“Percival Everett Can’t Be Pinned Down”
By James Yeh, originally published in New York (2024)
Illustration by Riccardo Vecchio
In February 2023, the news broke that Percival Everett would be publishing his 24th novel, James, a retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from enslaved Jim’s perspective, for an advance of more than $500,000. Some Everett devotees (myself included) wondered if, after years of inventive, philosophical, and absurdist work displaying a dizzying range — mute baby geniuses, nutty heist plots, post-westerns, and metacommentaries on race and publishing — he was finally selling out. After all, though Everett has increased in stature recently — he’s been a Pulitzer and Booker finalist for 2020’s Telephone and 2021’s The Trees, respectively, and his breakout, 2001’s Erasure, an incendiary publishing-world satire, was recently adapted into the comparatively defanged Oscar-winning film American Fiction — his books have not sold in great numbers. His subject matter can be eclectic. The cast of characters over his 35 books and counting includes an orphan named Not Sidney Poitier, a sociopathic rhino hunter who wants to turn the Grand Canyon into an amusement park, and, in multiple works, testy English professors named Percival Everett.
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