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The Book Review
Book Club: 'James,' by Percival Everett (Rerun)
00:45:32
This Thanksgiving weekend, we are re-running our roundtable conversation about Percival Everett's recent National Book Award winner for fiction.
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- [00:00]
Gilbert Cruz
This episode is supported by Merrell with a dedicated Merrell Advisor. You get a personalized plan for your financial goals and when plans change, Merrill's with you every step of the way. Go to ML.combullish to learn more. Merrill, a Bank of America company. What would you like the power to do Investing Involves Risk Merrill Lynch, Pierce Fenner and Smith Inc. Registered Broker Dealer Registered Investment Advisor Member SIPC.
- [00:30]
Hello, I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review podcast. It's a long holiday weekend here in the United States, and hopefully you're using some of that time to catch up on some of this year's best books. If you need help with that, Please find our 100 Notable Books of 2024 list. One very notable book is James by Percival Everett. This retelling of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleber Finn just won the top prize at the National Book Awards. And so we're bringing you our book club episode from earlier this year in which host MJ Franklin discusses James with book review editors Greg Coles and Joumana Khatib. In this time of Thanksgiving, we remain grateful to all of you for continuing to listen to our show. Enjoy the conversation.
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MJ Franklin
Hello and welcome to another book club episode of the Book Review Podcast. I'm MJ Franklin. I'm an editor here at the New York Times Book Review. For our May book club selection, we're talking about Percival Everett's latest novel, James. And joining me to discuss it are two wonderful colleagues. First up, our returning voice, you know and love, Joumana Khative Jumana. Welcome.
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Joumana Khatib
Thanks for having me, MJ Joumana, you.
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MJ Franklin
Were last here for our Erasure episode, I believe. And I remember you mentioned you could talk about Percival Everett's work all day. So for this episode, it only felt fitting to have you back.
- [02:03]
Joumana Khatib
Thank you. It's nice to be taken so literally.
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MJ Franklin
The book for your podcast, where we.
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Joumana Khatib
Take everything literally and literarily, an institutional memory is long.
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MJ Franklin
Well, thank you for coming back. And also with us is Greg Coleslaw. Welcome, Greg.
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Greg Coles
Thank you, mj. Pleasure to be here.
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MJ Franklin
Greg. I believe you were last on the show for Our best of 2023 episode where you spoke so eloquently about the fraud. So, listeners, if you haven't listened to that, go check that out. I also want to shout out, you wrote a few weeks ago a beautiful appraisal of Alice Munro after her death. And listeners, go spend time with that. It's incredible.
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Greg Coles
Oh, thank you.
- [02:41]
MJ Franklin
And now onto Our book club selection, James. I'm, as always, going to start off with a little synopsis. James is Percival Everett's latest novel and it's a retelling of Huckleberry Finn, this time told from Jim's perspective, or I should say James. As the character specifies, a lot of the beats of Twain's original are. Here we meet the young trickster Huck and the enslaved black man Jim. When Jim finds out that he's going to be sold, he runs away. And while hiding, he encounters Huck, who is also on the run. And together they flee down the Mississippi, along the way having episodic adventure and episodic adventure, including, but not limited to, getting bitten, a rattlesnake stumbling into a family feud, running into two scammers calling themselves the Duke and the King, and more. However, Everett's version of Huck Finn veers into different territory. Pretty immediately from the first page, you learn that there is more to James than meets the eye. When out in public, he appears to be simple, foolish, he speaks in broken English dialect, and he seems extremely susceptible to being pranked. That's just an act, though. Behind closed doors, James reveals that he's actually a hyper aware intellectual, a philosopher, a linguist, and he's code switching and playing dumb for his own safety. And he's not alone. All of the black people who are enslaved are doing the exact same thing. When James runs away, he's not just fleeing from being sold. He's fighting for family, freedom, self determination, and the right to tell his own story. Also, there are some pretty big new twists and some revelations that we'll talk about later in the episode. Jumana. Greg, did I miss anything? How's that synopsis?
- [04:18]
Joumana Khatib
I think you did a great job, mj. We're gonna get into the details today.
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MJ Franklin
We're gonna get into the details we should say.
- [04:23]
Joumana Khatib
There are gonna be spoilers coming. Capital S spoilers.
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MJ Franklin
So with that out of the way, we usually open these discussions with a general table setting like temperature check. What did you think about the book? However, we got a great reader question that I wanted to open with. And that is BA from Wisconsin asks with relation to Twain's Huck Finn. James has been variously described as a retelling, a reimagining, an homage, or a subversive revision. Is it one of these things or a combination or does it really matter? And I wanted to start off there because I think that gets at a critical idea of us as we talk about this book, as we approach this book, how should we be thinking about It. I'm going to throw it to the table.
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Greg Coles
That's such a great question. It's a great question partly because it's impossible to read this book without immediately thinking about Huck Finn itself and how they're in conversation with each other. So you're trying to answer that question as a reader, even as you're reading the novel in its own right. I would answer. It is parts of all of those things. It is certainly a retelling. It is very much a reimagining the term that I've used that BA From Wisconsin did not. I keep calling it a corrective because the Twain Huck becomes a fully realized figure in Huckleberry Finn, but Jim never really does. He's always kind of othered in there. And there are nods to it. I mean, the great moral gravity of Huckleberry Finn. What stops it from being just a boy's adventure tale is Jim as a character. And yet he never becomes fully rounded in the way that Huck does. And he is that immediately in James.
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MJ Franklin
I completely agree. And that corrective actually gets at something that another reader wrote in and said in our announcement article. I said Jim is a sidekick. And someone wrote in and said he's not a sidekick. He's actually the heart and soul of the novel, which I completely agree with. However, Jim is also, while being the heart and soul is also pushed to the side. It's Huck's story. It's quite literally the adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Jim's heart and soul is there in service of Huck's awakening.
- [06:34]
Greg Coles
I even I brought my copy of Huckleberry Finn so that I could read a line from the back of it. From the author's description, he has no mother. His father is a brutal drunkard, he sleeps in a hogshead, so on and so forth. It goes on to describe the book. And then it says the boy nobody wants becomes a human being with a sense of his own destiny and the courage to choose between violating the code of the conventional and and betraying the person who needs him most. It never says Jim does not become a human being with a sense of his own destiny. And Jim is only ever the person who needs Huck. And so there's always this kind of subordinate relationship there.
- [07:13]
MJ Franklin
Interesting. I also love this weathered copy of this book. It's beautiful. What about you, Jumana? What do you think about this?
- [07:19]
Joumana Khatib
I loved that reader comment. I was so struck by it. Cause I agree. I've been grappling with this myself. I don't know That I think reimagining is the right word because I actually think that the firmament of Jim was there, and Mark Twain just chose not to do anything. He chose to make Jim the sort of moral canvas that Huck was painting on, you know, or a foil in that way. I think this book is certainly subversive. I have no problem considering it an act of subversion. In fact, one of the major themes in this book is just how dangerous and risky language is and claiming it for yourself with wielding it for yourself. Personally, this felt like one of the best examples that I can think of of what I think of as like a contrapuntal novel. I think that's an Edward Said idea. Writing back to the canon. This is explicitly that and one of the best ones from the American canon that I can think of. You see it more certainly in literature from the subcontinent, from Africa. But this was super exciting. I want to talk more about that later, but we can keep it going.
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Greg Coles
It's interesting to me that Percival Everett is not the first person to do that with the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Yeah, that a novelist named Nancy Rawls did a book called My Jim, published in 2005, I think.
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MJ Franklin
I haven't read this.
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Greg Coles
Which is where James's wife Sadie is first named Sadie, because Mark Twain never gives her a name. She's just, you know, Jim's wife. And she's only in there very fleetingly. In Huck Finn, we get this kind of one scene of him missing his wife and children where that family life is at the heart of James motivation in Percival Everett. But Nancy Rawls kind of did that 20 years ago, and Percival Everett clearly knows that and uses the same name. And a guy named John Clinch did a novel called Finn a few years after that one that was really a reimagining of Pap Puck's father's character. So there's been this thing in the culture of people trying to kind of correct Twain or add on to Twain.
- [09:36]
MJ Franklin
I love this. We're like, what, five, ten minutes in and our reading list already grows. So with that, I kind of want to pivot and do that temperature check. I just want to know your top level general thoughts before we dive in a little bit more deeply of what you thought about this book, about James. Like it, hate it. Things that challenged you, things that you're still thinking about, things that you keep raving about. I just want to know top level thoughts of this book. I'm going to start with you, Jomana.
- [10:01]
Joumana Khatib
So I've dipped into James Several times, finished it twice. And I actually really recommend listening to the audio version if any of you are audiobook listeners, because that's very rewarding and adds a lot to it. My first time picking it up, I just wanted to get my bearings. It's like a dog on the deck sniffing to see if a storm's coming. It's like, this is a book about language. This is an adventure story. This is a contrapuntal novel. Like, I'm going to come back to this when I have the time to properly read it. Then I think I read it in two days or 18 hours straight through. And I could not believe how much I was responding to the adventure of it. Right. Of course the stakes feel high, so you feel compelled to understand what's going to happen next. And I will tell you that I loved the interplay between the adventure, the stakes, the humor. I mean, this is an unbelievably funny book. Early on in the book, there's a scene where Jim is instructing other enslaved people about how to code switch, which is hysterical. Right. And then, you know, later there's a scene where he's putting on blackface. I mean, he like, to me it feels. I love seeing Percival Everett's sense of humor. I love the way that he's able to contrast this absurdity but still keep the moral.
- [11:21]
MJ Franklin
And that's so fitting too for this one because Huck Finn also, the original, is funny as it's also strange and adventuresome and it has this moral compass to it in its own way as well. What about you, Greg? What are your top level thoughts about this book?
- [11:35]
Greg Coles
Oh my God, I loved it, but not right away.
- [11:39]
MJ Franklin
Interesting. Tell us more.
- [11:40]
Greg Coles
Well, when the book opens, I found some of the language stuff a little either on the nose or heavy handed. I felt like it was Percival Everett showing. This is going to be a book about code switching. Maybe it tracked a little too closely at the beginning with Huckleberry Finn. And so I thought, oh, he's just doing this kind of overlay with these elements of what Percival Everett has done in previous books of the black characters in conversation with white culture, with again, code switching with this kind of very cerebral thing. But within maybe five chapters, they're short chapters. And once you really do get into, as Jomana said, the adventure of it, the story of it, it gallops and there are, there's such psychological complexity and emotional stakes. And James, I'm going to call him James, not Jim. And the first thing that we see him write, he says, I am called J I have yet to choose a name. The name of the book is James. The last scene in the book is somebody asking him his name. And he says, james. And the guy says, james what? And he says, just James. And that's exit. Then. Actually, I wanted to talk about that last line, just James a little bit. Because Percival Everett has to know the double meaning with just as in justice, too. He is a just figure. And also, one of Percival Everett's more recent books was a riff on James Bond, Dr. No. And so the I am James. Just James. Now he's James out of Bondage. He's not James Bond. He's like unbonded James. And so all of this Percival Everett is just so clever and playful. And this is all there. And if it's not intentional, he has to at least be aware of it.
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MJ Franklin
I have two quick things. One, a deep reading that only our poetry editor can give us. Greg Edits is our poetry editor here at the Book Review. And then also, I think it just speaks to the layers that are in this novel. I think you've both spoken about being so compelled about what's gonna happen next, which is so interesting for something that is revisiting a classic. We know theoretically what's gonna happen next. Cause we've read the original story. And so the idea that Percival Everett is able to breathe new life and new energy and make this story gallop, as you say, is kind of remarkable.
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Joumana Khatib
And the fact that the book still gallops with these sort of dreamlike interludes with Voltaire, right, where he's interrogating these kind of preeminent thinkers about liberty and the rights of man. And this happens when he's recovering from.
- [14:23]
Greg Coles
Rock as the ultimate hypocrite and he's.
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Joumana Khatib
Holding these people to account when he's in.
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MJ Franklin
Yeah, yeah. I bet you didn't think you'd get that when you picked up a book that's a Huck Finn retelling, Right?
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Joumana Khatib
I did think it with first full evidence. True, true, true, true. You left out a key detail. Mj, what did you think about this?
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MJ Franklin
I also, in agreement with everyone. I loved this book. But unlike you, Greg, I loved it pretty immediately. I loved it with the opening line and. Can I read it?
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Greg Coles
Oh, of course. Yes, please. It is a great opening line.
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MJ Franklin
The opening line is just, those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass. And why I loved this is. We may have spoken about this in our demon Copperhead episode. But, like, there is a tricky work with reimaginings, with retellings. You want to be faithful to the original. You want to kind of show readers that, like, I understand my source material, we are going to be faithful to it. And yet you also want to bring your own flavor to it, your own energy to it. There's a reason why you're reading the retelling and not the original. So you want to get something new out of it. And that's what this book does. Right away, you immediately know who those little bastards were, Tom Sawyer and Huck. And it immediately tells you this is a book that is going to rip off of that, but it's going to be irreverent to it. It's going to challenge what you think already. It's going to have a humor to it. Sometimes I fear that retellings can be beautiful and the opening line dispels that immediately. And so for me, I was immediately hooked.
- [15:54]
Greg Coles
It puts James in a position that is superior to them. He is wise to them in a way that he never is. He's always the figure of fun. He's the kind of simpleton figure in the Twain.
- [16:09]
MJ Franklin
Yeah, like it immediately corrects and reimagines and revises all of this stuff with Jim. And then at that point I heard that opening line, I buckled up and I was like, I'm in. I'm ready to go wherever Percival Everett will lead. And it led to so many surprising places. Again, we know the beats of the story and yet he fills in the gaps and then veers off into some new places. It's philosophical, it's cerebral, it's harrowing and scary and yet, like, you can't put it down. I also marathon read it. I think for me, this is easily one of my favorite books of the year. I cannot stop gushing about it. But those are my top level thoughts. And before we dive in more into some specifics, I want to read some reader comments and some reader thoughts about this book. Rhonda from Seattle wrote, I read James after re reading Huckleberry Finn. In that American classic, Jim is kind hearted and brave and the butt of many cruel quote unquote jokes and abuses. Percival Everett gives James intelligence, literacy and a fierce righteous anger. The relationship between Huck and James is still loving, but gains more depth. And James journey to freedom is harrowing and glorious. Terry from Indianapolis writes, I listened to James instead of reading. I'm so glad I did. The vocal distinction between the slave Jim and the person James was great. I'm not sure I'd caught it all if I was reading. And jumana, you also pointed out the audio.
- [17:30]
Joumana Khatib
Yeah. Thank you, Terry from Indianapolis. That's what got me on that.
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Greg Coles
I will second that as well. I listened to the audio and then I read the physical copy and they're very different experience.
- [17:41]
MJ Franklin
Interesting. I need to listen. I need to listen. And then one more Earl from Texas writes, my book club is reading James and I'm reading the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn concurrently. My observation is that while Twain emphasizes the adventure, percival is contrasting 19th and 21st century African Americans. Percival has transported himself across time and into Jim. We know Percival from Erasure, his intellect, his broad and deep knowledge of societal issues associated with slavery, and his affection for imitating dialects. He has brought these into Jim's story to fully illuminate the inhumanity and the social impact of slavery. So some reader observations and assessments.
- [18:20]
Greg Coles
Those are great.
- [18:21]
MJ Franklin
Now I want to dive into some specifics, but before we do that, I think we should take a quick break.
- [18:36]
Gilbert Cruz
This episode is supported by Merrell with a dedicated Merrell Advisor. You get a personalized plan for your financial goals and when plans change, Merrell's with you every step of the way. Go to ML.combullish to learn more. Merrell, a Bank of America company. What would you like the power to do Investing involves risk. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith Incorporated. Registered Broker Dealer Registered Investment Advisor Member.
- [19:02]
MJ Franklin
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- [19:07]
Joumana Khatib
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- [19:13]
MJ Franklin
Pick a beautiful design, personalize it with photos and messages, and Moonpig will send.
- [19:18]
Joumana Khatib
It to everyone on your list.
- [19:19]
MJ Franklin
No long lines or post office trips. It's card sending made convenient and personal. Try it free with code moonpigusa@moonpig.com because everyone deserves a Moonpig card. And we're back. This is the Book Review Podcast. I'm MJ Franklin. I'm joined by Zumanica Teeb and Greg Coles and we're discussing James by Percival Everett. We just talked about our general top level thoughts and now we're gonna dive in. And that's a tricky conundrum. Because this book is so episodic. There are so many places that we could start. So I'm gonna throw it off to the table. What do you wanna talk about?
- [19:56]
Greg Coles
I just mentioned before the break that listening to it was a different experience from reading it physically. One reason for that is that there are several pages at the very beginning of the book. It opens with sort of a. It's not even a Prologue. It opens with kind of pages of song L from the time Jimmy crack Corn. And I don't care that those kinds of songs that you don't realize until you're much deeper in the book are actually. What you're reading is a notebook that James has stolen from the leader of a minstrel group who was writing down the lyrics. And he's writing that with a pencil that another enslaved man has stolen from his master to great consequence, in fact, he will be lynched and killed for stealing this little pencil stub that James writes with. And so listening to it, you kind of forget those beginning lyrics and you kind of lose the frame that, oh, I'm reading this book that James has actually written as he's running. This is his slave narrative. He mentions several times reading other people's slave narratives and now he's writing his own. So reading it physically, you get that in a way that I missed in audio, although audio offered a lot of other rich rewards.
- [21:16]
MJ Franklin
Interesting. Let's dive in and talk about the pencil. The pencil. The writing. The pencil. You will always be famous. So some setup. This plot line is. James is on the run and he realizes that after his fever dream, he wants to write his own story. And he gets this pencil. And all throughout he's talking about the power of language, the power of writing your own story. He wants to have this notebook throw it over to you. Jomana, what did you think of the idea of the pencil? The way Percival Everett's playing with language, the notebook, et cetera, et cetera? Because that's a big part of the book.
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Joumana Khatib
If I had a chicken to pluck with this book, I could have had maybe three fewer references to the pencil. Because, Greg, you talked about how maybe in the beginning, those opening shots, they felt maybe a little heavy handed. Personally, and I'm probably in the minority here, by the time that I saw the pencil again, it becomes a repetend. Right. And it's of course vague. Very important recurring image in the book. I could have had a few fewer references to James sort of feeling for the pencil in his pocket as he's making his escape. This is aesthetic, this is, you know, I understand and overarchingly, I think it's a beautiful. I mean, I say that with trepidation. It's not beautiful. Somebody died for it. You know, it's amazing to me that I still don't even have appropriate language to describe the feelings that this evinces. It's an incredibly apt image and reminder of the stakes of what is driving James to make this escape the peril that he particularly is in because he can read and write and the ability that he has to write his own story, which is something that he doesn't take for granted.
- [23:05]
MJ Franklin
I didn't mind the repetition of it. For me, the pencil was this perfect symbol that did so many things. Number one, it quite literally is a symbol of the retelling. Right here is James telling his own story. It's putting the pencil in someone else's hands, quite literally from Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn. So I like that idea. I also liked how so much of this book is about the power of language itself. Again, James and the other people who are enslaved are code switching. They are speaking in a certain way for their own protection, and then they are their true selves and speaking in another way. And I have a quote that I wanted to read about that point. James thinks my change in diction alerted the rest to the white boys presence. So my performance for the boys became a frame for my story. My story became less of a tale as the real game became the display for the boys. Right. So, like, language is not just a way of asserting yourself, but now it's this tool for survival. In many ways, it's. It's a way, he says that in order to feel safe, like the white people around them wanted to feel superior, so he has to speak in a way that allows him to be subjugated. Now it's a tool for alerting other people to other people's presence. Right. Just the way you speak. And then with the pencil, that idea of, like, the power of language becomes literalized. Right. It's this powerful tool to tell your own story and to get that out there. So I like that. And then also for me, the pencil tied everything so perfectly with Percival Everett's DNA. So many of his books are about the power of language, how we speak, who gets to speak, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so for me, the pencil was a symbol that fits so perfectly in this world that connects us to Percival Everett's larger oeuvre and also allows us a new point of entry to exploring some of the themes that he has introduced in this book.
- [24:55]
Joumana Khatib
Yes, to all of that, M.J. absolutely. And I think what's really striking about the way this book is set up, not only are there so many textures in this book, these written interludes, the dialogue, the code switching, but remembering that the book literally opens with the framing device of these incredibly racist minstrel songs, I think that this is a bigger point about how this fits in with how James is perceived. He's up against this image of enslaved people or black people as jokes or the subject of very crude entertainment. And even still in what follows is where he has to assert himself. That's what he's working with.
- [25:39]
MJ Franklin
So, Greg, kind of like speech and debate. You've brought up the idea of the pencil and language and stuff. We've talked about it. Now you get your rebuttal thoughts on the pencil and language skin.
- [25:49]
Greg Coles
One thing that I also like about the pencil, that you did not mention the lynching, that this is a shockingly violent book. There's violence throughout it. Very early on we hear about a runaway slave who's been killed in this act of mob violence where he's. He's burned alive and. And nobody's allowed to step in and put him out of his misery. From that, there are lashings, there are lynchings, there are rapes, there are murders. It gets very viscerally into the violence of slavery in a way that Mark Twain avoided. So doing that with the pencil. Having the punishment for stealing the pencil be death. It speaks not only to the power of language, but the danger of language. There's a reason that the white enforcers of slavery felt so threatened by slaves having language, by slaves having the power to communicate, because, you know, slavery depended on, you know, them not being able to.
- [26:48]
MJ Franklin
Yeah. It's quite literally like they're asserting their selves and their personhood in the system that is designed to do the exact opposite, to take that personhood away.
- [26:56]
Greg Coles
Yeah. Another thing I like about the framing device, the notebook and the whole minstrel act itself is already throwing another layer then into this notion of performance. Who is the audience? How is it safe to present yourself as somebody? Are you a figure of parody? You described early on, one of you described early on this idea that James is a black man putting on black makeup to play in the minstrel minstrel act. And you read the quote about going into slave dialect to signal that there were white people present. There's also a great moment while he is performing in the minstrel act where somebody is accosting him in his sleep. He wakes up and the people in the minstrel act know him as a runaway slave. The man accosting him in his sleep thinks that he is a white man in minstrel makeup and he needs to communicate in a way that addresses both of them. And he thinks, how do I. What language do I use? And he settles on the racially neutral Lottie. Oh, Lottie. As a way and it's again, this kind of navigating between different languages depending on the circumstances. That's just genius.
- [28:16]
MJ Franklin
That whole scene, I felt, was so remarkable. Just number one, as you point, like, how do you present yourself and how do you signal to others all of these various dynamics? But then also, just like, the setup of it, here is a black man who's having to put on blackface so that people, like white people will think he's actually a white man who's appearing to be black. Like, the levels of erasure. Yes. To call back to his previous book, like, that's wild to me. And it also, like, it's so inventive, and it's played for danger and also humor. And it's weird.
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Greg Coles
One thing that happens throughout this book, James, as a runaway slave, is always kind of trying to suss out when he encounters a white person, is he a safe white person? And really, there are no safe white people in this book. And I, as a white reader, am kind of looking for, like, is that a good white person? Which is, you know, I think Percival Everett would sneer at me for doing that. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is maybe the original avatar of the white savior narrative. Who is Huck? Except the white Savior for Jim and James by Percival Everett is a book that refuses the white savior narrative. And you, for a little bit, think maybe Emmett is. Emmett, who runs the minstrel troupe, is going to be that, because he's very welcoming and accepting of Jim. He has no problems accepting Jim into the troupe as a member of the troupe. But then he becomes very exploitative. I mean, he essentially treats James as an indentured servant. He maybe doesn't like slavery, but he has no problem accepting all the benefits that white privilege brings him.
- [29:56]
MJ Franklin
Exactly. And when James is there, James is always like, wait, when can I leave this troop? I'm tied to this troop. And then he has to negotiate how much money will I have to pay you so I can leave? Which is not the same as freedom, even as Emmett is presenting it as.
- [30:12]
Greg Coles
The Duke and the King. Also maybe don't buy into slavery, but are perfectly happy to use it as a, yeah, oh, we'll just sell you and steal you back. We're gonna, you know, use this system to our own benefit.
- [30:24]
Joumana Khatib
I'm glad that we're talking about this because, of course, of course, this narrative is focused on James and his family, but the cast of auxiliary characters, completely memorable. And so I'm kind of curious to hear the two of you who are the characters that stuck with you who made you laugh, who's lingering in the playground of your imagination.
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MJ Franklin
The first thing that came to mind is there's this, like, breeding farm, basically, and she's a young girl who's disguised as a boy.
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Joumana Khatib
Sam.
- [30:56]
MJ Franklin
Sam. So James first meets this person and thinks that she's just one of the other workers, and then finds out that, like, actually she's been, like, repeatedly and systematically raped on this plantation, and she flees with him. He convinces her this is no place for you to be. It's dangerous out there, but that is better than being here. And she flees. And spoiler alert, she's killed in an accident. And I can't stop thinking about her. Just the tragedy of every single step of her life. She's in this tragic place. And unlike James, for instance, who has this episodic adventure that is certainly harrowing, but, like, he has movement to it. She tries to take steps and flee, and she's killed unceremoniously by accident. As people are trying to get to James, I keep shaking my head. I feel so emotional about it.
- [31:49]
Greg Coles
It's the second death that James attributes to himself. After the pencil.
- [31:53]
MJ Franklin
Yeah, yeah. Because the person who gives him the pencil is lynched for giving the pencil for me. I kept being like all of these auxiliary characters. I want James to have allies, and yet I don't want him to interact with anybody because those people end up dead shortly thereafter.
- [32:06]
Joumana Khatib
Yeah. The Sam episode, she's the character that has stuck with me, too. And just the way that Percival Everett builds on. On it where, you know, James is getting whipped by this owner, and Sam is whipped, too. And when she removes her shirt, Jim recognizes that she has breasts. And then. And he thinks, well, maybe the owner doesn't realize that she's a woman. And then Sam says, actually, he's been raping me. And. And it's. It's. It's horrific. And as she's escaping, you actually have the. I don't know, almost a sense of relief where it was like, maybe this was the only. Only possibility for her. But I also was struck, like, one of the things that I love seeing in this book was James as a father. He's so good with Lizzie, and that actually really comes through in the audio. And he's so good with Sadie and with Sam. There was absolutely a parallel. He was thinking of Lizzie and to see him in that kind of paternal mode. And of course, this comes up with Huck in a pretty interesting way as well.
- [33:08]
MJ Franklin
But speaking also, too, of, like, the ideas of corrective revision, this reality is nowhere near Huckleberry Finn, the original. And like, Everett is kind of mining that again.
- [33:20]
Greg Coles
This is much more Toni Morrison territory.
- [33:22]
MJ Franklin
Exactly. Should we jump in? Should we talk about the Huck of it all?
- [33:26]
Greg Coles
I think we have to.
- [33:28]
Joumana Khatib
The time has come.
- [33:29]
MJ Franklin
The time has come. So I'm gonna do a second spoiler alert because there is a huge revelation, if you don't want to know it. Pause. Come back to us after you've read the book. I'm speaking with a prolonged vocal verse so that you can leave if you need. And now we're done. We're talking about Huck. So Huck is on this adventure halfway through, or a little more than halfway through. Toward the end of the book, you find out that James is Huck's father. I'm just going to start there. What did you make of that revelation?
- [33:58]
Joumana Khatib
Okay, so the idea. Okay, I was totally on board with this. Like, I love this. This is bonkers. Bonkers. And yet bonkers with an asterisk. And he really hot potatoes this knowledge to you. It's not even. I mean, like, it's.
- [34:16]
Greg Coles
I mean, there's talk of the widow's peak early, how James and Huck both have a widow's peak. And it's one reason that Pap hates Huck says, why does he hate my hair so much? I've got this widow's peak. Well, you've got one too, so that's there. And also, you know. Well, you not. You're not that dark, Jim. You know, you're almost no darker than I am. And so there's this question of kind of the skin tone also.
- [34:41]
MJ Franklin
Those are some.
- [34:42]
Joumana Khatib
See, that's interesting. That skin tone discussion I really thought was about some kind of, like, moral equivalence as opposed to, like a paternity thing. And I've watched so much Maury in my life. Like, you would think that I could see, like, paternity scandal from. Yeah.
- [35:00]
Greg Coles
What's interesting is the hot potato of it comes because we have access to James interior life so much, and yet those things that I said, the widow's peak, the skin color are external. They're not. He's not thinking, this is my son. You know, he knows it all along, but he doesn't tell us until the hot potato moment of it, until he tells Huck.
- [35:21]
Joumana Khatib
I like that we don't have much time remaining in the novel to make of that. I like the possibilities that it opens up. Right. Mj, I wanna hear what you have to think about.
- [35:33]
MJ Franklin
This for me is my one gripe with the Novel. Oh, I like the idea of it all. I like the idea that all along Huck is James son. But what it complicates is this idea throughout this novel and throughout the original, Huck Finn is like, who can be an ally and why, right? Like, who can James rely on? Who can James talk to? Who is he aligned with? Who is he willing to risk himself for? There's a moment in the book where a ship explodes. Norman, Huck, James are in the ocean. Norman and Huck can't swim. James can, and he can only save one of them. And given the racial component of it all, Norman and James have been talking about, like, staying together, saving each other, protecting other enslaved people, freedom, et cetera. And then here's this kid who's just on the run. And, like, James and Huck have this beautiful, special bond that you don't totally know what's going on or why, and Huck doesn't know either. And so when James decides to save Huck rather than Norman, it feels so significant, and it's so mysterious, and it's so morally complicated. And then when you find out that Huck is just James son, it kind of massages and smooths out some of those complicated wrinkles. And for me, those wrinkles were, like, the most exciting part of. And so that's my one gripe with finding out that Huck is James son, that I think it overly explains some of the complicated choices that James makes throughout the entire book.
- [37:09]
Joumana Khatib
I hear you. I hear you. I don't agree. Respectfully, I disagree. I love what this forces you to think about, which is that this golden child of American literature of this era is still predicated on being black. When you think about how much of our cultural material has been whitewashed that actually is traced to black artists and black creativity and black cultural production, I love the idea that this paternity is making that explicit.
- [37:42]
Greg Coles
That is really interesting. What's really interesting is in the 90s, there was a book of literary criticism by a woman named Shelley Fisher Fishkin called Was Huck Black? And it was not literally, was Huck Black? But it was. Did Twain pull that vernacular, pull the kind of the whole story and mood of Huck Finn from the black people that he knew? And so it's this question of cultural whitewashing, and is it, in fact, a black novel? Because he was steeped in that world. So this book makes it literal.
- [38:23]
MJ Franklin
So many layers. And I feel like we could talk all day about this book, but we have a fun second segment that I want to get to. But before I go, are there any last things you want to say about James, about Huck Finn, about this book?
- [38:35]
Greg Coles
I want to ask you guys before we leave this book, do you think James survives?
- [38:41]
Joumana Khatib
Survives what?
- [38:43]
Greg Coles
Survives the end. I mean, at the end there is a run in with a sheriff.
- [38:48]
MJ Franklin
And actually that was gonna be one of my last things I wanna mention is the ending is like, so there's a run in with the sheriff, James snaps and kills people. He sets his righteous fire. And then the book doesn't really wrap up, it just ends.
- [39:01]
Greg Coles
We never see Huck again.
- [39:02]
MJ Franklin
We never see Huck again.
- [39:04]
Greg Coles
His son.
- [39:06]
MJ Franklin
So to your question of do I think James survives? And I hate to say this, I hate to say this in my heart of hearts, I don't think he does. Because he has done this incredibly violent thing in a very regressive, vengeful system that is designed to target and take him out. And a flame is what? Also a beacon, right? And also historically, like so many of these types of large scale rebellions were quashed. And so for me it's giving Nat Turner, for instance, and it doesn't. And I don't think he survives as much as I want him to. And so the way I get around that is I just don't think about it. And I stick with that lingering feeling of justice of some way, of some sort is on its way for James. Right. Like, or he is making, I think.
- [39:54]
Joumana Khatib
The book is his justice.
- [39:56]
Greg Coles
Well, that's. I kind of want to take the book as documentary testament that he does survive. He's able to tell you about the run in with the sheriff, but then it fade out. Fade to black.
- [40:08]
Joumana Khatib
Yeah.
- [40:08]
Greg Coles
So, you know, I don't know.
- [40:10]
MJ Franklin
For me, the ending though lined this book up with the trees, which also ends in a very similar way. There is this rolling storm of justice. I'm not going to say what it is, but it is on its way. And the book ends when that is moving, but not quite there. And so you don't know what's going to happen. But you know, the momentum is still building. I just quickly wanted to read some more reader comments about this book because they're so good. So SNA from New Jersey writes James works because of its sharp contrast. His characterization in Huck and Everett's book exposes just how much we all lost by oppressing non white people for so long. I love James. The best book I've read so far this year. Another reader, L.F. from the east coast, writes, when I first read about James, what came to my mind immediately was, this is the book we've all been waiting for. I was not disappointed. It is not a retelling of an American classic, as some has said. It is Jim's story brought fully to life with brilliant language and convincing insight into James the Man. This is indeed the story that needed to be told. Thank you, Mr. Everett. Okay, so with that, let's move on to our second segment. We always like to give you some book recommendations. The obvious recommendation segment for this would have been share your favorite literary retellings. But we've already done that at the end of our demon Copperhead episode. And so instead, I just wanted to ask, what are your favorite classic novels? This is inspired by the idea that the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic that lives so large in the public imagination. And I just want to know what other classics live large, not necessarily in the public imagination, but in your imagination. What classes can't get out of your head that are your favorites that you can't stop talking about, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I'm going to start with you, Greg.
- [42:09]
Greg Coles
Good question. And I'm going to stick in the 19th century, since that's where we are with Mark Twain. Before this year, I think I would have said Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, kind of the great adultery novels of the 19th century. But this year I read Middlemarch by George Eliot and also a great 19th century novel, and it enclosed what Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina both did. I mean, it had similarities to both of those, but it is just so much more expansive. It's kind of the great social novel of that era. I'm going to say Middlemarch by George Eliot.
- [42:44]
MJ Franklin
I remember when you were reading it, you would come into the office and they'd be like, where in Middlemarch are you? My fun Middlemarch story is I read that in college and I need to reread it because I think I want to have a personal connection to that book, not just an academic connection to it. But it was in the middle of the class. We were talking about women's agency and how so many people have different approaches to it in that book. And someone stood up. It was a seminar, so like 12 people, but someone stood up and they started singing no Scrubs to describe Rosamond. It was.
- [43:15]
Joumana Khatib
Literacy was a mistake.
- [43:16]
MJ Franklin
Oh, my God. A liberal art school is a gift. So that's my Middlemarch story. What about you, Jomana? What's a classic that you love?
- [43:27]
Joumana Khatib
Portrait of a Lady Forever and ever. A passage to India. I mean I like all Forrester. I have a lot of problematic faves, which is a problem that I will be working on. But one thing that I was thinking about a lot reading James was just how much I loved an adventure story. What a relief it was to not be in the realm of auto fiction with 2 inch margins, you know, like it was and how much fun it is. And Karen Blixen, my girl Isaac Dinesen. I haven't read out of Africa in at least 10 years. I'm sure that her descriptions of the people of the indigenous people she encounters would fry my eyebrows off. I still think it's a worthwhile cultural product.
- [44:15]
Greg Coles
As long as we're talking about great adventure stories. I also have to put a word in for Moby Dick, which is not just a great adventure story, but a weird, encyclopedic just like cram it all in novel that I love and return to in part. I'm probably never gonna read it cover to cover again.
- [44:33]
Joumana Khatib
A lot of blubber. So mday how about you?
- [44:36]
MJ Franklin
So my favorite classic is to the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. I reread it every few years. I read it, I think at the beginning of not this past year, but the year before. I always do this like great New Year's Day reading marathon to like I'm start off the year surrounded by books and I'm gonna dive into one book and that's how that's gonna be my signal for the year. And that book just has so much heart in it, but it is so craft wise, like just technically skilled in the play with perspective. It's doing so many weird things that like time passes segment one of the best dinner scenes of all of literature. Truly unforgettable. And then speaking of liberal arts school, earlier I read that in my first English class my first semester of my first year of college. So it has this like very deep personal meaning and memory for me. There's so many layers to that book. I love it so much. So to the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf is my favorite classic. We could talk all day about favorite classics and about James and Huck Finn, but that's all the time we have for today. Joumana, Greg, I just want to say a huge thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you for this conversation. This was so much fun.
- [45:47]
Joumana Khatib
It really was your happiness. Mj. It was great.
- [45:49]
MJ Franklin
And I want to say thank you to the readers who wrote in for sharing your thoughts about the book with us. Please keep the conversation going. We have an article page on the New York Times website titled Book Club Discuss James by Percival Everett with us. Share your thoughts in the comments there, talk with other readers, but just keep the conversation up. Also before we go, I want to reveal our June book club pick. Drum roll please. In June we will be reading Headshot by Rita Bullwinkle. We're going to talk about that on June 28th. There will be an article announcing this book selection on the website. So go put your comments there too. But we're so excited to keep these book clubs going to talk with you about Headshot. In the meantime, just want to say thank you again and happy reading.
- [46:34]
Gilbert Cruz
That was M.J. franklin, Greg Coles and Xumana Khatib in an episode from earlier this year discussing the National Book Award winning novel James by Percival Everett. I hope you all had a good holiday. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thank you for listening.