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PERCIVAL EVERETT ON AMERICAN FICTION AND REWRITING HUCKLEBERRY FINN
 
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David Shariatmadari
April 6, 2024
Guardian
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_ ‘I’d love a scathing review’ says novelist Percival Everett.
His work triumphed at the Oscars, but he isn’t interested in
acclaim. He talks to the Guardian about race, taking on Mark Twain and
why there’s nothing worse than preaching to the choir. _

Percival Everett talks to Arizona State University (2022),

 

It’s 10am on the morning of the Oscars, and Percival Everett
[[link removed]] is nowhere to be
seen. We’re supposed to be meeting at his neighbourhood coffee shop
in leafy South Pasadena, a suburb of Los Angeles, before he makes his
way across the city for the ceremony, which begins its long march
towards best picture just after lunch.

American Fiction, the film of his novel Erasure, is nominated for best
adapted screenplay, up against Barbie
[[link removed]], but tipped to win. The hour
went forward last night, but surely he knows that? At 10.25am I
WhatsApp him, but the message remains unread. Eventually I call.
“Yes, this is Percival Everett. We’re meeting in half an hour?”
The clocks, Percival, the clocks. “Ah,” he chuckles, “my
fault.” He’s there in a couple of minutes, in khaki pants, grey
shirt and a baseball cap, looking as if he has nothing much on today
– a man not only in his own world, but his own time. When I ask why
his phone didn’t update like they all do now, he says he never looks
at it, and raises his wrist to flaunt a distinctively analogue watch.
Hasn’t he got quite an important date later? “Oh,” he shrugs,
“my wife would’ve made sure I got there on time.” That’s the
novelist Danzy Senna, with whom he has two sons, aged 17 and 15.

Despite having lived in LA for more than three decades, Everett, 67,
who teaches literature at the University of Southern California,
doesn’t see being invited to the Oscars as somehow getting the keys
to the city. It’s more like “visiting someone’s garden shed”,
he says, a little bizarrely. “I’ll feel ‘Oh that’s a nice
lawnmower’ and never go back.” I suggest that’s quite a prosaic
image for what lots of people consider to be the most glamorous event
in the universe. “I guess that betrays my feelings about glamour.”

Not that he’s ostentatiously professorial, his otherwordliness just
a different way of showing off. He genuinely doesn’t seem to care:
about the red carpet, accolades, critics. “I don’t go online,”
he tells me. No social media? No, and no reviews. Is he not curious to
see how others interpret his work? “Oh I do read scholarship – I
think I learn stuff from that – but reviews I just never have any
interest in.” Is it a case of protecting himself from comments that
might sow doubt, or sting? “In fact, I might be interested in a
really scathing review.” Why? “It might be fun? That’s gonna be
kind of crazy, to be upset about a bad review. Like, what else can you
expect in the world? Not everybody is gonna like my shirt.”

Acclaim isn’t a big motivator, then – instead he writes when he
gets fascinated by something, which has happened often enough to
produce 24 dazzlingly different novels, stories of baseball players,
ranchers, mathematicians, cops and philosophising babies. And, despite
his output, he finds time for plenty of other interests. Painting is
the big one, and we stroll the short distance from the cafe to his
studio, a windowless room in a basement complex bedecked with
frenetic, abstract canvases, half-squeezed tubes of paint and
impasto-slathered palettes. He’s also a skilled woodworker (he
recently became obsessed with buying and repairing old mandolins), a
jazz musician, and a horse and mule trainer. (Everett once told
Bookforum
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when he was being hired by USC a member of the faculty saw his name
and exclaimed: “The last thing we need is another 50-year-old
Brit,” only to be told by the receptionist that the newest professor
was in fact a “black cowboy”).

Horses are no longer a part of his life – he combined working on
ranches with teaching much earlier in his career – but they taught
him some transferable skills. “I don’t get stressed out,” he
tells me. “I think that’s from being on horses. You can’t calm
down a 1,200-pound animal by getting excited.” That’s handy,
because others in his position might be getting a little wound up by
their work being judged in the most public way possible in just a few
hours time. It’s a big day, no? “I mean, sort of. It’s not my
film,” he laughs. “So, I’m excited for the director.”

He means Cord Jefferson
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the former journalist who also adapted the novel, and who described
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Everett the movie as “the most frightening screening I did”. The
plot differences are relatively minor, though Erasure is more complex,
less certain in its conclusions. Both works tell the story of
Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a writer of abstruse fiction who fumes
when he finds his retelling of Aeschylus’s The Persians filed under
“African American studies” in a bookstore (“The only thing
ostensibly African American [about it] was my jacket photograph”).
But his commercial fortunes are transformed when he decides to submit
a “ghetto” novel, ramping up the stereotypes to an obscene degree
that white liberal editors nevertheless find irresistible.

_Huck Finn is the first time a novel tried to deal with the
centre of the American psyche – race_

Everett has spoken in the past with frustration about Erasure looming
so large in his body of work. Does he still feel that way? “The only
thing that ever pissed me off is that everyone agreed with it. No one
took issue, or said: ‘It’s not like that.’” Why was that
annoying? “I like the blowback. It’s interesting. There’s
nothing worse than preaching to the choir, right?” Erasure came out
in 2001, but people have taken American Fiction
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publishing. Are the double standards he satirised still as pervasive?
“There is a much greater range of work [now], and that was what I
was addressing. So in some ways, there’s been a lot of change. The
problem I had wasn’t with particular works, just with the fact that
those were the only ones available.”

On the other hand, the thinking that led to that narrow range still
very much exists. “For example, I have a friend, a director, who had
some success with a film. And the next call he got was someone wanting
him to direct a biopic of George Floyd. Why? Because he’s black.”
That could be very irritating, of course. But it could also be a
dream project. “Well,” Everett considers the point. “It’s like
you’re at the office and they say: ‘We need a black person.’
Why? ‘Well, we need diversity in this room, so would you come in
here?’ That’s not why you want to be invited.”

In any case, he isn’t feeling proprietorial about American Fiction:
“I view it as a different work,” he tells me, though I get the
impression he’s making a statement of artistic fact, rather than
attempting to distance himself from the production.
“I _appreciate_ it as a different work. In spirit it’s much like
the novel, but being a film, it’s not as dark.” It could have been
worse: he entirely disowned the TV movie of his second book, Walk Me
to the Distance. “I never saw it. I read the script, and I didn’t
like it. The changes that they made were so grotesque, there was no
way to embrace that at all.”

Regardless, more Everett will be coming soon to a screen near you. In
2022 he published The Trees
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a genre-busting comedy about lynching, if you can imagine such a thing
– part police procedural, part zombie-horror, part solemn testament
to the victims of racial murder. It has been optioned for a possible
“limited series” and “people are working on it” but he can’t
say any more. While not surprising (the novel was shortlisted for the
Booker), it will be interesting to see how a big entertainment company
deals with the taboo imagery and extensive gore – “Yeah, well
that’s their problem!” he laughs.

His new novel, James, is at least as likely to pique the interest of
producers – partly because it adapts a cornerstone of American
culture, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. While I’m teasing him
about his lack of interest in Hollywood glitz, I ask if there are any
writers he would be starstruck by. “[All] dead,” he replies –
but offers up Samuel Butler, Chester Himes and, of course, Mark Twain.
What would they talk about in any ethereal meeting? “You know,
I’ve thought about that,” he says. “I don’t know if we would
say much. We’d probably just talk about the landscape or something.
I’d just kind of like to hear what he sees.”

In the meantime, Everett has taken the initiative with Twain’s most
famous text, which tells the story of 13-year-old Huck as he navigates
the Mississippi River accompanied by an enslaved man, Jim. “It’s
kind of a cliche to say how important it is to American letters.
It’s the first time that a novel tried to deal with the very centre
of the American psyche – and that is race.” There were protest
novels about slavery before then, he says, but they were narrower,
focused on the institution itself. “Huck Finn, picaresque adventures
aside, is really about a young American, representing America, trying
to navigate this landscape, and understand how someone – his friend,
actually the only father figure in the book – is also property.”

“He’s got this moral conundrum: ‘He belongs to someone and I’m
doing something illegal by helping him run, but he’s my friend and a
person, and he shouldn’t be a slave.’ There’s nothing more
American.” Whereas Twain’s focus is tightly on Huck’s
moral universe, Everett tells the other half of the story, making Jim
the narrator, restoring his full name, James, and turning him into an
erudite intellectual. Characteristically, one of the major plot
devices is linguistic. The hokey dialect that, in Twain, renders Jim
rustic and unthreatening, is revealed as a feint – a survival
mechanism that the slaves use to disguise their real capacities in
front of white people. One evening, James sits down in his cabin to
teach some of the enslaved children a language lesson. “White folks
expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t
disappoint them,” he explains, the children chanting: “The better
they feel, the safer we are.” He asks a little girl to translate,
and is reassured when she produces a sentence in amped-up vernacular:
“Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.”

Everett’s novels make abundant use of language games, conceits and
disquisitions. Erasure contains a passage from Monk’s inpenetrable
post-structuralist novel, and snippets of conversations between
Wittgenstein and Derrida. This could be off-putting were it not for
the fact that they’re often spliced with much more conventional,
pacey writing, and many darkly hilarious moments – 2022’s Dr No
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for example, mixes head-scratching maths with a lot of wild,
Bond-inspired action. James, likewise, combines dreamed visitations
from Voltaire and Locke with page-turning jeopardy. Is that kind of
juxtaposition a tactic on Everett’s part, a way of licensing the
intellectual gymnastics? “I don’t know if I think about it a lot.
I think that any kind of intellectual understanding of the world is
generated by a physical location in the world.” And by stuff
happening? “Yes, by stuff happening.

[Percival Everett. James]

It’s why I like teaching – because I get to go out into the world
and be reminded that there are other people thinking different
thoughts. My inclination is to stay at home and never leave. What
would I write if I did that?”

Leave he does, though, and one of his more important outposts is an
office in the humanities building of the University of Southern
California. Unusually for LA, it’s an easy trip by metro from South
Pasadena, which is why a lot of professors choose to live there. The
day after the Academy Awards, the campus is glorious, its terracotta
tiles and pink-brick modernist halls warming in the sun. Everett is
running late, but only by a few minutes. He catches me in the lobby
and we walk upstairs to a room with a view of the skyscrapers of
downtown and, in the distance, the San Gabriel Mountains. American
Fiction won its Oscar, and I ask if he got into the spirit of things.
“Oh, that was fine. We had fun going, but we don’t need to go to
that again.” No parties, then? “We went to the so-called Governors
ball, which is in the ballroom right after the event. We could take it
for about 10 minutes and we found a way out.”

If Everett sounds ungrateful, or grumpy, he’s not – though he’s
in a little pain because of a bad back. No, he’s quick to smile,
generous with his time, and simply “not the most extroverted person
in the world”. He suspects that, like several of his characters,
he’s “on the spectrum”. Today, we’re surrounded by another
typically Everettian assortment – a framed photograph of a beloved
mule, lots of books and some awards, including one from the Georgia
Writers Hall of Fame. “Oxymoronic” he jokes, before explaining
that, though he grew up in South Carolina, he was born in the
neighbouring state. He got out of the south quickly, moving west after
his undergraduate degree. “I don’t want to return and live in the
south,” he told one interviewer. “I want to see the sun set on the
ocean.” But when I suggest he’s no fan of that part of the world,
he demurs. “That’s a little unfair. The American inclination is to
find a region and blame it so it doesn’t have to feel bad as a
whole. There are lots of good people there, and lots of people I’d
rather not spend time with. But that’s true of everywhere.”

It’d be great if somehow literary fiction could affect popular
culture

My attention is drawn to what looks like an elaborate sewing box.
“Oh, it’s a fly tying kit.” Is fishing another one of his
things? “Yes.” So you make the flies yourself? “Usually while
I’m talking to students.” I find it interesting that he likes to
distract part of his brain from the task at hand, and it turns out to
be something of a theme. James, he says, was written “on the coffee
table with Mission: Impossible going the entire time”. What? “Some
network would just play the same episodes over and over. It’s just
white noise for me.” We’re talking the original 1960s series, by
the way, not the movie. “I don’t remember them from being a
kid,” he says, and then, for perhaps the first time, becomes really
animated: “but the bongo part of the [theme] is fantastic. And
that’s really what got me watching. It’s an OK song but the bongo
part of it, the percussive part, is incredible – the counting of it.
It’s just completely mesmerising.” I’m amazed he can
concentrate, but he says: “I don’t really watch. I just know
what’s there. And I look up, and my game would be how quickly could
I identify the episode. Just from a shot of a hand or anything.” In
fact, it makes the writing easier: “It’s a distraction that allows
my mind to run instead of trying to … to figure out the story.”

It remains to be seen whether critics will pick up on any subliminally
incorporated plotlines from Mission: Impossible in the new book. The
reviews for James, published in the US a few weeks ago, are beginning
to trickle in. I mention that the Washington Post seemed to like it
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“They also told me there was a New York Times review today,”
Everett says, without affect. It’s only afterwards that I take a
look: it’s a spectacular rave
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We return, briefly, to that Oscar. “Awards are what they are. They
don’t make anything better” – unlike bongos, clearly. Being
unimpressed by the event is one thing, but this is going to have a
concrete effect on his life. The tour he’s about to embark on –
“against my better judgment, 12 cities in 13 days” – will
doubtless be sold out. There will be more interest in his work, more
sales, more scrutiny. And Erasure will potentially define him far more
than it did before. Does he worry, given the sheer variety of his
writing, about the gravitational pull of that “African American
studies” bookshelf – of, ironically, being reduced to the
stereotype of “race writer”? “When people come to the work, they
get what the work offers. And however you get them there, it’s OK. I
don’t much worry about that. If people read _anything_, I’m
happy. It doesn’t even have to be my work. Because if they just
become readers, that’s a much better culture.”

“What is it Walt Whitman says in By Blue Ontario’s Shore?” he
continues. “I’m paraphrasing, but since it’s Whitman, it
doesn’t matter: if you want a better society, produce better
people.” (The phrase in the poem is “Produce great Persons, the
rest follows.”)

So how do you produce better people? “By helping make them smarter.
Education, so they’re interested in ideas. It’d be great if
somehow literary fiction could affect popular culture.” But isn’t
that precisely what Erasure has done, via American Fiction? “A
little bit,” he concedes. “We’ll see”. And with a bemused and
friendly laugh, he’s ready to turn his attention to the next thing.

_David Shariatmadari is the Guardian's non fiction books editor and
author of Don't Believe A Word: The Surprising Truth About Language_

_James by Percival Everett is published by Mantle. To support the
Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com
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Delivery charges may apply._

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