James, by Percival Everett

"Deep in the night from deep in the forest, I heard the barking and howling of hounds."

James — Percival Everett’s first book with Doubleday after years with local Minneapolis publisher Graywolf — is a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the perspective of the slave, Jim.

It has received rave reviews, been short listed for — or won — dozens of awards (just today it won the Kirkus Prize), and is widely considered to be a fierce and fantastic novel that stands on its own merits, the reimagining of Twain’s cultural touchpoint aside.

But I have to admit that it took me a while.

Even though it has been literally decades since I read Huck Finn, I still remembered enough of the story to make the early going a little boring, a little dry. But then Jim splits from Huck and the story turns into a page turner that is laced with evil, absurdity, and downright terrifying depictions of what it means to be a slave, especially a slave on the run. The review in the NY Times uses a quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates to elaborate that last point: slavery is not “an indefinable mass of flesh” but “a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own.” And this is what Everett serves us in James: the story of one slave, an intelligent and kind and tender and lonely man, lost in a world of white men who treat him worse than they treat their animals.

It is not a spoof. It is not satire. It’s not a take down of Mark Twain or his novels, it’s not even really a take down of the American Experiment, though some might choose to read it that way. It is instead a magnificent, and harrowing, and brilliant novel. And an important one. An American masterpiece, one that should sit on the shelf of canonical American literature right next to its inspiration.

I give this novel a full throated recommendation. As you read it, you will grow to love James, just as I did, and your heart will break for him in ways you didn’t know it could.

And then there’s that ending.

**

Thanks for reading.

Next up: Nineteen Seventy-Four, by David Peace