James by Percival Everett
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I am very cautious with book reimaginings since, honestly, most of the time they are quite unneeded — but here the idea of it indeed seemed necessary. I understand why Jim of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn needed his own story not filtered through the perspective of a young white kid raised in the world of racism – even if that boy slowly learns to see Jim as a human being and not just property.
Jim of Mark Twain’s story was simple and ignorant and superstitious, in the end becoming something between a cruel plaything for Tom Sawyer and life lesson material for Huck Finn — and yet there were also glimpses of a genuinely kind man, a husband and a father, and a man existing outside the limited worldview of a barely adolescent boy. With James Everett sets out to give this man a voice and selfhood he deserves, and he takes a no-holds-barred approach to it. Everett’s James is an erudite and educated man who has read Voltaire and has dream arguments with John Locke. He is a man who teaches small children to effortlessly code-switch to the extreme as a life-saving technique.
“I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written.”
And yet it kept me at a distance. I can only conclude that Everett’s style just doesn’t work for me.
Retellings to me are tricky beasts. I hope for them to do something new and fresh, maybe with a peripheral character, to approach everything from a new angle. But here I got a whiplash. For almost half of the story we were diligently retreading the familiar Twain territory, but still with no insights into things that even in the original were a bit odd and baffling — not to mention that you needed to already know Huck/Jim story for the background as this book can’t quite stand on its own. And then suddenly it starkly diverges from Twain (although thanks to Everett for throwing out the atrocious part on the Phelps farm), but that divergence doesn’t help much, with plot developments that left me even more baffled than King/Duke farce (Norman and his fate? Huck’s origins? Huh? What’s the point?)
Maybe it’s the overload of satire that kept me at the arm’s length (or at least I sincerely hope I read that right as a satire). We went from one extreme to another – from Twain’s Jim being simple and childlike to Everett’s James being a sarcastic Voltaire-conversing erudite. I guess I was hoping for Jim/James to be explored more as a person not extreme but a regular guy – a father, a husband, a friend – with no exaggerations needed to show his actual humanity and not a caricature or a statement and a channel for angry satire.
“ How strange a world, how strange an existence, that one’s equal must argue for one’s equality, that one’s equal must hold a station that allows airing of that argument, that one cannot make that argument for oneself, that premises of said argument must be vetted by those equals who do not agree.”
And no, I wasn’t a fan of how Everett chose to portray the bond between James and Huck. I get that he wanted James’ growing love for the boy to be different than the implied servile devotion one may see in Twain’s book — but to me it cheapens James’s character and motivations. I get the “why”, I am just disappointed with “what” and “how”. It was unnnecessary.
It is a devastatingly dark read – don’t be fooled by “ferociously funny” misleading nonsense in the book blurb. Twain had levity; Everett quickly lets go of that after a few pages and makes the tone grim, appropriate to the book on horrors of slavery from the viewpoint of a person who’s seen by the society as an expendable inhumane thing. I appreciated the somber feel as atrocities do not need sugarcoating, but the rest just did not work for me – even if the ending went all unexpected Hollywood blockbuster in a bit of a tonal change And since it’s the second Everett in a row where I just don’t feel it, maybe his books are just not for me (but based on all the other reviews, I’m in minority here, so take it with a grain of salt).
2.5 stars.
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Buddy read with Nastya.
books are life 