The Book Twain Couldn’t Write

James by Percival Everett (Doubleday, 2024)

 Reviewed by Sarah Selden

Percival Everett’s James is probably the most talked-about book this year, and for good reason. It has now been shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the National Book Award, and most public libraries have hold lists for this novel that are hundreds and hundreds of people long. In short, James is in high demand.

James is a retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, empowering this character to reclaim his identity as James. Everett most notably accomplishes this through the use of dialect. In Huck Finn, both Jim and Huck use different, non-standard forms of dialect when they speak, contributing to the novel’s specific regionalism and timeframe, but also contributing to the idea that Jim lacks intelligence. This idea is bolstered by his perceived illiteracy and his agreeableness toward Huck and Tom’s outlandish plans. In James, Everett flips this power dynamic on its head, establishing from the beginning of the novel that Jim’s speech is actually a secret language created by slaves to preserve their safety by appeasing white society. Before giving the six children who live in his cabin a lesson in this language, Jim remarks how these teachings “were indispensable. Safe movement through the world depended on mastery of language, fluency” (20). Throughout the novel, when James speaks to other slaves privately, he uses sophisticated, standard English informed by the vast amount of reading he has done by sneaking into Judge Thatcher’s library. Indeed, the fact that James can read and write in James while he could not in Huck Finn is significant to the novel’s thematic development, as he has many dreams in which he argues with philosophers like Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau about how their notions of “freedom” did not include abolitionism. But it is important to note that James is not an indictment on Twain’s work; Everett maintains that he does “not see the work as a corrective, but rather [he] sees [him]self in conversation with Twain.”

Everett’s literary status is on the rise in such a way that he must be in conversation with Twain and the rest of the American literary canon. Since the release of his first book, Suder, in 1983, Everett has published 22 novels, four collections of short stories, seven poetry collections, and one children’s book. His critical reception matches his prolificness—he has won or been nominated for 23 different literary prizes, including a variety of PEN awards, the Hurston/Wright Legacy award (won in 2002, 2010, 2021, and 2022), the Pulitzer (finalist in 2021), and the Booker (shortlisted in 2022 and 2024). His work is known for including clever and satirical commentary on the state of race relations in America in a variety of contexts, from his novel I am Not Sydney Poitier, which features a title character drolly named Not Sydney Poitier, to Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, which offers a unique perspective on grief by featuring a fictionalized version himself as a protagonist written by a fictionalized version of his late father. And the brilliance of his retake on Huck Finn in James may well garner him the Booker this November.

As a retelling of an American literary classic, James comes to readers at a time when notions of what constitutes the literary canon continue to evolve. The American literary canon in its original state is well reflected in the “stereotypical” high school and college reading syllabi—authors like Steinbeck, Melville, Hawthorne, Fitzgerald, and, of course, Twain are mainstays of this list. However, beginning in the late twentieth century, authors and scholars alike sought to open the canon to be more representative of the American public. Alice Walker, fighting from the fringes of the canon herself, went on an epic quest to find Zora Neal Hurston’s unmarked grave and then wrote an essay about it in Ms Magazine, effectively renewing interest in Hurston’s work and bringing her into the canonical ranks. Unsurprisingly, these revisions to the canon were met with considerable backlash, which John Guillory discussed in his landmark 1993 book Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. To Guillory, canon formation is primarily political, and this idea continues to permeate canonical discussions today. There has been much chatter about what students should and should not read as book bannings continue to rise at the local and state level. Even books like Huck Finn, which were once safely considered pillars of the canon, are being read less and less, both due to the controversial use of the n-word and perhaps because, as an Atlantic article recently noted, students are having a harder time holding the attention span necessary to tackle a such a historically complex text. Perhaps refreshing such stories through updating them is one way to renew popular interest.

The modern retelling-as-canon-revision is not necessarily a new idea, either. Zadie Smith’s 2005 White Teeth brought diversity to E.M. Forster’s Howards End, and its popularity and critical reception secured Smith’s position in the British literary canon. Two Nobel laureates have also tried their hands at retelling The Great Gatsby—Haruki Murakami through Killing Commendatore and Salman Rushdie through The Golden House. The idea of reimagining the canonical is not limited to reimagining fiction. Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer with his 2016 novel Underground Railroad, also published by Doubleday, which reconceives the underground railroad as an actual train with engines and conductors. Percival Everett’s James once again refreshes the conversation surrounding which stories should continue to be told and how.

Early reviews of James praised it for its sense of humor, almost to the point where the reader is unprepared for the severity of the novel’s contents. As the inside flap reveals, The New York Times Book Review noted how “Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knockout comedy.” James certainly has its funny moments, but since those early reviews, critics have also noted that what was funny when told from Huck’s perspective is much more difficult to laugh at when told from James’s. The antics of the Duke and the Dauphin, for example, are much more sinister than ridiculous with James well-aware that they could either sell or lynch him at any moment. The reality of the horrors of life as a slave is on full display in this novel, as James witnesses two graphic rapes of slave women during his journey, powerless to do anything to protect the women. James also faces a myriad of stereotypical racist incidents in the story, including being purchased by a group of minstrels who perform in blackface (and in turn forcing him to put on whiteface and then blackface on top of it to ‘blend in’ with them), friendship with another former slave passing as a white man and struggling with his racial identity, and the near-constant use of the n-word. Even Huck uses it a few times, but James notes that “the word seemed strange coming out of Huck’s mouth. I think he heard it, too, because we shared an awkward silence” (69). Everett preserves some of Twain’s humor, especially in moments like the feigned revival scene where Huck and James are dumbfounded at the gullibility of the attendees, but instances like Huck’s use of derogatory language remind the reader of the gravity of the racism James experiences.

While Everett follows Twain’s plot for the first half of the novel, he substantially diverts from it after the riverboat explosion. When James finds himself in the water in its aftermath, he hears his name being called from two directions. In one direction is Norman, his white-passing friend. In the other is Huck. James knows Norman can’t swim, and that by leaving him, he is sentencing him to death, but he still chooses to save Huck. This heart-wrenching scene sets up the biggest surprise of the novel: James reveals that he is Huck’s father, which may explain why the abusive man Huck’s deceased mother was married to hates James so much. This admission sets off a wave of confusion for Huck—what is his racial identity, if he has passed for white all his life? Can he run north with James and live as his son? In one of the most painful passages from the novel, Huck tells James, “I’m your family,” to which James replies, “You’re no slave. Be the white boy you can be, Huck. You go back to Hannibal and keep your secret. I’m going north” (256). Huck continues to reason with James, talking about how the impending Civil War could change things for them, but James won’t budge—his mission is to save his wife, Sadie, and daughter, Lizzie, from slavery and run north, and Huck must stay in Hannibal. This upsets Huck greatly, who ends the exchange with “I ain’t your son. I ain’t no n—.”

Despite the strain this scene puts on their relationship, James and Huck continue to make their way back towards Hannibal. Unlike Huck Finn, though, Tom Sawyer does not meet the pair and begin his infuriating escape plan for Jim, complete with all sorts of dangerous and childish antics like eating sawdust and passing Jim a new shirt by baking it in a pie. In the original, he and Huck keep Jim hidden on an island nearby for weeks, despite Tom’s knowledge that Jim was actually freed by Mrs. Watson’s will weeks ago. Instead, in this novel James returns to Hannibal on a mission to free Sadie and Lizzie. This quest leads him to kill an overseer, kidnap Judge Thatcher for a time, and finally set fire to the plantation to which Sadie and Lizzie had been sold. The three quickly escape to Iowa, where a local sheriff meets them, asks if they are runaways, and questions if any of them is named “N— Jim.” James responds, “I am James” (303), fully reclaiming both his identity from his enslavers and also his story from Twain. Where Jim fades into the background in the last chapter of Huck Finn as Huck contemplates how he’s “got to light out for the territories” to escape being “sivilized” (263), in James, it is Huck who is left behind, and the reader is left wondering how he must feel now that he has lost his mother, Mrs. Watson, and two men who claimed to be his father.

James’s ending is yet another way Everett masterfully rewrites Twain’s story to fully empower James. Tom’s antics in Huck Finn, which become truly horrific when counted against the cost of Jim’s freedom, are derived from his favorite adventure stories. However, at the end of James, it is James who becomes the stuff of legends—he becomes a gun-wielding, mercenary-like mythic being who argues with dream-like visitations from John Locke. While Twain wrote Huck Finn in such a way to help readers sympathize with Jim, there is no way to read the ending of that novel as an empowering story for him in the twenty-first century—not when his life is so callously risked by the novel’s heroes, as young as they may be. James, on the other hand, is all about James’s power. Even as Huck Finn has dropped off more and more class syllabi, Everett refreshes this pillar of American literature. As he has commented, he “wrote the book Twain did not and also could not have written.” In doing so, he expands the literary canon in such a way that will surely keep critics, academics, and lay-readers alike talking about both novels for a long time. 

Sarah Selden earned her bachelor's in English and secondary education at Palm Beach Atlantic University and her master's in English and American studies at the University of Oxford. She has taught English in Palm Beach County, in Spain on a Fulbright grant, and currently teaches in Littleton, Colorado.