Review: JAMES

Title: James by Percival Everett

Book Beginnings quote from page 1:

Friday56 quote (from page 22, last page of preview):

Summary:

A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view.

When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

While many narrative set pieces of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light. (Publisher)

Review: I loved The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when I read it as a kid and when I reread it as an adult. When I heard that Percival Everett had written the Huck Finn story from Jim's point-of-view I knew I had to read James. And I am so glad I did. What a treat. My husband and I listened to the audiobook version together. Immediately after we finished it, we both sat in silence for a few beats before we both exclaimed "wow!"

I think the two quotes I've provided from page one and page 22 set the stage very well. Slaves behaved by a set of rules in their behavior and speech when they interacted with Whites but not when they were alone. After Jim escapes to the island and then down the Mississippi River on the raft with Huck he keeps messing up with his language, not remembering to use slave-speak. This always pulls up Huck short, making him ask what was wrong. "James runs his every public utterance through what he calls his “slave filter,” to make himself sound ridiculous and gullible, to pacify the truculent white people around him" (NYT).

Jim's James' language and knowledge about the classics is astonishing. When he has his fevered dreams due to the snake bite, he imagines conversations with Voltaire, Rousseau, and Locke, philosophers from the Age of Enlightenment. James can read and write. His most prized possession is a pencil and later a book in which he can write his thoughts. It is important to write about his life, so it has meaning.

At one point James ends up being sold to a man who has a traveling minstrel troupe. James has a fine tenor voice and is forced to put black polish on his face before the performance. A Black man pretending to be a White man, pretending to a Black man. Preposterous and silly but also deadly serious. The songs they sang were slave ballads that both Don and I sang in elementary school. At this point we turned off the audiobook and gasped with horror to think such songs were still being sung by school kids 100 years after the Civil War and Emancipation!!!

This is my first Percival Everett book but it won't be my last. 

"What sets James above Everett’s previous novels, as casually and caustically funny as many are, is that here the humanity is turned up — way up. This is Everett’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful. Beneath the wordplay, and below the packed dirt floor of Everett’s moral sensibility, James is an intensely imagined human being" (NYT). 

What a book. The best I've read all year, maybe all decade. It's a new American classic.

Rating: 5+ stars

-Anne