Publishing often resembles a dating agency, with writers, editors, and agents attempting to match aesthetic, moral, and political supplies to their corresponding demands. Close your eyes and imagine a warehouse full of sectionals, all of them taupe. Everett has refused the ready-made object, too busy building gardens out of heavy metal, deserts out of phosphorous, anything to avoid artistic stasis. Regrettably, in his latest novel, James, the writer’s ego has outstripped his curiosity, perhaps because it is the first of his novels intended to be manifest, discernible, and aimed at an audience. Unlike any of his other works, James has been accurately described in a single sentence fragment: a reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim.
At first, James is logistically faithful to Huckleberry Finn. The plot hits the same opening beats. Jim flees his owner, Miss Watson, after discovering she aims to sell him to a man in New Orleans, which would separate him from his wife and daughter. Huck, escaping his abusive sot of a father, fakes his death and finds Jim on the nearby Jackson’s Island. Huck and Jim’s simultaneous disappearance puts Jim under suspicion for Huck’s murder, and so the familiar pair head down the Mississippi River. Where James immediately breaks from its source text is in its narration: we are getting the story from Jim’s point of view. Jim presents himself to white people as Miss Watson’s big and affable slave. But this is a ruse, you see, because Jim is James, and James is, we now know from Everett’s book, a genius. James is a thoughtful writer and a better read than a modern graduate student. His mind often accordions open, revealing impressive, implausible bellows. In an early scene, Everett uses one of Twain’s most memorable set pieces, the rattlesnake bite, to substantiate James’s intellect. In a venom-induced delirium, James hallucinates a quarrel with Voltaire about inherent morality.
“Let me try this,” I said. “You have a notion, like Raynal, of natural liberties, and we all have them by virtue of our being human. But when those liberties are put under societal and cultural pressure, they become civil liberties, and those are contingent on hierarchy and situation. Am I close?” Voltaire was scribbling on paper. “That was good, that was good. Say all of that again.”
