James (4*)

 

It's about time!  With James, Percival Everett has reclaimed Jim, one of American literatures most iconic characters.  He no longer plays second fiddle to Huck Finn; more significantly he doesn't sound anything like Mark Twain's original character because in Everett's conceit, "slave talk" is something that black people employ only when communicating in front of white people, as a means of survival and concealment.

I must admit that Jim's use of the phrase "proleptic irony" (dictionary, please) early in the book stretched the bounds of credulity but it also slyly contemporizes the tale and reveals Everett's deep love of language and writing for people who, like me, are reading him for the first time.  I wasn't familiar with his work until two years ago, when American Fiction, the Oscar-nominated movie based on his novel Erasure, was released shortly before he won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for James, his 24th novel.  New fans might even congratulate themselves on finding a little proleptic irony in this passage, considering the mid-list confinement its under-appreciated author endured for decades:

Waiting is a big part of a slave’s life, waiting and waiting to wait some more. Waiting for demands. Waiting for food. Waiting for the ends of days. Waiting for the just and deserved Christian reward at the end of it all. 

In a New Yorker podcast, Everett said he re-read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 15 times so that he could internalize Twain's novel which has been a near constant--and often controversial--presence on middle and high school reading lists since the 1950s.  His diligence pays off, but to say much more about James's plot, equally adventurous and peopled with familiar characters sometimes to its detriment (the shenanigans of the Duke and the Dauphin still bore), would definitely enter spoiler territory.  Suffice it to say that the revelation explaining Jim's lifesaving behavior at the conclusion of Everett's novel rings more true than what Huck does at the end of Twain's.  

It also exposes the absurdity of a critical take on the original novel which was still in vogue when I first read and thought it overrated.  But "Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!," a 1948 essay did pique my interest at the time.  Leslie Fiedler posits that the relationship between Huck and Jim--as well as that, more explicitly, of Ishmael and Queequeg in Melville's Moby Dick--is homoerotic and that their respective raft and ship are a kind of Eden where the characters must go to escape the violence characteristic of 19th century America. Hmmmm.  Theories like that are what made me decide graduate school would be worse than Hell.

Everett has finally freed James from the shackles of white imagination, imbuing him with the intelligence, dignity and agency that American violence always had denied him.  At least Fiedler got that part right.