NEW YORK, March 19, 2024 — Percival Everett has been writing at a level of ambition, intelligence, and formal audacity that the American literary establishment has, until recently, contrived not to notice. Thirty-plus books deep into a career that has included ERASURE (the novel that Cord Jefferson adapted into AMERICAN FICTION, which won him the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay just weeks ago), THE TREES, DR. NO, TELEPHONE, and I AM NOT SIDNEY POITIER, Everett has spent decades demonstrating that he is one of the country’s most restless and most necessary novelists. Today, with the publication of JAMES, he delivers the book that ends any remaining argument.

JAMES is a retelling of Mark Twain’s ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN told from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man whose journey down the Mississippi Twain rendered largely through Huck’s uncomprehending fourteen-year-old gaze. What Everett has done, and what has provoked the extraordinary early response the book is receiving from critics who have already read it, is give Jim back his voice, his mind, his rage, his tenderness, his humor, and above all his interior life. It is the kind of literary intervention that only a novelist of Everett’s specific gifts could have executed. It is also, and this matters, one of the most propulsive American novels published in years.

What the Book Is

JAMES is a novel of escape and return, of literacy and its dangers, of the specific and murderous absurdity of American slavery, and of the moral education of Huck Finn as seen from the perspective of the man whose life Huck accompanied without ever quite understanding. The plot, in its broad architecture, follows the river journey Twain readers know. What has changed is everything else. Jim, whom Everett names James, is a reader. He is a thinker. He is a man who has spent his life performing the version of himself white people needed to see, and who conducts, in the pages of Everett’s novel, an internal life of formidable range and depth.

The novel operates by a device that is, on inspection, staggering. James speaks one way to white people (the dialect Twain rendered) and another way entirely to himself and to other enslaved people (a register of full linguistic and intellectual command). Everett makes this simple structural fact the moral engine of the novel. Every scene now runs on two tracks. The one Huck and the reader of Twain saw, and the one that was always happening underneath, and which American literature spent a century and a half refusing to see.

The result is a novel that does not merely correct Twain. It converses with him. It honors what Twain got right, which was considerable, and it fills in what Twain could not or would not see, which was more. James emerges as one of the great characters in recent American fiction, not because Everett has invented him, but because Everett has finally allowed him to be seen.

Why This Book Matters, and Why Everett Was the Novelist Who Could Write It

Retellings are a fraught genre. Most of them fail, and most of them fail in the same way: they replace one thin reading with another. What JAMES avoids, and what makes it the rare retelling that becomes a permanent literary artifact rather than a footnote to its source, is Everett’s refusal to reduce James to a corrective device. James is not the answer to Jim. James is a full novelistic consciousness in his own right, and the book is his book.

Everett’s career has been building toward this. He is a novelist obsessed with the machinery of American racial performance, with what Black writers are allowed to write and what white readers are willing to see, with the exhaustion of being read incorrectly for decades. ERASURE was a satire of exactly this. THE TREES was a horror-comedy of exactly this. JAMES is the same argument at its full literary weight: the American canon has spent a century and a half misreading its own foundational texts, and the correction, when it comes, will not come as commentary. It will come as fiction that is better than the fiction it replaces.

Why It Matters Now

HUCKLEBERRY FINN has been fought over for more than a century. Banned, defended, taught, un-taught, celebrated, and pilloried. What has almost never happened, in all of that fighting, is a serious literary artist stepping in to write the book that the argument has been circling. JAMES is that book. It does not settle the argument by taking a side in it. It settles the argument by making the argument obsolete.

Everett has written the American novel of the spring, and, on the evidence of the earliest readings, one of the American novels of the decade. JAMES will be read alongside HUCKLEBERRY FINN in classrooms from this year forward. It will be argued about, taught, adapted, imitated, and remembered. It is the book that finally gives American literature something it has always needed from Twain’s story and never had: the man himself, in his own voice, telling his own life.

JAMES by Percival Everett is available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook wherever books are sold. Published by Doubleday.

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