Because this is a Percival Everett novel, we are not surprised that he tears down and rebuilds a cultural landmark ... Because this is a Percival Everett novel, too, it luxuriates in language. Everett, like Twain, is a master of American argot; he is the code switcher’s code switcher. In James, he puts his skills to incandescent use ... What sets James above Everett’s previous novels, as casually and caustically funny as many are, is that here the humanity is turned up — way up. This is Everett’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful. Beneath the wordplay, and below the packed dirt floor of Everett’s moral sensibility, James is an intensely imagined human being ... My ideal of hell would be to live with a library that contained only reimaginings of famous novels. It’s a wet-brained and dutiful genre, by and large...James is the rarest of exceptions. It should come bundled with Twain’s novel. It is a tangled and subversive homage, a labor of rough love ... Everett shoots what is certain to be this book’s legion of readers straight through the heart.
The result is strangely new and familiar – an adrenaline-spiking adventure with absurdity and tragedy blended together ... Re-imaginings of classic literature are challenging, often unnecessary endeavors. This one is different, a startling homage and a new classic in its own right. Readers may be surprised by how much of the original scaffolding remains and how well the turnabout works, swapping a young man's moral awakening for something even more fraught ... Everett provides what Twain could not: Jim's deep interior life. The entire story is narrated in his voice. Getting inside James's head is a remarkable experience. Though they're sometimes parted, James (as he prefers to be called in Everett's novel) and Huck somehow always find each other again, and that creates a sense of surreality ... Again and again. In true Everett fashion, the intertwined artifice of race and language is stretched to self-reflexive absurdity ... Like James and Norman's encounter, the novel is exquisitely multilayered. A brilliant, sometimes shocking mashup of various literary forms, James has the arc of an odyssey, with the quest for home, and an abundance of absurdly comical humor.
...the horror gathers gently in James. First, Everett moves to reorient these characters in his own moral landscape ... leans in hard on its thriller elements and gathers speed and terror like a swelling storm. Its conclusion is equally shocking and exhilarating ... What’s most striking, ultimately, is the way James both honors and interrogates Huck Finn, along with the nation that reveres it.
Playful and resonant ... Everett has plenty of derisive fun here, dissecting and subverting damaging stereotypes ... For a writer who often plays by few rules, Everett has drawn on what he knows best here - that freedom can be won, one word at a time. Add levity and serious intent and you have a novel that's a class act.
To call James a retelling would be an injustice ... What emerges is no longer a children’s book, but a blood-soaked historical novel stripped of all ornament. James conjures a vision of the antebellum South as a scene of pervasive terror ... The novel never loses its sense of humor, but the laughs become manic ... Imaginative.
Elaborations are frequent in Mr. Everett’s books but feel comparatively stunted here, lacking the author’s usual Twain-like spontaneity. Mr. Everett may even have reined in his outrageous imagination to serve his material ... A book like this can only be written in a spirit of engaged devotion. More than a correction, it’s a rescue mission. And maybe this time it will work.
[A] complex work of adaptation ... Every narrative choice Everett makes is always already a commentary upon Twain’s novel ... What an achievement James is ... Ingenious.
Allows us to see all the ways Twain may have overlooked Jim’s humanity and, more surprisingly perhaps, all the ways Twain may have been signaling toward it ... What funny truths James speaks in this extraordinary novel.
Knowing Everett’s impish propensities, it’s impossible to read James—among other things, a litany of atrocities visited upon Black characters, set in the past—and not wonder if he’s still needling gullible white readers about what we expect from Black novelists. If he’s mocking us, well, he’s earned that right. Maybe he’ll even win a Pulitzer.
The kind of work we have come to expect from Everett. It is at once acerbically humorous and existential ... In a way that is sweetly quixotic, Everett intercalates the main plot of Jim’s adventure with the stories of other characters such as the Duke, the King and Norman, yet the novel does not feel crowded.
James seems — and I wish I were wrong about this—exploitive, not exactly Blaxploitation but a work cleverly designed and rapidly fabricated to elicit exactly the kind of raves it received ... A slog.
Everett is playfully unfaithful and disloyal to Twain’s original text in a way that places James far from the contemporary trend of retelling classic works from the perspective of an alternative protagonist ... Everett mixes the sweet with the bitter and horror with hilarity.
The Jim-Huck relationship, so moving and tender, is given a gloss that entirely changes its nature, not for the better in my view. But in a final flourish, James is the one who frees Huck.
The final chapters feel rushed, with a great deal of action happening over the course of relatively few pages, but they do achieve their own kinetic energy. One of the most anguishing aspects of the novel is the power of slavery not only utterly to disempower the enslaved, but in some instances to convince them that their situation is not entirely miserable.
Considering its endorsements and detractors alike, I could easily understand why Everett—a writer never afraid to challenge current literary orthodoxies and pretensions—would find a worthy subject in Twain’s portrayal of the enslaved Jim. What I did not expect was the extent to which this book can be read and enjoyed and written about without the slightest nod to its predecessor ... It is a novel where the reader can sink in so deeply, they might forget it’s a reimagining.
If I have one quibble, it’s that Everett often sacrifices poetry for pace. Several scenes are sketchy, like provisional marks on a page. But pace has a quality of its own: we get a novel that feels genuinely urgent and which glows with intelligence and imagination.
Smart and funny and brutal ... James challenges Twain’s right to his own creation. It reminds us that he told "some stretchers," and it gives its characters a life that seems to lift off the page.
Everett balances a moral clarity about the atrocities of slavery with a dry, Twainian humor ... Stands out for staying true to Twain’s voice, tale-spinning talent and humor, while also accurately depicting what Twain failed to acknowledge: the reality of life for enslaved people. In revealing Jim’s full humanity, deep thinking and love through his hero’s journey, Everett has written a visionary and necessary reimagining.
Though the novel clocks in at over 300 pages, it can be read in a few short hours ... The secret language of James and the other slaves is a clever way of accounting for the racist diction of Huckleberry Finn. It’s also a major constraint for James’s dialogue and structure. As a gambit meant to comfort racist white sensibilities by making slaves seem as stupid, deferential, and, of course, Black as possible, it’s pretty funny for a while, and then it becomes clear that the book has structured itself around this conceit and doesn’t have very many other ideas.
The pain in Everett’s novel is counterpointed by the pleasure of reading his prose, which he has spent the last four decades honing to a sharpness, meaning he never wastes a word. There is also deadpan wit and plenty of comical moments ... Everett redresses these failings, giving voice and individuality to James, and exposing the stupidity of racism in a horrific story which is beautifully told. He is an essential writer and James may be his greatest novel yet.
That James occasionally slips up and confuses white people with his proper diction is only one of many brilliant details, as is the introduction of characters such as Daniel Decatur Emmett, who founded the Virginia Minstrels and hires James, 'a slave of light-brown complexion,' to don blackface and replace their lost tenor. Clever plot developments and a satisfyingly violent conclusion make James yet another late-career triumph from one of America's most original authors.
James, determined to return and rescue his wife and daughter, takes the story in a completely different direction than the original, exemplifying the relentless courage and moral clarity of an honorable man with nothing to lose. An absolutely essential read.
Jim’s wrenching odyssey concludes with remarkable revelations, violent showdowns, and insightful meditations on literature and philosophy. Everett has outdone himself.
