Percival Everett's 'James,' Winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction

Summary

All Of It: Percival Everett's 'James,' Winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction

Release Date: December 5, 2024 | Host: Alison Stewart | Guest Host: Kusha Navidar

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of All Of It, host Alison Stewart welcomes renowned author Percival Everett to discuss his acclaimed novel, "James," which has recently secured the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction. The conversation delves deep into Everett's reinterpretation of Mark Twain's classic, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," exploring themes of perspective, language, and cultural representation.

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Reimagining a Classic: From Huck to Jim

Everett embarks on a bold literary journey by retelling the familiar tale of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of Jim, an enslaved man seeking freedom. Unlike Twain's portrayal, Everett's Jim is a multi-dimensional character who "teaches himself how to read and protect himself," showcasing both vulnerability and strength.

Notable Quote:

Alison Stewart [00:17]: "Percival Everett's novel James is a mainstay of 2024 best of lists, and that was before it won the National Book Award for Fiction this year."

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Engaging Humor and Underlying Tension

Everett's narrative strikes a delicate balance between humor and the ever-present danger faced by Jim. While the story maintains engaging and often humorous elements, it "never lets you forget about the danger Jim is in," presenting a more violent and honest depiction of the threats confronting Black individuals in America, whether enslaved or free.

Notable Quote:

Alison Stewart [00:39]: "It's more violent than Twain's story and more honest about the threats faced by every black man, enslaved or free, in America."

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Influence of Mark Twain and Evolution of Humor

During the conversation, Everett reflects on his early encounters with Twain's work. Initially unimpressed by the abridged version of "Huckleberry Finn," Everett found greater appreciation for Twain's other works like "Life on the Mississippi" and "Roughing It," citing Twain's ironic observations and detached engagement as significant influences on his own humor.

Notable Quote:

Percival Everett [02:12]: "I remember not being terribly impressed as the abridged version was merely an adventure story. I had been impressed by other works of Twain, Life on the Mississippi and Roughing it, which I found, you know, funny enough that I can say that Twain's humor influenced mine."

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Creative Process: Owning the Narrative

Everett discusses his meticulous process in crafting "James," highlighting his decision to internalize Twain's original world by reading the novel "15 times in a row." This repetitive immersion allowed him to "own" the narrative without merely replicating it, enabling him to create a story that exists within the same universe but stands independently.

Notable Quote:

Percival Everett [03:37]: "I had to accept, as all picture writers, too, that this world exists. And so I read the novel some 15 times in a row. I would finish it and just start again. And I did that to blur it, to own it, and to forget it."

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Jazz and Literary Improvisation

Drawing parallels between jazz and his writing, Everett likens his approach to composing music, emphasizing syncopation and improvisation. He references John Coltrane's rendition of "My Favorite Things" as an inspiration, illustrating how he transforms recognizable themes into something uniquely his own.

Notable Quote:

Percival Everett [05:22]: "I think of John Coltrane's rendition of My Favorite Things, which is recognizable as My favorite things in the beginning, but then it becomes Coltrane's, and it actually does a great deal of violence to the song and so has and can be uncomfortable for a lot of people."

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Language as an Act of Liberation

A significant theme in "James" is the use of language and code-switching. Everett explores how oppressed individuals develop their own linguistic nuances to communicate privately and protect themselves from oppressive forces. Jim's ability to "speak differently" in various contexts underscores the complexity of his character and the broader societal constraints.

Notable Quote:

Percival Everett [08:49]: "One of the things that I think oppressed peoples do is create languages that allow them to communicate with each other, that does not allow entry of their oppressors. They can speak privately, and that's essentially what I'm working with here."

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The Power of Naming

Everett delves into the significance of names, both in the context of his novel and more broadly. Discussing the title "James," he distinguishes it from the original name "Jim," emphasizing how names carry cultural power and influence one's identity and perception within society.

Notable Quote:

Percival Everett [14:39]: "Naming is important in that you talk about power. We name our children, we name places. If we get there first, names can have sort of a cultural import."

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Adaptation and Reception

Shifting focus to his previous work, Everett reflects on the adaptation of his novel "Erasure" into the Oscar-winning film "American Fiction," commending the screenplay by Cora Jefferson and expressing his enjoyment of seeing his work translated to the screen.

Notable Quote:

Percival Everett [16:12]: "I enjoyed it very much. I never expected to see my novel on screen. I expected to see what I saw, which is a translation of it. And I think he made a very nice piece of work."

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Community and Reader Engagement

Everett touches upon the positive reception of "James," noting that feedback from his publisher has been encouraging. He expresses gratitude for the book's widespread attention and hopes to reach even more readers, underscoring the importance of community in the literary landscape.

Notable Quote:

Percival Everett [16:54]: "If I can get a few more readers, that's terrific."

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Conclusion

The episode concludes with Alison Stewart summarizing the insightful discussion, highlighting Percival Everett's achievements and the profound themes addressed in "James." Everett's innovative reimagining of a literary classic not only honors its legacy but also challenges and expands upon it, offering listeners a nuanced exploration of culture, language, and identity.

Notable Quote:

Alison Stewart [17:12]: "That was author Percival Everett speaking with our guest host, Kushinavadar about his novel James. It won this year's National Book Award for fiction."

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Key Takeaways:

• "James" offers a fresh perspective on a classic narrative by centering the story around Jim, providing depth and agency to a historically marginalized character.
• Everett's creative process involves deep immersion and transformation, akin to jazz improvisation, allowing for a unique and personal reinterpretation of existing works.
• Language and naming play crucial roles in shaping identity and resistance, themes that Everett masterfully weaves into his storytelling.
• The successful adaptation of Everett's work into film underscores the universal and impactful nature of his narratives.

For those interested in the intersections of literature, culture, and social commentary, Percival Everett's "James" is a must-read, and this episode of All Of It offers invaluable insights into its creation and significance.

Transcript

[Percival Everett]

Listener supported WNYC Studios.

[Alison Stewart]

This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Percival Everett's novel James is a mainstay of 2024 best of lists, and that was before it won the National Book Award for Fiction this year. In it, Everett takes on one of the most well known works in the American literary canon, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. But in Everett's version, the story is told by Jim, an enslaved man who decides to run away rather than be sold from his family. Jim has taught himself how to read and also how to protect himself. You remember that dialect that Jim uses in Twain's book? In Everett's writing, it's kind of code switching that Jim does to pacify the white people around him. So Jim's dismayed to find that at the same time that he's run away, Huck Finn faked his own murder and split as well, leaving Jim as a suspect for the crime. Banding together, they journey along the Mississippi River. Everett's telling is engaging and funny, but it never lets you forget about the danger Jim is in. It's more violent than Twain's story and more honest about the threats faced by every black man, enslaved or free, in America. When our guest host, Kusha Navidar was filling in for me earlier this year, he spoke with Percival Everett on the book's publication day and they also spoke about the Oscar winning film American Fiction, which was adapted from Everett's book Erasure. Cuscia started the conversation, asking Percival about the first time he read the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

[Percival Everett]

Well, I was a fairly young, young child. I read an abridged version. First, I can't remember exactly how it was abridged, but it was short. And then later in high school, and I don't know if it was for school or not, I did read the unabridged version.

[Kusha Navidar]

What was your first impression of that book, do you remember?

[Percival Everett]

I remember not being terribly impressed as the abridged version was merely an adventure story. I had been impressed by other works of Twain, Life in the Mississippi and Roughing it, which I found, you know, funny enough that I can say that Twain's humor influenced mine.

[Kusha Navidar]

Go more into that. How do you think his. What, what did you borrow from his humor?

[Percival Everett]

The ironic observations? I, I always found very human, but also engaged and at the same time detached.

[Kusha Navidar]

And so, you know, Huck Finn. Not totally impressed, you're saying, on your first read, when did you get the idea at first to take on your own version of the story?

[Percival Everett]

Oh, that wasn't until three years ago, perhaps, when I. I thought to myself, has anyone told this story from the point of view of Jim? So I searched around, and it turns out no one had. And then I thought, well, I hadn't thought of it either, and so on. So I embarked on it.

[Kusha Navidar]

And when you embarked on it, how did you navigate the idea of sticking to the original story versus deviating? Where did you decide you might want to stick to the plot? And where did you decide, no, this is the time that I should deviate?

[Percival Everett]

Well, I had to accept, as all picture writers, too, that this world exists. And so I read the novel some 15 times in a row. I would finish it and just start again. And I did that to blur it, to own it, and to forget it. And so when I started working, I did not look back at Huck Finn. It was internalized, but yet not formed in any way. And so much of the material of the novel remains, but it. It's. It's not a retelling. Yeah, it's just the same world.

[Kusha Navidar]

Did you say you reread it 15 times?

[Percival Everett]

Yes.

[Kusha Navidar]

What. Can you walk us through that process 15 times, looking at this source text? What was that evolution like for you? What was something you took away the seventh, eighth, ninth time? How did that look?

[Percival Everett]

Well, you start feeling crazy after a while. It's like repeating a word over and over again until it sounds like nonsense. And that's. And that's what I was attempting to achieve.

[Kusha Navidar]

Tell me. Attempting to achieve. Make it sound like nonsense. Why is that?

[Percival Everett]

Because I didn't want to merely regurgitate a story. I wanted to tell it as if it had happened. And so the text became meaningless, and the only thing that exists was the world.

[Kusha Navidar]

It reminds me of the way a musician might approach Variations on a Theme. And tell me how you think about that. Like you are embodying the text enough where you decide, I live in this world now. I am going to tell a new version. Is that a fair comparison?

[Percival Everett]

I think it is. Immediately and even when I was working on it, and often when I work, I think of John Coltrane's rendition of My Favorite Things, which is recognizable as My favorite things in the beginning, but then it becomes Coltrane's, and it actually does a great deal of violence to the song and so has and. And can be uncomfortable for. For a lot of people.

[Kusha Navidar]

You play jazz guitar, right?

[Percival Everett]

I used to play jazz guitar. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not terribly still. Kind of in your.

[Kusha Navidar]

In your bones. A little bit. I mean, you're talking about Coltrane. You still.

[Percival Everett]

I. I know how one plays jazz guitar. We can put it that way.

[Kusha Navidar]

As one jazz musician to another, I ask, how does music influence your writing approach?

[Percival Everett]

I think in timing, I can't articulate it, but I think that when I go to fiction, there's a kind of syncopation that one might find in jazz. I never start on the one. Ironically, I can't listen to serious music while I'm writing.

[Kusha Navidar]

Brain space gets too distracted.

[Percival Everett]

I listen to it.

[Kusha Navidar]

Yes, absolutely. Let's talk about the character of Jim a little bit. How would you describe the Jim created by Mark Twain in the original novel, and how does your version differ?

[Percival Everett]

Well, Twain's novel is about Huck, and so the novel. And so Jim is, however important a character, is not even a character that Twain was equipped to inhabit fully. And so his gem is fairly superficial. There's no depth to his story. He's a representation of an enslaved man. My novel is about Jim, and I suppose a complaint about it might be that Huck isn't fully developed. I hope that he is. But my Jim is moving through a space where the most important thing to him is his family and a kind of psychic survival more than a physical survival.

[Kusha Navidar]

Tell me more about the psychic survival element. I think part of it is what that reminds me of are these dream sequences where he's talking to. To political philosophers like Montesquieu and Voltaire and Locke. Is that what you're referring to there?

[Percival Everett]

Well, that informs his sense of self. Certainly it's the intellectual self that he's denied by the culture that he lives in. He can't articulate his thoughts to anyone in the world because it's a danger to him.

[Kusha Navidar]

Part of that character choice that I think readers will immediately grasp is through dialect. Part of what made Mark Twain famous was his use of dialect in his writing. And you really play around with that in this novel because Jim is constantly code switching in front of white people, he talks with a certain dialect, but around his family and friends, he speaks differently. Like at one point talking in his sleep, Jim uses the word hierarchy, and then Huck asks has to ask him what it means. How did you want to play around with language and code switching there?

[Percival Everett]

One of the things that I think oppressed peoples do is create languages that allow them to communicate with each other, that does not allow entry of their oppressors. They can speak privately, and that's essentially what I'm working with here. They have to speak a certain way to navigate the world of white people and their. Their owners. But they also have to be able to speak to each other in a way that doesn't betray what they're actually talking about.

[Kusha Navidar]

And you know, it's not just that James wants to read, but he also feels compelled to write too. He even has another enslaved person steal a pencil for him, which leads to the man being whipped horribly. Why is James so drawn to writing? What is it that he wants to capture on the page?

[Percival Everett]

Language. Owning languages is perhaps more crucial to freedom than anything else.

[Kusha Navidar]

Have you ever felt similarly to that yourself? Like you almost are using writing as an act of liberation? Or that you almost can't write as fast as your own brain wants you to?

[Percival Everett]

I don't know if I've had the experience that Jim is actually having, but it's certainly the case that that for me, language is my way of being in the world. You know, for other artists it would be painter or music, but it's how I understand the world. And it is. And in that way my place and my freedom are established by my ability to use it. He's also responding to the history of slave narratives that are related or told by someone for then an individual. And Jim is really intent on writing his own story and not relying on someone to. To translate it for him.

[Kusha Navidar]

You brought a reading of that exact topic right apart where Jim is writing?

[Percival Everett]

As it turns out, yes. You steered me right toward it. Two to Tango My mother's mother was from some place on the continent of Africa. I've been told, or perhaps simply assumed. I cannot claim to any knowledge of that world or those people. Whether my people were kings or beggars. I admire those who at five years of age, like Ven Smith, can remember the clans of their ancestors, their names and their movement and the movements of their families through the wrinkles, trenches and chasms of the slave trade. I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world. A man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family. A man who can read and write. A man who will not let his story be self related but self written. With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here.

[Kusha Navidar]

When you say the act of writing is an act of empowerment in your own writing. You've in past interviews talked about how you don't know exactly what you're doing and how you are putting things on the page. And it sounds a lot like improvising. I mean, there's this whole Idea for yourself as well. In previous interviews, you talked about work amnesia, where you forget about the novel as soon as you've written it. Juxtaposing those two things is really interesting. Is that for yourself? Is that work amnesia by choice? Is it just how you, like you said, live in the world with your writing?

[Percival Everett]

Well, you know, it feels like it's not by choice, but I would accept that. If someone accused me of choosing to do it, I wouldn't fight that. I think about what I'm making about the work in front of me, and to sort of pause and live in past work is not conducive to new work. So I call it the Mother Bear school of Art. When I turn it loose, it's on its own. If it can eat and survive, that's great, but it can't come back to.

[Kusha Navidar]

The den Mother Bear school of thought. That is wonderful. Also slightly violent, I gotta say. It's kind of private.

[Percival Everett]

It's a mean world.

[Kusha Navidar]

Good segue there. Because the world that we're living in with Huck Finn is also mean, not to put too much of a point on it. But in the scenes where Huck and Jim get separated, you really have the freedom to take things beyond the scope of the original novel. We really see Mother Bear come out in full force. What was something you knew you wanted to achieve in those moments where Jim and Huck were separated and you really did get to stray from the source material?

[Percival Everett]

Well, you know, slavery. There's an opening scene in a film called. In a novel called Band of Angels by Robert Penn Warren, and later a film with Sidney Poitier and Clark Gable. In the opening scene, you get to see a good slave owner. And that's always been amusing to me, that slavery can be depicted as somehow a good time. This could be gentle slavery. And so in my novel, that's not happening.

[Kusha Navidar]

Another element of the novel that really sticks out is naming. The name of the novel is James, which is an elevated version of Jim. How much of a role do names have in determining who we are, you think?

[Percival Everett]

Well, first I'll back up and say that it's not so much that James is an elevated version of Jim, that Jim is a diminished version of James. And so there's a distinction to be made there.

[Kusha Navidar]

Thank you for that.

[Percival Everett]

Naming is important in that you talk about power. We name our children, we name places. If we get there first, names can have sort of a cultural import. Certain names can. If my name was Conway Twitty, I would be a country singer. I would have no choice. So naming is crucial in our understanding of the world and our participation in it. But also it's, for me as a novelist, the name is just a little bit fun.

[Kusha Navidar]

Absolutely. Your own name has so much meaning, too. Percival means piercing the veil or the valley. Has that been important in your name? Do you carry anything from the meaning of your own name into your life?

[Percival Everett]

No, I don't. Except for the fact that the Parsifal is the only night of the Round table naive enough to actually see the Holy Grail. So I suppose that's something.

[Kusha Navidar]

Yeah. Erasure was adapted last year into the film American fiction. Screenwriter and director Cora Jefferson was the person who took home the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. What did you think of that adaptation?

[Percival Everett]

I enjoyed it very much. I never expected to see my novel on screen. I expected to see what I saw, which is a translation of it. And I think he made a very nice piece of work. It's different and necessarily different and I think enjoyably different.

[Kusha Navidar]

Were you able to join any of the Oscar night celebrations?

[Percival Everett]

My wife and I did attend the Oscars. It's not something I need to do again, but it was, it was fun.

[Kusha Navidar]

And now that you're, you know, you're speaking soon about James to audiences, have there been any reactions that have surprised you or delighted you as you talk to people now that this book is out in the world?

[Percival Everett]

Well, I don't read reviews, but I've been told by my publisher that they're good. I get reports and it's great. I think that the book is getting so much attention, is wonderful. If I can get a few more readers, that's terrific.

[Alison Stewart]

That was author Percival Everett speaking with our guest host, Kushinavadar about his novel James. It won this year's National Book Award for fiction.

[Ira Flatow]

This is Ira Flatow, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, the Science Friday team has been reporting high quality science and technology news, making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI to the tiniest microbes in our bodies. Audiences trust our show because they know we're driven by a mission to inform and serve listeners first and foremost with important news they won't get anywhere else. And our sponsors benefit from that halo effect. For more information on becoming a sponsor, visit sponsorship wnyc.org.