From the author of Erasure and The Trees, a reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
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.
