Percival Everett, James

Let's be clear.

Even before the first Trump presidency [shudder], there was no way that I could comprehend American culture. Now that we're deeply into the second one, this Canadian feels like the USA is incomprehensible: not just to me, as an individual failing or weakness on my part, but to almost anyone anywhere else.

("What's complicated about white Christian fascism?", I can hear you asking, and that's a fair point except that American white Christian fascism, which dominates the Republican party and which the Democrats can't seem to help flirting with, is different from the soft-fascist colonialism that's defined Canadian political evolution.)

And then there's slavery.

I've written before on this blog about my own ignorance about race in Canada, particularly in Canadian history; probably the longest such comment appears in my post on David Chariandy's Soucouyant. I spent so many years not knowing how much I needed to learn on this subject, that my sense now is that I can only ever approximate what some folks will already have known intimately and viscerally.

When I encountered Mark Twain's novels, first The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and later on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I read them as books about children kind of like me. After all, I was growing up in the country, albeit in 1970s/80s rural BC rather than 1840s Missouri, and I spent a lot of hours every week alone in the woods doing whatever I felt like doing, so even though Huck and Tom found themselves in more trouble than I ever did, trouble both more complicated and more dangerous, they still felt a little like they could've been classmates.

It's not that I didn't notice the slavery and other issues of race. It's that I was ten years old, and it meant so very much to find in print someone who was a little like me (so don't even get me started on Jim Kjelgaard's Big Red books!). Literally: not only was there no one to talk to about these books, it never would've occurred to me that I would talk to someone about my reading.

Anyway, Percival Everett's novel James rewrites and extends The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which Huck and the escaped slave Jim have a series of adventures along the Mississippi River, retelling the events from the perspective of Jim. In Everett's retelling, of course, Jim claims the name James for himself, and Everett goes to great pains to articulate James' humanity in the face of trials both systemic and individual. It follows Twain's narrative fairly closely, except for shifting its dates nearer the Civil War, and also follows Twain's lead in its emphasis on character and individual experience.

Interestingly (to me, at least), Everett clearly doesn't think his readers quite get the novel, as can be seen by some conflicting remarks about James on the Booker Prize site. The Booker judges, on the one hand, remarked in James' citation that "the novel examines the dehumanising effects of slavery and the pervasive, institutionalised racism that underpins it." For his part, Everett said something rather different to Elle: "I hope that no one thinks that my novel is about slavery. There’s a difference between writing a story about people who happen to be slaves and writing a story about slavery."

James feels like an essential novel, an approach that was inevitably going to be taken by someone, and I'm glad that Percival Everett was the one to take it on. James' code-switching, which is shared by every other slave, is a solid satiric touch, and Everett does well to emphasize James' weaknesses along with his virtues. Even though much of his personhood is defined and controlled by slavery, James lives on the page as a person who happens to be a slave, as Everett said in his Elle interview.

Given my long ignorance, I'd say that even though I've tried to learn a lot, I'm the wrong person to assess this book's ultimate success. Its accomplishment feels slighter to me than I thought it would, the bar it clears a bit too low, because after all it's really a satiric rewrite of a comic novel, extending and clarifying the sympathies that one would've hoped that Twain would've had, even if the extent of Twain's sympathies remain a little hard to map.

In my ignorance, as a result, I'm left damning James with relatively faint praise: essential reading, but predictable even where it strays from Twain's template.

It's just that this novel, like the country it comes from, isn't my own, and isn't for me. You'll want to trust someone else, because I'm not James' ideal reader. I don't know that I trust the hyperboles of Tyler Austin Harper in The Atlantic, but that's maybe a good antidote to my self-doubt.

Of course it'll be filmed, after the success of Everett's novel Erasure as the movie American Fiction, but I'm unclear why Steven Spielberg and Taika Waititi should be the ones most likely to lead its filming. Still, the most recent Oscar Best Picture I've seen came out in 2010, so I shouldn't even have an opinion about that!