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Percival Everett

Author of Erasure

46+ Works 4,222 Members 240 Reviews 12 Favorited
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About the Author

Percival Everett is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Works by Percival Everett

Erasure (2001) 842 copies
The Trees (2021) 669 copies
I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009) 333 copies
Telephone (2020) 211 copies
Dr No (2022) 208 copies
American Desert (2004) 191 copies
Glyph (1999) 181 copies
Wounded (2005) 178 copies
So Much Blue (2017) 178 copies
Assumption (2011) 166 copies
God's Country (1994) 105 copies
Watershed (1996) 84 copies

Associated Works

The Best American Short Stories 2000 (2000) — Contributor — 391 copies
Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing (2002) — Contributor — 125 copies
In the United States of Africa (2006) — Foreword, some editions — 99 copies
Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor (2006) — Contributor — 65 copies
My California: Journeys By Great Writers (2004) — Contributor — 55 copies
The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story (2021) — Contributor — 52 copies
A Portrait of Southern Writers: Photographs (2000) — Contributor — 13 copies
Nick Brandt - the day may break (2021) — Afterword — 8 copies

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AMERICAN AUTHORS CHALLENGE--AUGUST 2023--PERCIVAL EVERETT in 75 Books Challenge for 2023 (February 4)
Is this (name a book!) worth finishing? in Book talk (March 2023)

Reviews

For more reviews and bookish posts visit: https://www.ManOfLaBook.com

James by Percival Everett is the reimagining of the story of Huck Finn’s runaway adventure, from the viewpoint of the enslaved person Jim. Mr. Everett is a published author and educator at the University of Southern California.

When Jim hears he’s going to be sold to a man in New Orleans, he decides to escape. He does separate from his wife and daughter for the time being, but he has to be careful since 1840s Missouri is no place for an escaped slave.

Huck Finn, meanwhile, fakes his own death to get away from his abusive father. The two embark on an adventure down the Mighty Mississippi hoping to reach free states.

I haven’t read Mark Twain’s The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn in a long time, but I do remember the highlights, and that I enjoyed the story. in James, Percival Everett retells the story from the viewpoint of Jim, the enslaved person who is running away after he was sold.

I found the story to be exciting, and very thought-provoking, contrary to the marketing which promised me a tremendously funny book. Frankly, I liked it much more for bringing up points of view I didn’t think of while entertaining at the same time.

The fact that Mr. Everett stayed true to Twain’s story, characters, and style while creating a different work is a feat all by itself. I think that humanizing Jim, the enslaved hero of the book, actually shows the inhumanity that he faces better than just describing atrocities.

I do have to read the original again at some point, but I have a feeling that as an adult James might be just as meaningful. I’m glad that Jim got his voice, a clear, proud, and strong one at that.

Around the middle of the book, the author changes course from the Twain narrative. There are twists and turns, new characters, and a revenge scene that would make Quentin Tarantino proud.

This is a remarkable novel, that shows self-awareness and irony, sometimes in the same scene. I have read several of my favorite books as an adult (Treasure Island for instance), and discovered that there’s a whole new novel in them when reading with a perspective of a few decades behind you. This novel, an intelligent and fascinating retelling, is one of them.
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ZoharLaor | 1 other review | Mar 15, 2024 |
An incisive, subversive reimagining of a classic.
 
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Unreachableshelf | 1 other review | Mar 13, 2024 |
Gunther went downstairs and sat alone in the kitchen, watched the snow turn serious. The truth was that Gunther did feel windless. He felt unusually calm and he wasn't sure it felt good, though he was pleased with how he was handling the situation with his daughter. He held his hand out, like a gunfighter in a movie, to check his steadiness. His hand did not quiver. He checked his pulse. Fifty. It had never been fifty. He wanted to be anxious about his newfound serenity, but instead he grew even more relaxed. The irony was not lost on him and in fact played out as being strange and slightly amusing.

Percival Everett is one of my favorite novelists but one can never be sure if an author who writes novels well will have the same mastery of the short story. I've been disappointed before. But Everett excels at the form, here giving brief looks at lives lived in rural Colorado and Wyoming. The main characters here are mostly men, mostly Black men, living alone, or with their families, all looking to do the right thing, keeping mostly to themselves. In the first story, a vet goes out on horseback to help search for a missing child and finds much more than he'd expected, in another, a horseman helps a woman with her riding, but is taken aback when she takes his practical advice as life lessons. In The Day Comes, the story I pulled the above quote from, the slightly bored sheriff of a quiet rural district deals with the usual small problems and then a much larger one. Each story is carefully crafted and manages to create a large impact in just a few pages.
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½
 
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RidgewayGirl | 5 other reviews | Mar 11, 2024 |
With its strong note of the Southern grotesque, I naturally thought of Flannery O’Connor while reading this extraordinary novel. Like O’Connor, Everett exaggerates his characters and plot to make the stupid violent racism of whites more shocking. Everett’s racists here are profoundly stupid people. This is not to say however that Everett and O’Connor are similar in their fundamental aims. O’Connor was famously a Catholic novelist. She was concerned with redemption, and her stories attempted to show to a complacent society why we needed it. Everett is not a Catholic or any kind of religious novelist.* “The Trees” is not about redemption, but revenge. It is a purely secular reckoning with a sinful society, lacking any transcendence.

This similarity/difference is nicely illustrated I think in O’Connor’s quote that, “The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” Everett does not have any Christian concerns but in “The Trees” he is also addressing the problem of forcing a slumbering sinful society (sorry) to look at its horrific pattern of racist violence. One of his characters muses:

“Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices. Where there are no mass graves, no one notices. American outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life. If that Griffin book had been Lynched Like Me, America might have looked up from dinner or baseball or whatever they do now. Twitter?”


Or take this exchange between Everett’s avenging angel, Mama Z, and a well-meaning academic whose uselessness is corrected by forcing him to take a more visceral look at America’s racist violence:
“What do you know about lynching?” Mama Z asked.
“Some. I wrote a book about racial violence.”
“I know,” the old woman said. “I have a copy in the house. It’s very …”—she searched for the word—“scholastic.”
“I think you’re saying that like it’s a bad thing.”
Mama Z shrugged.
Damon looked at Gertrude, as if for clarification, only to see her shrug as well. “Scholastic,” he repeated.
“Don’t take it the wrong way,” Gertrude said.
“Your book is very interesting,” Mama Z said, “because you were able to construct three hundred and seven pages on such a topic without an ounce of outrage.”
Damon was visibly bothered by this. “One hopes that dispassionate, scientific work will generate proper outrage.”
“Nicely said, nicely said,” Mama Z said. “Wouldn’t you say that was nicely said, great-granddaughter?”


Everett’s story here, and his use of the Southern grotesque tradition, does an incredible job of illustrating the repugnant distortion of America’s past and present. It is highly engaging, humorous mixed with horror, and the writing is addictive. He leads his characters, and the reader, to first imagine this is a ghost story of one vengeful spirit, then to a more natural explanation involving a small active group of assassins, only to finally veer way off into a zombie revenge fantasy that I for one never saw coming!

It is not all Southern grotesque of course, Everett writes out of multiple traditions here. One of his most effective methods borrows from the Homeric Epic - the making of lists. Lists of names. Lists of places. Lots of lists of places. This is an entire and complete chapter:

Florence, South Carolina. Macon, Georgia. Hope Mills, North Carolina. Selma, Alabama. Shelbyville, Tennessee. Blue Ash, Ohio. Bedford, Indiana. Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Irmo, South Carolina. Orangeburg, South Carolina. Los Angeles, California. Jackson, Mississippi. Benton, Arkansas. Lexington, Nebraska. New York, New York. Rolla, Missouri. Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Elsmere, Delaware. Tarrytown, New York. Grafton, North Dakota. Oxford, Pennsylvania. Anne Arundel, Maryland. Otero, Colorado. Coos Bay, Oregon. Chester, South Carolina. Petersburg, Virginia. Laurel, Delaware. Madison, Maryland. Beckley, West Virginia. Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee. Fort Mill, South Carolina. Niceville, Florida. Slidell, Louisiana. Money, Mississippi. DeSoto, Mississippi. Quitman, Mississippi. Elmore, Alabama. Jefferson, Alabama. Montgomery, Alabama. Henry, Alabama. Colbert, Alabama. Russell, Alabama. Coffee, Alabama. Clarke, Alabama. Laurens, South Carolina. Greenwood, South Carolina. Oconee, South Carolina. Union, South Carolina. Aiken, South Carolina. York, South Carolina. Abbeville, South Carolina. Hampton, South Carolina. Franklin, Mississippi. Lowndes, Mississippi. Leflore, Mississippi. Simpson, Mississippi. Jefferson, Mississippi. Washington, Mississippi. George, Mississippi. Monroe, Mississippi. Humphreys, Mississippi. Bolivar, Mississippi. Sunflower, Mississippi. Hinds, Mississippi. Newton, Mississippi. Copiah, Mississippi. Alcorn, Mississippi. Jefferson Davis, Mississippi. Panola, Mississippi. Clay, Mississippi. Lamar, Mississippi. Yazoo, Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi.


Personally I found that the most chillingly effective chapter in the whole novel. Over and over and over, lynching after lynching after lynching. It keeps happening but don’t dare for a second think it’s natural, or just the way things are.

This is an incredible, extraordinary, accomplished, brilliant, urgent novel. The writing quality is very high. My only hesitation with it is that purely secular revenge stories as good as they may be are always missing something for me that writers like O’Connor have. Here there is no transcendence, no redemption, no grace. All there is is the world’s brutal stage and actors upon it and the best thing is revenge. There are many stories like that, of course, and they can be very entertaining. And if a belief in something greater than the material world is alien to the reader’s constitution, they would not share this small hesitation. Either way, definitely a 5 star read.

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* Quote from Everett in an interview: “Religion is about fear. Nobody wants to be a Christian because they want to help people. They want to be a Christian so they don't go to hell.” I’m admittedly disappointed he has this simplistic outlook but it does fit perfectly with “The Trees”.
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lelandleslie | 41 other reviews | Feb 24, 2024 |

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