"Jim, in Huckleberry Finn, is not like that — his depiction seems lazy and racist. And that’s why people don’t necessarily teach or even defend the book these days. So the question is ... do we, the potential readers of Percival Everett’s book, James, really have strong feelings about this other book, Huckleberry Finn?"
Hmmmm. Gonna have to strongly disagree with this. Huck Finn is an American classic, the book Hemingway said all American literature starts from. Huck Finn is a parody, a satire; it's mocking American racism by showing it for what it actually is. Twain was really one of the first public authorial anti-racists. The idea that because there are racist tropes in the 19th century book (normal Overton Window for the time) doesn't make Twain or Huck Finn racist. I think that's a very 2025 perspective. "Presentism," as the kids like to say nowadays.
I haven't read James but I've read a lot of criticism about it. Most of the criticism strikes me as probably genuine: The fact that the slave narrator comes off as pretentious, well-educated, articulate, etc, all things that sound nice on paper but are essentially ahistorical and unrealistic for a slave in the South in this era. I'd call that revisionist history, except it's fiction, of course.
And plenty of people and teachers still teach and defend Huck Finn. It really is not only a but THE American classic and for good reason.
Give Huck Finn a read. It's a beautiful book. So deep and rich with meaning, symbolism, metaphor. It's shocking to me that any serious writer/reader would casually dismiss it.
Concur. Timorous and dissembling. Gets to a conclusion about lawlessness and nihilism that not only should have been well above the fold, but should have been the first observation about this book. A disappointing critical debut for MR.
Goodness. I kept wondering when you were going to get back to the point. On of your many tangents you somehow miss the point about Shylock and why he’s the center of the play. Portia, we seem to keep forgetting, is not a judge but the lover of the plaintiff. Even if she was a judge, she was still intimate with the plaintiff. So the entirety of “the quality of mercy” is the subsequently cruel sentence (for a Jew asking that a Christian pay him his loan back) is pure Christian hypocrisy. Merchant of Venice isn’t a racist play, it’s a play about racism and its subsequent, ages-long critical history confirms and upholds that racism. Your discomfort about even mentioning Huckleberry Finn seems to indicate a consciousness of racism limited to the American experience.
agreed. this idea that no one reads Huckleberry Finn in schools is not true to me. Obviously Percival admires Mark Twain and makes that clear in the dedication. In my Black literature class in college (albeit 20 years ago) the Black professor had just published an introduction on Huck Finn. It is considered an anti-racist classic. even if criticized like all lit.
A paragraph dismissing the depiction of Jim as lazy and racist seems a little glib, as it doesn’t engage with the most famous scenes featuring that character: his story of his daughter going deaf, and his scolding Huck for playing a dehumanizing trick on him. It’s true that many readers over-valorize the treatment of Jim by pretending it’s all like that, when in fact a lot of it is racist as you say. But this quick dismissal reads like, with respect, you had checked out by the time you reached those parts of Huck Finn.
Huck Finn is a parody and a satire. It's the great anti-racist novel of the 19th century. And you have to always add historical context and understand the Overton Window at the time it was written.
I agree with your last sentence. I think it's too pat to call it a parody and a satire—if it were that then the parts in which Jim is well-realized wouldn't mean anything. Of course much is satirized in the book, but that's not the same thing as the whole portrayal being satirical.
I think the last section of the book, where Jim stops caring about freedom in any meaningful way and instead is perfectly willing to be a prop in Tom Sawyer’s adventure fantasies, is at least condescending and dehumanizing towards Jim.
It’s not often (fortunately) that you find a book reviewer discounting a novel because it speaks to another novel the reviewer simply hasn’t read. Willful ignorance is not a good look for a book reviewer.
I don’t agree with your take on the ending, and your distinction between realism and fantasy. This is a blend between realism and fantasy, realist fantasy if you like, and using Northrup’s slave narrative as a contrast isn’t really illuminating. James burns down the slave farm, frees the slaves, shoots the slave owner and they all flee North, just as the Civil War is beginning. In Iowa, Jim asserts his new identity as James, signifying his freedom from slavery. This does not seem like suicide to me, but the elimination of his double-consciousness, that has played throughout the novel - the mask he shows to oppressors and the person he shows to himself and his loved ones. A better guide to the significance of the novel runs through Fanon and Du Bois. And speculating about whether the novel will be read in ten years time is meaningless, and somewhat patronising.
I agree the end of this novel was the weakest part, but I disagree that he didn't achieve his goal to humanize James. I think he certainly made the character feel like an alive human to me that I could connect to the memory I had of the famous Jim from Twain's novel. I really do think you mis-identify Twain's importance as an anti-racist writer, which is a weird lack of historical knowledge about American history that hurts the understanding of the novel. The whole realism versus fantasy thing in the criticism at the end doesn't count for much. This is a mediocre review but serviceable. It was good to get another opinion on the novel who at least read it. I look forward to tighter written reviews with more interesting voice work and analysis in future issues if this magazine is going to break ground on Substack. But ya gotta start somewhere.
FWIW I was made to read the adventures of huckleberry Finn in the *4th* grade in 1984. The rest of my time in school there was absolutely an assumption that everyone had read it already. When I studied creative writing in the early 2000s it was frequently cited as the ur-text of American letters. So maybe more people have read it than you’d think?
I finished James and thought it a good read with many virtues, starting with the initial concept. It is a book about a book, and that gives the author certain freedoms as well as constraints. Clearly Everett is an accomplished writer and knows what he is doing; every scene is purposeful and pointed. If I have any criticsm, it is that at times, as a reader, I feel as if I am being talked down to and I resented that. I could feel somone standing over Everett's shoulder and saying "more of this here" and you need "a scene where" but overall it clipped along nicely and the duality with Huck Finn was quite engaging. Booker Prize though? I'm not quite convinved. Is it on the level of Creation Lake or Orbital? How do you judge or do you pander to this moment in history? Unfortunately, there is something of the latter dynamic in play but maybe that's just how things work in these days of virtue signaling, where the voices shout so loud lest the intended audience misses the point.
Twain wrote a fascinating and insightful novel SPECIFICALLY about race, which I love as much as Huck Finn, Pudd'n Head Wilson. I'd love to read your reaction to that book.
i feel like i have to read this since i just won a flash fiction contest that started based on criticism of this novel from someone who had not read it. I did read it and i look forward to digesting this review and commenting with my thoughts. But i must say, already, just the glancing criticism is funny because having read this author's fiction....Percival is in a whole other stratosphere in comparison to that level of story telling. Maybe the writer here is a better critic than writer themselves though, which is true of a lot writers to be honest.
lol. so many people on substack hate this novel that the contrarian thing is to like the novel at this point in this space.
--says a true contrarian.
You should read my Flash fiction on my Substack i published yesterday. No Conductor. It was written based on an battle based on someone shitting on this book.
The very fact that Twain's text clashes with our sensibilities and contains ironic subtexts is what makes it teachable. Context also matters. Twain wrote many other stories with Black characters that show an explicit awareness of and sensitivity to racism. The best example is "A True Story," which overtly subverts the patronizing white characters and shifts control of narration to a Black woman.
Similarly, I don't know how anyone can talk about "James" without talking about "Erasure," Everett's novel that was recently adapted as the film "American Fiction." The whole premise of "Erasure" and "American Fiction" is that explicitly anti-racist writing pigeonholes Black writers and requires a kind of disingenuous performance, which then gets rewarded by guilty white power brokers. Which is exactly what is happening with "James."
The only way "James" makes sense to me from the author of "Erasure" is as a kind of infinite series of ironic mirrors. There's a scene in the movie "Tropic Thunder," where Kirk Lazarus (a white man who has his skin surgically altered to appear Black in the movie) takes offense at a white character saying "you people." "What do you mean, 'you people'?" he says. And then right behind him Lincoln Osiris, played by a real Black actor, asks, "What do YOU mean, 'you people'?" It's the only way "James" makes any sense to me. The joke is on anyone who James's code switching at face value.
I wonder whether we'll ever be able to untangle the damage done to readers born after 1980 when it comes to calling conflict and relations in literature "racist." It's been ages since I've read Twain's novels, but the truth that this literature aims to capture is that Jim would have spoken a certain way, and would have believed certain things that might seem naive to the average reader.
We need to be able to talk openly about the way people really talked, and how little people really knew, in a certain time and place. Case in point: I was waiting for the bus along with two middle-aged black women who were talking about how their charges don't even know how to color within the lines in a coloring book; they said that these kids had literally never seen a coloring book, much less any other kind of book in their homes. This is a contemporary conversation that I'm describing. The truth is that a lot of black kids grow up in homes where no one reads, where intellectual pursuits are considered "white." At the same time, I see many black parents holding the hand of a child on the way home from school who is reading while walking.
It's not literary criticism to sniff out racism. The focus should be on the dynamics, the character, and how character drives the story.
I have reservations about James due to the assumption that the author feels compelled to make a man of that time and place something that he isn't for reasons to do with political correction, which takes what could have been a work of art into the propaganda zone. Still, it might be well worth a reader's time to read Huck, and then James, and consider the comparisons -- and the artistry.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is still assigned. A friend of mine uses it. Whenever he comes across a certain word, he says "nur." I found this hilarious, he said it's the best he can do.
The book is a comedy, and Tom, Huck, Jim, the Duke, the King, and most of the people on the river banks are portrayed as clowns and fools. Jim is not exempt from this, but that doesn't mean the book is "racist," it just means that he's portrayed as one more idiot in a world of them, which was Clemens's view of the world. Jim's an unlettered slave, too, not a literary genius who knows by magic how to manage things. That was the truth of life in the South, for most people. Give them one shirt, no education, and not a word of explanation about how the world works, and most people are not able to do much except take orders and feel confused by the rest.
"Jim, in Huckleberry Finn, is not like that — his depiction seems lazy and racist. And that’s why people don’t necessarily teach or even defend the book these days. So the question is ... do we, the potential readers of Percival Everett’s book, James, really have strong feelings about this other book, Huckleberry Finn?"
Hmmmm. Gonna have to strongly disagree with this. Huck Finn is an American classic, the book Hemingway said all American literature starts from. Huck Finn is a parody, a satire; it's mocking American racism by showing it for what it actually is. Twain was really one of the first public authorial anti-racists. The idea that because there are racist tropes in the 19th century book (normal Overton Window for the time) doesn't make Twain or Huck Finn racist. I think that's a very 2025 perspective. "Presentism," as the kids like to say nowadays.
I haven't read James but I've read a lot of criticism about it. Most of the criticism strikes me as probably genuine: The fact that the slave narrator comes off as pretentious, well-educated, articulate, etc, all things that sound nice on paper but are essentially ahistorical and unrealistic for a slave in the South in this era. I'd call that revisionist history, except it's fiction, of course.
And plenty of people and teachers still teach and defend Huck Finn. It really is not only a but THE American classic and for good reason.
I’ll have to read HF now. I actually found this review maddeningly high school level, with tangent-on-tangent asides and indirect assertions.
Give Huck Finn a read. It's a beautiful book. So deep and rich with meaning, symbolism, metaphor. It's shocking to me that any serious writer/reader would casually dismiss it.
Concur. Timorous and dissembling. Gets to a conclusion about lawlessness and nihilism that not only should have been well above the fold, but should have been the first observation about this book. A disappointing critical debut for MR.
Will do, Michael.
Goodness. I kept wondering when you were going to get back to the point. On of your many tangents you somehow miss the point about Shylock and why he’s the center of the play. Portia, we seem to keep forgetting, is not a judge but the lover of the plaintiff. Even if she was a judge, she was still intimate with the plaintiff. So the entirety of “the quality of mercy” is the subsequently cruel sentence (for a Jew asking that a Christian pay him his loan back) is pure Christian hypocrisy. Merchant of Venice isn’t a racist play, it’s a play about racism and its subsequent, ages-long critical history confirms and upholds that racism. Your discomfort about even mentioning Huckleberry Finn seems to indicate a consciousness of racism limited to the American experience.
Agree. Huck Finn is the greatest ANTI-RACIST novel of all time.
agreed. this idea that no one reads Huckleberry Finn in schools is not true to me. Obviously Percival admires Mark Twain and makes that clear in the dedication. In my Black literature class in college (albeit 20 years ago) the Black professor had just published an introduction on Huck Finn. It is considered an anti-racist classic. even if criticized like all lit.
Exactly!!!
I actually meant Merchant… but I’ll still read Huck
*and the subsequently cruel sentence…
A paragraph dismissing the depiction of Jim as lazy and racist seems a little glib, as it doesn’t engage with the most famous scenes featuring that character: his story of his daughter going deaf, and his scolding Huck for playing a dehumanizing trick on him. It’s true that many readers over-valorize the treatment of Jim by pretending it’s all like that, when in fact a lot of it is racist as you say. But this quick dismissal reads like, with respect, you had checked out by the time you reached those parts of Huck Finn.
Huck Finn is a parody and a satire. It's the great anti-racist novel of the 19th century. And you have to always add historical context and understand the Overton Window at the time it was written.
I agree with your last sentence. I think it's too pat to call it a parody and a satire—if it were that then the parts in which Jim is well-realized wouldn't mean anything. Of course much is satirized in the book, but that's not the same thing as the whole portrayal being satirical.
I think the last section of the book, where Jim stops caring about freedom in any meaningful way and instead is perfectly willing to be a prop in Tom Sawyer’s adventure fantasies, is at least condescending and dehumanizing towards Jim.
It’s not often (fortunately) that you find a book reviewer discounting a novel because it speaks to another novel the reviewer simply hasn’t read. Willful ignorance is not a good look for a book reviewer.
Exactly. Not a good look.
Also, this review is childish. If this is the best MR can do, well, lawdy, I'se got to find me some otha substack to waste mah time.
I don’t agree with your take on the ending, and your distinction between realism and fantasy. This is a blend between realism and fantasy, realist fantasy if you like, and using Northrup’s slave narrative as a contrast isn’t really illuminating. James burns down the slave farm, frees the slaves, shoots the slave owner and they all flee North, just as the Civil War is beginning. In Iowa, Jim asserts his new identity as James, signifying his freedom from slavery. This does not seem like suicide to me, but the elimination of his double-consciousness, that has played throughout the novel - the mask he shows to oppressors and the person he shows to himself and his loved ones. A better guide to the significance of the novel runs through Fanon and Du Bois. And speculating about whether the novel will be read in ten years time is meaningless, and somewhat patronising.
I agree the end of this novel was the weakest part, but I disagree that he didn't achieve his goal to humanize James. I think he certainly made the character feel like an alive human to me that I could connect to the memory I had of the famous Jim from Twain's novel. I really do think you mis-identify Twain's importance as an anti-racist writer, which is a weird lack of historical knowledge about American history that hurts the understanding of the novel. The whole realism versus fantasy thing in the criticism at the end doesn't count for much. This is a mediocre review but serviceable. It was good to get another opinion on the novel who at least read it. I look forward to tighter written reviews with more interesting voice work and analysis in future issues if this magazine is going to break ground on Substack. But ya gotta start somewhere.
FWIW I was made to read the adventures of huckleberry Finn in the *4th* grade in 1984. The rest of my time in school there was absolutely an assumption that everyone had read it already. When I studied creative writing in the early 2000s it was frequently cited as the ur-text of American letters. So maybe more people have read it than you’d think?
Profoundly important classic, still taught and read often.
I finished James and thought it a good read with many virtues, starting with the initial concept. It is a book about a book, and that gives the author certain freedoms as well as constraints. Clearly Everett is an accomplished writer and knows what he is doing; every scene is purposeful and pointed. If I have any criticsm, it is that at times, as a reader, I feel as if I am being talked down to and I resented that. I could feel somone standing over Everett's shoulder and saying "more of this here" and you need "a scene where" but overall it clipped along nicely and the duality with Huck Finn was quite engaging. Booker Prize though? I'm not quite convinved. Is it on the level of Creation Lake or Orbital? How do you judge or do you pander to this moment in history? Unfortunately, there is something of the latter dynamic in play but maybe that's just how things work in these days of virtue signaling, where the voices shout so loud lest the intended audience misses the point.
Twain wrote a fascinating and insightful novel SPECIFICALLY about race, which I love as much as Huck Finn, Pudd'n Head Wilson. I'd love to read your reaction to that book.
i feel like i have to read this since i just won a flash fiction contest that started based on criticism of this novel from someone who had not read it. I did read it and i look forward to digesting this review and commenting with my thoughts. But i must say, already, just the glancing criticism is funny because having read this author's fiction....Percival is in a whole other stratosphere in comparison to that level of story telling. Maybe the writer here is a better critic than writer themselves though, which is true of a lot writers to be honest.
Loved Erasure, and American Fiction based off it. I need to read more of Everette.
Yeah, for sure. He's not my top guy but he did a good job with a difficult task with this James book in my opinion.
I know I know, I need to read the damn thing. Grr. My contrarian nature makes me want to NOT read it yet just because everyone IS reading it (haha).
lol. so many people on substack hate this novel that the contrarian thing is to like the novel at this point in this space.
--says a true contrarian.
You should read my Flash fiction on my Substack i published yesterday. No Conductor. It was written based on an battle based on someone shitting on this book.
Huckleberry Finn is a founding text of American literature. The reviewer’s glib dismissal of it is ignorant in the extreme.
The very fact that Twain's text clashes with our sensibilities and contains ironic subtexts is what makes it teachable. Context also matters. Twain wrote many other stories with Black characters that show an explicit awareness of and sensitivity to racism. The best example is "A True Story," which overtly subverts the patronizing white characters and shifts control of narration to a Black woman.
Similarly, I don't know how anyone can talk about "James" without talking about "Erasure," Everett's novel that was recently adapted as the film "American Fiction." The whole premise of "Erasure" and "American Fiction" is that explicitly anti-racist writing pigeonholes Black writers and requires a kind of disingenuous performance, which then gets rewarded by guilty white power brokers. Which is exactly what is happening with "James."
The only way "James" makes sense to me from the author of "Erasure" is as a kind of infinite series of ironic mirrors. There's a scene in the movie "Tropic Thunder," where Kirk Lazarus (a white man who has his skin surgically altered to appear Black in the movie) takes offense at a white character saying "you people." "What do you mean, 'you people'?" he says. And then right behind him Lincoln Osiris, played by a real Black actor, asks, "What do YOU mean, 'you people'?" It's the only way "James" makes any sense to me. The joke is on anyone who James's code switching at face value.
I wonder whether we'll ever be able to untangle the damage done to readers born after 1980 when it comes to calling conflict and relations in literature "racist." It's been ages since I've read Twain's novels, but the truth that this literature aims to capture is that Jim would have spoken a certain way, and would have believed certain things that might seem naive to the average reader.
We need to be able to talk openly about the way people really talked, and how little people really knew, in a certain time and place. Case in point: I was waiting for the bus along with two middle-aged black women who were talking about how their charges don't even know how to color within the lines in a coloring book; they said that these kids had literally never seen a coloring book, much less any other kind of book in their homes. This is a contemporary conversation that I'm describing. The truth is that a lot of black kids grow up in homes where no one reads, where intellectual pursuits are considered "white." At the same time, I see many black parents holding the hand of a child on the way home from school who is reading while walking.
It's not literary criticism to sniff out racism. The focus should be on the dynamics, the character, and how character drives the story.
I have reservations about James due to the assumption that the author feels compelled to make a man of that time and place something that he isn't for reasons to do with political correction, which takes what could have been a work of art into the propaganda zone. Still, it might be well worth a reader's time to read Huck, and then James, and consider the comparisons -- and the artistry.
Amen. See my comment above.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is still assigned. A friend of mine uses it. Whenever he comes across a certain word, he says "nur." I found this hilarious, he said it's the best he can do.
The book is a comedy, and Tom, Huck, Jim, the Duke, the King, and most of the people on the river banks are portrayed as clowns and fools. Jim is not exempt from this, but that doesn't mean the book is "racist," it just means that he's portrayed as one more idiot in a world of them, which was Clemens's view of the world. Jim's an unlettered slave, too, not a literary genius who knows by magic how to manage things. That was the truth of life in the South, for most people. Give them one shirt, no education, and not a word of explanation about how the world works, and most people are not able to do much except take orders and feel confused by the rest.
Precisely.
This has balls and if I’m the first commenter I’m sure I’m not the first reader who was waiting for James to come in for a good kicking!! Chapeau!
Lots of people are James-hating. I haven't read it but everyone says it's pedantic and mocking people by ahistorical methods.