Percival Everett has never been one to handle the American literary canon with reverence, and James is his most audacious act of literary reclamation yet. By taking The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and shifting its narrative gravity, Everett transforms what was once a story about a boy’s moral awakening into something far more urgent. The story of a man forced to perform simplicity for the sake of his own survival. Twain’s Jim, a character flattened by dialect and limited perspective, becomes James, erudite, self-possessed, and painfully aware of the fictions that shape his existence. The result is not merely a retelling but a confrontation, a novel that forces its readers to reconsider not just Huck Finn but the entire structure of who gets to tell what stories and why.
The premise is familiar, but under Everett’s hands, its implications are entirely different. James is a man in constant calculation, forced to measure every interaction, every word, every moment of silence against the violent realities of his world. He speaks several languages, has read widely from the books left behind in his enslaver’s library, and yet must strategically conceal his intelligence to avoid suspicion. What emerges is a character of immense depth, someone whose every movement is both an act of survival and a quiet resistance. The brilliance of Everett’s prose lies in its ability to convey all of this through restraint, letting James’s inner monologue reveal the vast distance between what he thinks and what he must allow others to perceive.
Everett has long been preoccupied with the question of how stories are told, and James is perhaps his most cutting deconstruction of narrative power yet. Huckleberry Finn has been lauded as a satire, even an anti-racist text, but its very structure depends on Jim’s limited agency, on his role as a moral test for a white boy’s development. Everett refuses this framework, stripping away Twain’s folksy benevolence to expose the raw terror of James’s journey. There is humor here, but it is sharper, more knowing, less the bumbling comedy of Twain’s original and more an indictment of the ways Blackness has been forced into caricature.
What makes James a masterpiece is that it is not simply a corrective; it is a novel that stands entirely on its own. Everett does not rewrite Twain as much as he dissects him, using the bones of Huck Finn to construct something that is at once deeply familiar and wholly original. The language is precise and controlled, mirroring James’s own necessity for restraint, and the shifts in power—between James and Huck, between James and the reader—are handled with subtlety.
Few modern novels manage to engage with history while feeling as immediate, as necessary, as James. Everett has done something extraordinary here: he has given voice to a character who was always there but never fully seen, and in doing so, has reshaped the landscape of American literature.
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