Book Review – James
Author: Percival Everett
Publisher: Doubleday
Year: 2024
This book destroyed me.
James is a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim. The enslaved man. The character Twain made into a noble sidekick for Huck’s adventure. Percival Everett takes that character and gives him a voice and an interior life and a rage that Twain couldn’t or wouldn’t show us.
The premise is simple. Same story. Different point of view. But what Everett does with that point of view is extraordinary. James — he refuses to be called Jim, that’s the white folks’ name for him — is intelligent and literate and philosophical. He reads Locke and Voltaire in secret. He thinks deeply about freedom and personhood and the violent absurdity of a system that considers him property. And he plays dumb for white people because that’s how you survive.
There’s this device Everett uses. When James talks to white people he speaks in dialect. The minstrel voice they expect. But when he talks to other Black people the prose shifts. It becomes eloquent. Precise. The real James emerges. And the whiplash between those two modes — the mask and the face beneath it — is devastating. Every time he has to code-switch you feel the weight of it. The exhaustion. The fury barely contained.
The plot follows Twain’s novel loosely but diverges in important ways. There are scenes here that Twain couldn’t have written. Scenes of violence and degradation that Huckleberry Finn hints at but never shows. Everett shows them. Not gratuitously. Not for shock. But because the horror was the point. The horror was the daily reality.
And yet. The book is also funny. Darkly funny. Everett has this dry wit that surfaces in unexpected moments. James observing the stupidity of white supremacy with philosophical bemusement. The absurdity of it all. The cognitive dissonance required to believe what slave owners believed. It’s comedy born from horror which is maybe the only comedy that matters.
I don’t want to oversell the “important book” angle because that makes it sound like homework. It’s not homework. It’s a gripping narrative with a protagonist you care about doing things that matter. It works as a story first. The politics emerge from the story rather than being imposed on it.
Everett has been writing for decades. This feels like his masterpiece. The thing he was building toward all along. A book that takes a canonical American novel and reveals the humanity that was always there, hidden beneath the surface, waiting for someone to tell the truth.
I finished it in two nights. I couldn’t sleep after.
Read this book.
My rating: ★★★★★