On James

I wanted to love this book, and I did for its first two parts. I went in knowing nothing about it except that it had won the National Book Award, and I was glad to find it a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, christened here as James. From the start I was pulled right in. Though it begins as a retelling, Everett veers away from Twain in the second part — and that’s to his credit. What starts as a reinterpretation becomes a story in its own right, a massive indictment of American society, very much speaking to the present: “passing,” the limits of white “allyship,” the limits Black Americans impose on themselves to appease a white-supremacist system, and the Black figures who uphold it. Daniel Decatur Emmett claims to oppose slavery and is as vicious a slaveholder as any; it’s unclear for much of the book where Norman’s loyalties lie; Brock keeps the steam engine’s furnace going for crumbs and has likely never even met his “master”; and Luke is all too willing to sell Jim out to his brutal overseer.

Everett is especially strong when he pokes at white people’s superiority complexes. In Twain, Jim is a superstitious fool who knows little of the world; in Everett, Jim plays the fool to soothe white egos. The characters code-switch to keep up the charade, and the use of language tells us a great deal about who is considered “in” and who “out.” James even confronts Locke and Voltaire, as Everett pricks little holes in the ideological claims white America makes about itself. He also subverts the central arc of Huck Finn — Huck’s discovery that Jim is worthy of human dignity, that by the end he can see past race to the man. For what it’s worth, I do think Twain’s novel was meant to be, and in many ways still is, anti-racist; but it upholds as many racist tropes as it tries to knock down, and it hasn’t aged well, so Everett’s book is a necessary corrective. It’s hard to escape the sense that in Twain, Jim is little more than a literary device for Huck’s benefit, the catalyst for Huck’s growth into a self-actualized bourgeois man. In Everett, that’s reversed: now Huck exists to catalyze Jim’s growth.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the plot succeeds, because Everett pushes it too far in the third act. Rather than Jim remaining a father figure to Huck, and Huck a metaphorical son, Huck turns out to be literally Jim’s son — Jim was close to Huck’s mother, the alcoholic Pap was never Huck’s father at all, and that is why Pap hated Jim. Huck struggles to take it in and then seems to accept that he is, by the standards of American society, actually Black, if white-passing, even though no one else knows it. The story veers further still: instead of staying in the sectarian antebellum 1840s, word arrives that the country has fallen into civil war, and we even meet a soldier — which Everett uses to argue that the Union never went to war to free the enslaved (true enough, though the South seceded to preserve slavery), but it comes off shallow, a device dropped in for commentary that goes no deeper. Back in Hannibal, Missouri, Jim tries to save his wife and daughter only to learn they’ve been sold to a “breeding farm,” and James devolves into Django Unchained for the literati.

Is it cathartic? Absolutely. Is it gratuitous? Also yes. Does it work? No — it did, until it didn’t. I’m not sure Everett knew how to end the novel, so it became a revenge narrative; I don’t know that I can fault him for it, and I’m not even against the form, but its handling here is ham-fisted. Everett’s James begins on familiar tracks, takes a detour through beautiful uncharted scenery, and then hurls itself off a burning bridge.