“An Interview with Percival Everett”
By James Yeh, originally published in the Believer (2022)
Illustration by Samar Haddad
Everett’s books are similarly slippery and multifarious. They are, by and large, boundless, imaginative, exuberant works full of linguistic glee, formal ingenuity, and metaphysical comedy. But, given a closer look, the individual books elude whatever expectations one might impose on them. Take Erasure (2001), his most often recommended novel, an incendiary send-up of the publishing industry, with an entire race-exploitation novella inside. Or the caper-ish Glyph (1999), which has as its narrator an ornery baby with an IQ of 475, whose talents in philosophy, literature, and math make him a target of psychologist kidnappers who want to dissect him. And then there’s the book-in-verse The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843, Annotated from the Library of John C. Calhoun (2019), a “text on the training of our black animals” that is as diabolical as its title suggests. Even Telephone (2020), which seems more straightforwardly a Western novel about the desert, immigration, and grief, turns out to be three novels, with different endings and other elements, much to the chagrin of early reviewers who weren’t in on the conceit. (The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.)
A major theme of Everett’s is place: finding one’s own place, which might be another way of saying getting free, especially when some of those residing in said place don’t quite know what to make of you and, somewhat inevitably, take it upon themselves to remind you, not infrequently with force. The Trees (2021), his latest novel, is set in Money, Mississippi, where there’s been a spate of unsolved murders that have two things in common: their gruesome violence and the presence of a small dead man resembling Emmett Till. Thrown into the mix is a host of characters whose very existence seems to confound the dominant culture. One character, a young academic from the University of Chicago, holds a trio of PhDs in biology, psychobiology, and Eastern philosophy, yet he’s placed in the Department of Ethnic Studies “because they didn’t know where to put him.” He’s there not because of what he does but because of who he’s seen to be.
Which is not to say Everett is writing (or not writing) only about place any more than—as a critic at New York magazine remarked about Erasure—he is “always, in a sense, writing about race, and always not.” (“Have you to this point assumed that I am white?” Glyph’s baby genius asks the reader, a third of the way in. “It is not important unless you want it to be and I will not say more about it.”) I suspect that Everett’s greater project might be about resisting attempts to be pinned down or, even more, refusing this framework to begin with. Not just because it’s wrong, but also because it’s dumb. As well as boring.
Read more in the Dec/Jan 2022 issue of The Believer.