family connection to the men believed to have murdered Emmett Till 60 years before. Then, the decrepit old White woman who first accused Emmett of whistling at her, and later recanted her story, is found dead of natural causes...but show more also accompanied by the same--or a very similar--Black corpse. It all proves too much for Sheriff Red Jetty and his force. Enter two special agents from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation...two Black special agents from the MBI. They don't make a lot of progress in figuring out what the devil is going on either...but for a while they, and the reader, have a hell of a lot of fun trying. There are some of the darkest bits of humor I have ever encountered in the first two hundred pages of this book, and I could not put it down. Everett's characters are drawn with wicked accuracy, and named with a whimsy that defies description. As deaths multiply all across the U. S., the mysterious unidentified unmutilated companion corpses begin to include Chinese and Native American men in addition to Black men. The situation gets less amusing, more profound, more bewildering and even the instigators of the original retributive killings do not understand what they have set in motion. There is no subtlety here, and ultimately not the slightest suggestion of hope for a resolution of either the burgeoning Rising, or the historical atrocities that brought it all into being. Unforgettable. show less

We’ve all read [Huckleberry Finn], or at least we all have a good idea of what it’s about — it is another of those books that gets referenced so much that it’s almost unnecessary actually to read it. But we probably haven’t thought much about how different the story would look if it were told from Jim’s point-of-view. It’s the classic bacon-vs.-egg situation: what seems like a thrilling adventure to the white boy is a hideously frightening life or death struggle to the enslaved show more black adult.

Everett brings us face to face with this reality in a delicate, ironic way, letting us draw our own conclusions rather than ramming the obvious down our throats. He says his aim is not to attack Twain’s book, but to complement it in an affectionate way, giving us access to a way of seeing things that would have been closed to the original author.

He does this on multiple levels, with the most important and unexpected being language: he makes the point that slaves would have communicated between themselves in a private language inaccessible to their white masters, and that has nothing to do with the “slave dialect” they used for talking to white people. Since we don’t know much about this private language, he adopts the arbitrary convention of having the slaves in the story speak standard modern English amongst themselves (the whites all speak southern dialect, of course), and translate this into “Yes, massa” dialect as required to display suitable humility and unthreatening stupidity to the whites. To rub the point in, we see the narrator, James/Jim, giving the black children a formal dialect lesson in an early chapter.

We also learn that Jim has taught himself to read, and is studying on the quiet in Judge Thatcher’s neglected library of Enlightenment philosophy. Again, this isn’t meant to be taken literally as something that would have been going on behind the scenes in Huck Finn, but it is supposed to make us stop and realise that these are normal, intelligent human beings, perfectly capable of talking about Locke and Voltaire if they got the chance, who are being made to live like animals.

Everett has the sense of humour and storytelling ability to engage with someone like Mark Twain without making himself look silly, and he has the perception to make us look at something we are very familiar with in a new way: this book probably won’t teach us anything we didn’t already know about slavery, but it will force us to re-examine the way we think about what we have read about it previously. Entertaining and worthwhile. show less

Percival Everett doing what he does best – cloaking the deadly serious in farce and ridiculousness, and telling a great story along the way. Ted Street, a self-professed mediocre professor and husband dies in a car accident on his way to the ocean to drown himself. He is neatly decapitated but doesn’t let that stop him from rising from his coffin three days later (Yes, sounds familiar) and walking out of the church with his family.

Of course he becomes big news, is kidnapped by a doomsday show more cult, escapes, falls into the hands of a typically shadowy government organization based at Area 51, escapes, and makes it home to his family with the help of an insurance investigator sent to prove that Ted is still alive so they don’t have to pay out. But not before becoming a hero by saving twenty-seven children being held by the cult.

At the end, no longer truly alive or truly dead, Ted decides his own fate. Another story that only Percival Everett could have written. show less

Curt Marder, the narrator of this ironic anti-Western, is a coward, hopelessly prejudiced, utterly lacking in moral sense, and not especially clever. When outlaws burn down his house, kidnap his wife and shoot his dog, the neighbours are all very upset about the dog, but it seems that no-one is going to help him to rescue poor Sadie. Eventually he manages to secure the assistance of Bubba, the only African-American in the district, a man who has spent so much of his life being chased that he show more has become an expert tracker himself.

Naturally, the partnership is not without its difficulties, but, this being an Everett novel, we can be pretty sure that the incompatible pair will not bond, Hollywood-style, to form an unlikely friendship. Bubba knows perfectly well that he can’t trust Marder, and Marder is too dim to see how much he owes to Bubba, so they go on hating each other to the last page.

A dark, unrelenting, and very funny story, complete with gunfights, painted ladies, the Silver Dollar Saloon, a stagecoach, Red Indians and the 7th Cavalry. But not quite in the mix you might expect from a Western, and strongly laced with Everett’s characteristic antipathy toward neat narrative closure… show less