James by Percival Everett

Zero to Well Read is sponsored by ThriftBooks.com. Today's episode, we discussed James by Percival Everett, which is out now today, the release date, April 21st, 2026 in paperback. And you can get new books on ThriftBooks.com and at a competitive price. The sticker price for a paperback is 20 bucks for James with ThriftBooks.com. Looking at it right now, you get $3.52 off that plus. If you're ordering that in the US, you're going to get free shipping and you're going to get credit towards a free book credit as part of ThriftBooks.com Reading Rewards Program. Go check out ThriftBooks.com for James and everything else you might want to need to stock yourselves. Thanks to them for sponsoring the show. All right, James, a modern classic. So excited, let's go. Welcome to Zero to Well Read, a podcast about everything you need to know about the books you wish you'd read. I'm Jeff O'Neill. And I'm Rebecca Shinsky. Today, we are discussing a modern masterpiece. We're really excited about this. It is Percival Everett's James, which is finally coming out in paperback this week. This is maybe was the easiest call when we heard the book was coming out. We knew Everett, we heard the subject matter. Even the book deal, which maybe we'll get into a little bit here. There's some publishing imprint stuff that's interesting note in Percival Everett's career and this book in particular. But this was the book of 2024. I think it's clearly one of the books of the decade, maybe the century, we'll get into all that stuff here. And also gives us a chance early in the life of the show to talk about Percival Everett himself and his body of work. And I think for our office hours today, it would be interesting to talk about him in the context of the other great living American writers. I have this idea for like, let's do Nobel prize pie. Like we have a pie of probability of American Nobel winners. How big of a slice does Percival Everett versus other kinds of people? We could do some other things too. But this is the kind of person we're talking about. And James of course is engaging directly in another peak on the mountain range of American literary classics and doing it in a respectful way, but also a troubling, playful, investive, gory, pushy kind of way. Calibrated within an inch of its life for us to like it, Rebecca, I think is a fair way to put this. Yeah, this is like factory made to be something that Jeff and Rebecca are really into. But we were far from alone. As you said, this was the big book of 2024. It's been two years since it came out in hardcover. And two years between a hardcover and a paperback release is a really rare gap these days. Typically in publishing, it's about a year. Sometimes it's shorter than that. And sometimes it's much longer. The Da Vinci code is the longest one I know of. It was in hardcover for six years. But two years is a really, really wide window. And it indicates that there was runway for this. People were willing to like go out to their bookstores or go to their favorite online bookstores and plop down hardcover money for this book for two years. And that's really remarkable, but not nearly the most remarkable thing about it. Yeah, we'll get into all of that and more. So you can check out the show notes to sign up for our free newsletter. And or if you want to become a member and get early ad-freed episodes and bonus content, you can go to patreon.com slash zero to well read. This is a reminder to rate and review the show wherever you're listening. You can always email us at zero to well read at bookrat.com. We do mail bags. I respond to people directly. Lot of nice comments there. Got to review the other day on Apple Podcasts saying this podcast is single-handedly up great, up my reading life or upgraded or whatever. Love to see that. So if you have a moment to review, that's wonderful. But even just five seconds to hit the five stars, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen is really, really great there. Rebecca, the synopsis, I guess synopsis first and then we'll talk about the moment this came out. I think makes the most sense. I think we've got to do some synopsis stuff and we'll do the non-spoiler section and then a spoiler section. So if you really don't want to be spoiled about James, you'll have a chance to like bump forward a few minutes or really bookmark this, go read the book and come back. Because the book is what it says on the tin. It's a reimagining of the adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, who was the escaped slave that accompanies Huck down the river. But James in this book gets word that his master is preparing to sell him to someone. That's gonna separate him from his wife and daughter, which is unthinkable, untenable for him. So he goes on the run. It's an escape story. Shortly after his departure, he bumps into Huck who has faked his own death to escape his abusive father. And his father has just returned to town. So Huck's in danger, Jim is in danger, they're both on the lam. And now their fates are linked because James knows, even if it hasn't occurred to Huck, that he's gonna be suspected of killing Huck. And the two of them start traveling down the Mississippi River together. They have a series of encounters that largely follow the plot of Mark Twain's novel, but these in Everett's version, they center James's interiority, his intelligence, his agency, and Percival Everett inverts Twain's adventure novel and extends it into something that's far more absurd, really philosophical. In addition to all that, it's also a lot more than what it says on the tin, and we can't really go much further without getting into spoiler territory. So if you're here to find out, just do you need to read Huck Finn before you pick up James? The answer to that is no, I think we agree on that. Well, I think just by dint of where this is happening in the feed, right? Huck Finn was not the one we did last week or three months ago, right? We could have, and that's no ding on Huck Finn, but as we're trying to get contemporary pieces into the mix, this is the most contemporary book that we've done at this point. We will do Huck Finn at some point in the formless of time, but it is interesting, and I think telling that you can read this book with no knowledge of Huck Finn at all, but I think with all things, books and reading, and maybe the premise of the show is the more you know, the more interesting stuff you will get out of it, and you need to bring all of your knives and forks and calipers and golf clubs and scotch tape when you are in counting personal leverage, which we'll get into here as well. So the more you know, the more you are gonna get out of it, you gotta be careful with personal leverage. Because not in a bad way, but for me, the very, very, very best way. So the more you know, the better. So you can see where the divergences are. You can see where the overlap is, because there's some of both. You can see where there's wholesale invention. I will get to this, but there's this minstrel troop that is a wholesale invention based on a real person and a real dynamic. And in a lot of ways, I think is the sort of the fulcrum point of the book, where there's a collision of performance and vision and identity, and all the things I think Everett is most interested in colliding into this soup that's so hard to figure out the more you are, the more you have the better. But it's also pleasurable. So you don't have to do anything. I mean, this is a frustrating thing to hear. People want a binary, right? Either you should or you don't need to. And it's not that, right? It's somewhere, it's something else. You don't have to have read Huck Finn. I didn't reread Huck Finn. I don't think you did either before our first time around with James. I didn't do it this time either. But it will, as you're saying, familiarity will enrich the reading experience. And Everett is just working on a ton of levels. So even if you get there and you only can pick up on like 75% of what he's doing, you're still gonna have a great time. And for being a book that does so much, it's not confusing. It's not challenging in terms of the quality of the writing. Certainly the subject matter is challenging. But you'll generally know where you are and what's happening. Whatever it is doing can be an open question at times. Which answers the other question that people might have opened this episode to have answered. And that is, does it live up to the hype? And our answer, I mean, we're doing an episode on it. Our answer is yes. So get out now if you don't wanna be spoiled and then you can come back after you've read the book. All right, now we're in spoiler territory. Sound the alarm. Waw, waw, waw. Yeah, there's a spoiler alarm here. So there's two things, right, Rebecca? Do you wanna take one and I'll take the other? I don't know, right? How do you wanna go? Watch the first one, I'll do the best. The first big departure, the central conceit that Everett uses here is that enslaved people deliberately speak in a degraded dialect to perform ignorance that white people expect of them. So when we first see James, he is talking in like a early 19th century African-American vernacular, what you would see in, like what you would have seen in Mark Twain's book, the way that Jim spoke in the book. Yes, Jim's dialogue in Huck Finn is, I think, very much what he's going for here. He's speaking to white people and then we see him retreat to a room with other black people, with other slaves. And that's the language that he uses in the book rather than the contemporary enslaved person. So we're gonna use Everett's language throughout this episode. But he turns to other slaves and he starts speaking in like very formal, highly educated English. And we find out this happens in like the first three pages, but it's the central conceit of the book that this performance is a large part of slaves' lives and experience and that they are performing ignorance in order to achieve a lot of things, but primarily to secure their safety with the white people who expect them to sound uneducated. But they're really quite sophisticated. And James is a voracious reader. He has imaginary arguments with John Locke and Voltaire, among others in the book. And he's been secretly educating other slaves as well. So that's the first big difference, the first big departure from Twain's novel. And it does happen really early in Everett's book. And we'll talk about the ramifications, analogies, metaphors, like all the things that go into how this is portrayed in the book and what it means and what it doesn't mean. The other one is more of a plot one. And this one is that we find out over a course of time that it's told to Huck directly by James later that he is indeed Huck's father. He had a relationship of some kind with his mother, his mother has passed away. This is in the, I guess the canon, the Twain canon of Huck Finn. And that his relationship to Huck is paternal, but it's also not paternal. Like it's complicated. I think that's, we're gonna say that's a lot at times is it's complicated. Then Huck has to reckon with what that means. And then his optionality, right? Cause he's clearly has been passing for white and passing is also one of the sub themes here around the racial discourse, passing of language, passing of culture, passing of color, passing of skin, passing of gender at one point, even among one particular slave. And so it's really brought to the fore at the end that Huck has to wrestle directly with racial identity in a way that's hinted at in the original Huck Finn. Like he has a burgeoning sort of critical consciousness. Like a beginner's mind about morality that turns out to be right, more or less. And here he has to take, Everett puts him in a position where he needs to take a step further about his own role, his own positionality. Will he deny, will he accept? What is it going to look like for him to be in this world in which he is both and neither all at the same time? And then what, you know, that means for Jim and James. And I think it's interesting that even in hearing us talk about it, we're gonna be flipping back before it between Jim and James. And really, if there is an arc of the book, it is for Jim, the character to take on and own the name James and all the things that represents. Because essentially the last line of the book is, you know, my name is James. So he, this fully representation of an integrated person where he's no longer dissembling, he's no longer performing, he's no longer just surviving. He's taken bold in a revocable action, I would say. At the end of, we'll get to that there. So that's the other spoiler alert is that he goes back to this place where his wife and daughter have been sold, which is this breeding slave encampment, which is sounds as bad as it can possibly be, and stages an insurrection. And it's the early days of the American Civil War. So there's other things going at the same time, but it ends with James in a place of real, decisive, affirmative, structural action, which is so much different than what Twain does with Jim's journey in Huck Finn. And that's part of the appropriation, reimagining, revisioning of whatever it is doing in James. So I think those are sort of the three big changes. Now, there's other inventions inside, but those three things, if you know those, you've got a lot of the pillars of what's going on in this particular book. We kind of did a little bit of why it's important, but let's do accolades and acclaim, Rebecca. What kind of, what scoreboarding did James do for the best of books of the world? The scoreboard is so full. When this came out, it was, I mean, before it came out, let's talk about that. When the book was announced, it just was immediately like, oh, that's gonna be the book of the year. I think it was an announcement that Percival Everett was doing a reimagining of Huck Finn from Jim's perspective. And that's all anybody needed to know. Like publishing was ready. When it came out, it was immediately celebrated, just tons and tons of positive reviews. Dwight Garner in the New York Times said, this is Everett's most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful beneath the word play and below the packed dirt floor of Everett's moral sensibility, James is an intensely imagined human being. It won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which is a pretty rare feat. And we can do some trivia around that later in the show. It made basically all of the best of lists that year. It was Barnes and Noble's book of the year. It was in the New York Times' top 10 books of 2024. Amazon zagged and picked a different book of the year, like basically just for the sake of zagging. That was the boys of Riverside, right? I think it was. Yes, I can never remember. I always want to say it was the boys in the boat. But they kind of at that point were like, or at least what it looked like from the outside, was like, well, everybody's naming James for everything. Let's do something different. This notably, it did not make the New York Times' top 100 books of the century. I think probably because it was too new at the time of voting, we did the voting for that in mid to late 2024, but it is number 50 on readers list. So recent and powerful, 540,000 plus good reads ratings with an average of 4.42 stars. Extremely high. Incredibly high. And half a million copies for a work of literary fiction that does the kinds of things that Percival Everett is doing, or half a million ratings, is also really remarkable in two years. That's just all over the scoreboard. Percival just ran the board in 2024. Today's episode is brought to you by Source Books Landmark, publisher of The Mountains We Call Home by Kim Michelle Richardson. Now, if you like something that's bookish, that's southern, that's heartwarming, but gets into the nitty gritty of life, this is for you. So in this deeply moving standalone and companion novel to the New York Times bestselling, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek series, our heroine for the ages, legendary book woman, Cussie Lovett, returns home. 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And I think that's part of what he's doing here. And in doing so, he further enshrines Huck Finn, right? This is what happens. I'll save this for my hot take a little bit later. Like this goes back to ancient Greece, where you had people retelling the story of Troy and the Aresty, like people returning from Greece get told over and over and over and over again. And that's part of how they become cemented in the foundation of the literary tradition here too, right? This is not something that's new. In fact, that we don't do that this much is a relatively new phenomenon. We talked about Shakespeare, you know, reading things and repurposing things that were sort of around, right? Really, it's really with the invention of copyright in the length of copyright that this is something that happens a little bit longer. When we do eventually get to Don Quixote, one of my favorite literary facts of all time is that as soon as Don Quixote came out and became popular, there was no copyright. And I think Cervantes published that anonymously too. So even the branding of the name was weak. So people started publishing other Don Quixotes. And so when Cervantes published book two, in the book of Don Quixote, false dons from other Don Quixotes appear, right? It's like a very personal, everything to do, right? Sounds like, so, but that also meant that there was a lot of Don Quixote stories in there. So I think as people think about, and this is how I think about adaptations as well, I'm always interested in adaptation, not so much because I'm dying to see something on screen, but that further gives it weight, right? So many books are forgotten that anything you can do to give it some ballast to survive sort of the stormy waters of history will be very helpful here. And you wanna do something interesting, right? You wanna offer something interesting and provocative and thoughtful and entertaining to a contemporary reader. And I think by that account, Rebecca, this really scores on all points. You have this quote here. Maybe you wanna transition to that. So it's a really good one from Everett. Oh yeah, well, I mean, Everett says that Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the source of the novel. And he hopes, he says, I hope that I have written the novel that Twain did not and also could not have written. I don't view the work as a corrective, but rather I see myself in conversation with Twain. And then in the acknowledgements of the book itself, he nods to Mark Twain and says, his humor and humanity affected me long before I became a writer, Heaven for the Climate, hell for my long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain, which is a play on an old Twain quote where Twain said, go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company. So there is just real affection there. And as you were saying, Everett has done something here by further and shrining Huck Finn, but in this version, giving voice and full humanity to a historically important, but quintessential side character in a great American novel. And he complicates also what that novel is about. Huck Finn is the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This book is not called The Adventures of James. What looks like adventure to Huck is constant threat. Cormac MacCorthy, like the road survival with horror escape. Yeah, fight for survival for James. And that really comes across. And that is just one of those key things that Twain couldn't and didn't recognize or write into about the black experience, but that Everett, from the perspective of a few hundred years later, and being a black person himself can see. So I think what's interesting too is at the time that Huck Finn comes out, which is like 1885, I think in the United States. Yeah, I'm just looking at my notes here. Jim would have been, I think, probably the second most famous black character in American literature after Uncle Tom and Uncle Tom's cabin. Yes. And both the reputation of Jim and Uncle Tom and Uncle Tom's cabin, let's just say they are not fully realized three dimensional characters. And so by going back and giving Jim this perspective, I don't think modern scholars, modern readers are now going to be able to, whether they want to or not, read Huckleberry Finn without the shadow of Everett James on that book, which is really powerful and interesting. This is what literary history can do. I love this point. So I think that's part of how to understand what's going on here. And this all goes in the bucket of like, if you read Huck Finn side by side, I bet there's I hope there's some book clubs that did them both. I'm sure there's classes and all those things going on out there. But I just I'm trying to give some background here without saying like you don't know what you're talking about if you don't go read Huck Finn, but it's all there for you. Everett himself, I think I think part of the reason this book was so anticipated is because at the moment we heard about this book, Everett's name was on the Ascendants after a long career of publishing really interesting books. The book that had just come up before Doctor No, which is a kind of. Not a dissimilar perspective, though the execution is different of like a James Bond type spy novel like Doctor No, but it's about, I think it's his infinity or nothing, which is the big idea in that. Like it's an Everett sort of mindbender at the same time. The trees, which they came up before, which is metaphors about lynching and not metaphors about lynching. And then, of course, Erasure, his book, which has turned into American Fictions, written by or directed by Cora Jefferson, became one of the movies of that year. And then Everett moves from Grey Wolf Publishers, where he's done most of his publishing over his course of his life, to a giant Big Five publisher. And Big Five Publishers have been trying to get him for a long time. Decades. He says he didn't really care. I don't. I. The proof is that he didn't move. So I guess he didn't care. I'm not sure what he was looking at. And so at this particular moment and then this conceit feels almost like genetically engineered at the lab for this moment of time, where it was like we I remember saying to you at the time, what else? What you couldn't write this plot line for Everett's career any more deterministically than this? It's almost unbelievable at this point. It is. It really is. Yeah, I was surprised to learn doing my research for this episode, that his debut novel, Souter, which came out in 1983, came out from Viking, which is a Penguin Random House imprint. So he started his career there at a Big Five. And then he moved over, as you were saying, to Grey Wolf Press, which is one of the great indie publishers. He had an editor there that he's worked with for decades that he thanked in his National Book Awards speech for James. I think they continue to have a close working relationship. But Big Five publishers have been trying to lure him away for a while. And he just kept saying, no, he has not said yet what the thing was that got him to move over for this book. But he certainly benefited from the marketing engine that a Big Five publisher can produce for a book with this profile and that a book with this profile deserves to have. So just incredibly cool to see. And he's got dozens and dozens of books. Yes, like whatever genre you want to read, Percival Everett has turned that genre on its head. There are mysteries and Westerns and thrillers. There's head spinning, lit, thick, satire. Almost everything is satire with him. And everything is heavy on philosophy because he majored in philosophy at the University of Miami before he went on to get his masters in fiction at Brown. And that just infuses the way that he works, the way that he thinks. It makes him one of modern literatures, I think, most interesting thinkers. He's also written several collections of short stories, several collections of poetry. Like this is a person who is just fascinated with words and what they can do. And he wants to play with them in every possible sandbox. If you want to entertain yourself for a good five to ten minutes, it's it's a good reading experience just to read the descriptions of his books like his Wikipedia page. Like it's like, oh, that sounds cool. Oh, that sounds cool. And it's really metafictional along the way. And I think we don't really talk about too much of the publishing history on this show, kinds of behind the scenes. But there's a fascinating A.B. universe where what if James comes out from Grey Wolf, which, again, is a serious publisher? This is not some tiny, tiny situation. But big time publishing does big time publishing things. And I'd be fascinated to know in personal ever, it's hard of hearts what the reason was. I'm sure he got a huge check. Maybe, you know, he at the time the book came out and certainly while I was writing it, he had younger kids. He's an older kid. Like 13 and 15 and he's 67. So, you know, that can change your dynamic. Well, if you've got kids and you've got a whole different financial situation that you're trying to deal with, maybe it was time. Maybe he maybe he knew that the platform that a random house imprint would bring would just give the book a different kind of trajectory and a different kind of futurity. And it's not to say that independent publishers or smaller mid-market publishers can't do it. It's more of a probability game. This got in front of everybody. This got from us. It got into the news. It just they did all the things that they know how to do. I think what's delightful then, you know, one of one of my if I could make the universe where I want, you know, we see on book talk and book to Graham Wright House, some author will blow up and they have a huge backlist and then like all the books. Oh, yeah. That's the world I want to live in. But for Percival Everett. I'm not Cindy Poitier and the trees and Dr. No are like number three, four and five of the best selling books of 2026 because book book talk. Let's do it. But yeah, let's do it. That's not the world we live in right now. Yeah. But of those dozens of books that he's written, like having been with a small publisher for most of his career, didn't hold him back. And Ray Sher from 2001, you know, was well recognized at the time. And then, as you said, became the American fiction film. I am not Cindy Poitier from 2009. Another one that he's best known for where the main character's name is not Cindy Poitier, like just incredible Percival Everett shit. And then the trees from 2021 is the other of like sort of the big three of Percival Everett. But across this career, he's been nominated for like just about every literary award there is. The trees was a finalist for the 2022 Booker Prize. And then, of course, he won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer for James, as we said, in just an interesting guy, too. Born in Georgia, grew up in South Carolina, as I said, majored in philosophy, got his master's in fiction. And for the last many years has been a distinguished professor of English at USC, still actively teaching, which many high profile writers do for both economic and spiritual reasons. But like the idea that you can just be enrolled at USC and take a class with Percival Everett. Can you imagine turning in a short story to Percival Everett? I don't know. I can't. Absolutely not. It's like to go into the pearly gates and giving an account of yourself to Michael or Gabriel. I don't remember. I can't remember. It's been too long since then. Yeah. Who's supposed to be in the pearly gates? I remembered one of the profiles that I read when the book came out and that came back up in my research today begins with the journalist sitting in on one of the classes Everett is teaching and they're the students are workshopping someone else's short story. And the students are kind of like, I don't really like have anything else to say. Like they're being a little soft about it. And Everett kind of leans in and is like, well, either you're like, you must all be way smarter than I am because I don't get what's happening in this story at all. And I thought like I would just like Alex Mack melt into a puddle and slither out the door. Like that would be the end of me. There is a the jester is smarter than the King dynamic with Everett. I I've read a bunch of his reviews and I find them all fascinating, but I've got to admit my guard is always up. Oh, yeah. Is this what is going on? Right. Is this it could be the real dope. This could be the actual, you know, like the honest confessions or musings, observations of the real person will ever. It I would also believe a hundred percent of the time it's him playing a character in his own mind named person. Not personal ever appears in his own book as a character. So like it's all possible. And that I think maybe that's the thing I want to I want to present as much as anything is that sense of possibility, the interpretive richness, the the language, the linguistic playfulness and creation, like the philosophical range that he brings to bear mean sort of everything's on the table to consider, think about and happen to us and for us in a personal Everett book. Really reminds me of George Saunders in a lot of ways. Like I think about the career where Lincoln in the bar, no 2017 was really his big novel breakout, even though he's written a bunch of stuff before. I guess the 10th of December maybe came out before Lincoln and the borrow, but like short stories, novellas, kind of weird stuff. But then there was something that elevated broke out into it and really commercial kind of way. And I don't say that derogatorily. I want both. I want people to do very well. I want a bunch of people to read these books and I want the art to be flippin' awesome. And I think I get that with James and Everett, especially at this particular moment, so exciting for us. It is. It is. Yeah. And I think I just want to hang a lantern on the fact that Everett describes himself as pathologically ironic. Yes. So like all of the warnings. It's like saying I am a liar. Like I don't know what to do with that. Like, okay. I'm very self aware, but he's also out there having a great time. And I love the comparison to Saunders that you're bringing in because I think one thing that I see in both of those, in both of these working writers novels is that you can tell they're having a great time. That it's like, what if we tried this and then I'll do this thing? And would that be funny and interesting and weird? And the writing just sort of comes up around it, but that these are not just minds at work, but really curious, interested minds that want to experiment and play with things. You can just tell how much Percival Everett loves language and not only because he says it through James a million times in this book, but that he's having a really wonderful time getting in there and figuring out how to tell the story. And he is one of the only authors that like has demonstrated he can move around between genres. Every book is different from every other one in his uvra. But they're all there's something exciting about each one. Like I am so far from my completionist reading of Percival Everett. I've got a bunch to do too. Yeah, that's so. Yeah, like I can spend the next two decades of my reading life, sprinkling Percival Everett in and not run out. And that feels like such a gift to you. But there's not in my understanding, there's not a stinker among the bunch, which is also great. They're all at least very interesting at the same time. I think another thing, the Saunders comp is accurate in this other way. And this maybe gets into what our own experience of reading it and what people like to read. This book is an abiding humanity in both. These are not nihilists. They're experimentalists, but they're not existentialists in this way. They know that the world is broken and flawed, but it's not just that. And in most of the books I've read by Saunders and James, there is a desire to see the world to be improved, but also a recognition of the fundamental humanity of most people. I think James is interested in what present, what can happen to a people, a culture that allows them to perpetuate and, I guess, authorize and enjoy even yes, routine systemic violence. But also we get Huck, you know, he also doesn't. There's a version of James where Huck is a jerk. I want to say, I guess that's something where where Huck is not the the Downey innocent who has a who's pure of heart, that he is some kind of other kind of monster. And that's not what James is doing. That's not what he's doing. That's something to that inquiry and that sweetness and innocence and ignorance of Huck, the nose or things together that's retained and troubled to some degree. But it's still there that that Huck can do this means that not all is lost to some degree. Yeah, that I think Everett is ironic, but not cynical. Yeah, that's right. That is a really important distinction in a story like this and concerned with humanity. Angry. James is very angry on the page in the book for, you know, the most justifiable reasons in the world. But the book is not an angry, cynical read of humans. Like it comes from a place of warmth and of belief that we can that we can be better and we should be better. And that is, I think, a common thread with Saunders that I didn't pick up on the first time that that I read. And I think he shares it with Twain as well. Like Twain will mock and deride to his heart and our delight. But I also think at some level, he also is interested in people for their own sake. And that's a thing that Everett himself said that it's that it's Twain's humor and humanity that drove him. And I think you can see humor and humanity throughout this book. Yeah. And so our first exposure, we read it right as it came out, famously recorded a book club episode and then technology ate it for the book podcast. So this is our second go round about talking with James. Your note here is wow. And I just have same. So I don't know what else to say about our first exposure. No, I just remember getting on the mic to record that book club episode and being like, OK, we both loved it, right? Yeah, right. Great. And if I mean, this is what it's like to read this is like, you have electrifying here, like for the kinds of reading we like to do and for this show and in our own personal lives, all our dopamine is firing. We're thinking historically, we're thinking the level of language, character, plot, philosophy just does all the things we like it. It really is. But I remember the feeling of those like first five pages sitting down and starting it and seeing James talking in what they call like slave language or the slave dialect and then switching into his actual educated dialect and being like, Oh, like this is what we're going to do here. All right. And that that like that just was the first thing that really lit me up about. OK, Percival Everett, here we go. Like let's do it. But throughout it's just surprising and it's funny and it's terrifying and it's touching. There's this whole spectrum that's really hard to do all. Well, it's really hard to do any one of these things. Well, Everett manages to do all of them well and to move between them with just incredible and then it feels like a piece that you go from horrible racial and sexual violence to. Not, you know, to not that at the same time. Like I don't know. And we talk about adaptations in a minute. That's one of my questions I have about. I think books can do this differently than visual medium for all the reasons we can talk about, but that's part of what's going on here. I think maybe a surprising to anything to me when I first read it is how readable it was, even though the Everett I've read Trees, Dr. No, American fiction, none of is difficult on a sentence paragraph, chapter, book length level, but it belies the complexity that goes along with that readability at the same time. And I think that sort of having the having sort of a, I don't know, almost a aside car of philosophical and artistic interest alongside the engine of plot and entertainment is something Everett does. But I also think it's embedded in this like songs and minstrel she and their code switching, like part of this is look what you can do if you string people along with pleasure and language and story. Look what you can get away with in the sidecar along that motorcycle at the same time. What a thing he gets away with. Like this, the code switching really literalizes the dual consciousness that W. E. B. DeBoys wrote about black people experiencing in America. And then I found New York Times linguist writer, John McCord, talked about it as well, that having the black character speak standard English with one another makes them more readily human to us. He said, I doubt I am alone and guiltily finding it hard to feel Twain's gym or the less educated black characters in Uncle Tom's cabin, because even without outright distortions, their speech seems so unfamiliar. Yeah, distancing. That's right. Yeah. And that allowing James to speak in language that people who are picking up a personal Everett book understand and are expecting from a work of literary fiction does draw us draws us closer in to really see this full humanity that that Everett's giving him. And then there is like the sidecar is packed with philosophy, just which I wondered as I was reading it, like, what do people do with this who were like, don't know that Locke, who shows up is a real philosopher or Voltaire or there's a reference to Candide. Like, what do they think is going on here? Could you just sort of let it wash over you? But all of this context that he's drawing that gives us James's understanding of the world and the lines and the limits of race, like, allow it to be really high minded while also just it has a hell of a story, as you were saying, like that plot engine just just keeps it going. And he manages then to like, we're having adventures kind of doing these side quests, but then we're also looking in a very matter of fact way at the hell of slavery and hell is a word that is used multiple times in the book that there's this daily mundane violence. At one point, James has shackled and he talks about the nostalgic terror of being shackled, this, this memory in his body of that, but that those things are happening in and around. And like sometimes because of the absurd, silly things that happen in the story is just such a monumental feat. So I think, you know, the double conscious, Du Bois's idea of double conscious, I'm glad you put that here. Just for people may not know what that is quickly is this idea that black people to survive in America have to both look through their own eyes. They're looking through their eyes is also to look through white people's eyes to stay safe. How was a white person going to see me and this experience? And then how do I use that information to navigate it? Right. So that's the, the doubleness you have to see through white and black eyes. And this manifestation is probably the most baldly metaphorical one you can possibly imagine where the speech is so different and they are talking in one way so that they get white people to think of them some way. But in order to do that, they must have mastery of navigating, manipulating and moving in and through white expectation and white understanding of them. And those dream sequences and they're sort of like double consciousness on the biggest possible level where Jim, he's Jim now at this stage. I think part of his hero's journey, if there is such a thing as to sort of defeat these demons of Western philosophical thought that have authorized or otherwise downplayed, even as like, oh, slavery seems bad, but there's reasons, right? He vanquishes those. But that's the ultimate level of this is like, I can also see through not just how to walk down the street of this market or whatever, I can see how to deal with your biggest, greatest thinkers and I can see how you argue and how you understand. And then, but at those moments, his mere being stands counter to it. Right. He's like, I'm just me and I know because of what I can do and what my people can do that all of this is garbage. Right. Even if you don't know, I know it's garbage. I just know it's garbage. Like it's not it's not even something to argue. Like I'm not even interested in the argument. And it's not just like a perfection of the performance of the language, but a deep understanding of, as you're saying, how white people see black people and what they expect. Why that works, right? Like this way, but what that means for them. So it's not just like that you drop the G's off the end of your words or something. It's that if something is going wrong, like if the house is on fire and you, the black person have to tell the white person that the house is on fire, you have to do it in a certain way. That's an amazing sequence. Right. But you have to do it in a certain way where you have to like let the white person be the one who first acknowledges the danger. And then you have to find a way to sort of suggest to them what they should do about it without sounding like you're the one who knows better because they're the ones who expect that they should know what happens in every situation. And there's a real like, we know that they know that we know that they know, but we know and that the real knowing of what's going on in these racial dynamics rests with the black people who understand what white people expect of them and how to deliver it. And they choose to deliver it because it keeps them safe, but they also push the edges of it and seek to subvert it wherever they can. Because the ultimate knowledge is if they were to perform, at least in the in the context of this book, their full humanity to use their standard English to show that they that Jim especially can write with some of them can read, that they have different kinds of understandings that they are performing would be such a threat to the status quo. And it is such a threat to the status quo that any indication of it is met with the most extreme violence you can imagine, right? At one point, a pencil gets stolen and it's both representative and just literally dangerous to this community that black people are interested in getting writing instruments because subconsciously, the white population knows that if they read and write and talk and sound more like people, if we allow them to take care of themselves, to have, you know, dignity and, you know, their own social relationships and families, the more they seem like humans, the more we have to wrestle with it. They are human and that what we're doing is wrong. And so all these dehumanization things, the circular logic of American chattel slavery is such that you have it has to be this way or it can't be at all. Yeah. And that's the thing that James himself sees. And that I think Huck quite beautifully has is revealed to him through his friendship and then ultimate relationship with James and Ergo then revealed to us and then Ergo revealed to the reader. And that's one of the beautiful things. My memory of Huck Finn, the book, is that it is an indictment of American racialism and racism in a way that could be done or that Twain was interesting to do at that moment. Because we see Huck, he's this kid's like, I like Jim. That's as simple as it is, Rebecca. He's my friend. That's as simple as it is enough. That can do a lot of work. Just to go back to what you were saying about how terrifying the reality of the intelligence and language that these black characters are using is there's a scene near the end of the book where James is back with Judge Thatcher and he's like, this man has been horrible to him. James is pointing a gun at him and is speaking in his real voice. And he says that he recognizes that Judge Thatcher is not so much scared that he's pointing a gun at him, but that he's using the language that he's using, that he sounds intelligent and articulate. And it's that dissonance between the judge's expectations of this black enslaved man and the reality of his full humanity and his intelligence that like that's the thing that is really frightening. Because if this person is intelligent, if he can speak this in this way, I don't have as much power as I thought. Right. And Huck, as you have here, one of the great lines is I forget that you feel things just like I feel. I know you love them when he's talking about forgetting that Jim's trying to go back to his family, right? And that Huck, no other white character in the book to my memory, has a real recognizes their own limitations of understanding, but then tries to reengage. And that what makes Huck special in this relationship special. It's a little unclear to me if that we're supposed to think of, and maybe there's no supposed to hear that because he is Jim's son and then part black or not, like how much is the sensualist or not, or how much Huck is just Huck and his own interiority, his own upbringing, his own Jim being around him from an early age and treating him a certain way has maybe shown a little bit more of his humanity hand than he's willing to show other white people because he knows that he's related to him in a sort of genetic kind of way. I think too, you know, there's a scene where Jim becomes part of this minstrel troop and that the the the signification and layers of irony and representation there are almost two mind-bending to talk about. But he's walking through the town dressed up. Jim is dressed up in blackface to make him seem like he's a white person in blackface so that they can do this performance. It's amazing. Like he had to get into whiteface to get into blackface. Yeah, it's you can't. The literal and figurative levels are amazing. But he's watching then the people watch him. And what he recognizes is that there's just not a lot to these people's visions. That the only way they can exist in this system is to just exist on the take things for what they are. And anyone who doesn't take things for what they are, the whole Jenga tower comes falling down. If you start looking at things too closely and there's that moment of the less of the reality of the world you see, the less you actually are the less actually less human you are. So in a lot of ways, the most dehumanizing thing, not the most, let's not put it that way. One of the dehumanizing factors of slavery is what it requires of the slave population to do to their own humanity to authorize it. They have to become sort of an automaton of a certain kind of logic that makes you not able to see the reality of what's going on before you. You have to participate in and then it makes you more gullible. One of the great things about the Duke and Dofan, which is one before, they recognize that these people are duping themselves so much that they're ready to be duped for almost everything else because they cannot see the fact. They cannot handle the facts in front of them. So anything is possible. It's amazing what goes out in those moments. Yeah, it really is. And it's funny. And then you're like, am I allowed to think this is funny? It's like gallo-sumer on every level. And then, OK, Everett wrote this on purpose. What is this doing? It's showing me the absurdity of these things. And then he moves right into terrifying. Like after Jim performs in this minstrel troupe where everyone thinks that he's a white person dressed as a black person, there are a few of them are really taken with how realistic his wig looks, which is actually just his head and his hair. And he wakes up in the middle of the night with a white man in his tent, feeling his hair. And black people's hair is, of course, a. Yes. Rich and controversial. And still, it's still a current, a story like how to talk. How to not talk about anti-black people hair. This is crazy. And it's threatening to Jim because he's like this white man is going to find out that I'm actually black and then I'm going to be in danger again. But that Everett lets us fully see the ridiculousness of people who can participate in these systems and then also how entitled they feel to even walk into another person's tent in the middle of the night and touch their body. Well, in that particular character, that's this white person says to Jim earlier in that scene, you know, I can smell a slave from 50 yards. I know. Right. There's no. So that part of his fascination, maybe the entirety of that person's that character's fascination is if he touches the hair and it's real, that means his mastery of the racial dynamic isn't what he thought it was. And therefore the whole thing is a house that he really doesn't understand how anything works. Yeah. And that's why that's that moment really initially gets it launches into part two of the book, which is much more chaotic. It's much more the whole thing is dangerous. Yes. But it's much more terrifying after that moment because the stakes are of representation of this whole unspoken agreement about the status quo that could come tumbling down if he reaches down, touches Jim's hair and sees, feels and believes this is a black person that I didn't recognize that's that's participating in all these levels of signification that are completely beyond my kin. And that's terrifying and destabilizing the way that the world blows up. Like, yeah, it's it's not. I think it's not nothing that we get the first rumblings of the civil war is happening after that moment, because the whole world is fraying at this moment. Because these structures of feeling and understanding, politically, culturally and artistically are falling down at this moment. Let's see. What else do I have here? Like, it's just a spectrum of humanity from from quite beautiful and touching to evil and understanding, violence, compassion and culture. For a book that's not very long, we haven't said this on my hundred pages, 184 pages, my hardcover is 300. It reads quickly like you. I read it in like three hours. Yeah, I broke it up over two days, but only because of scheduling. And I resented it when I had to put it down at the end of the day on that first night. But I want to keep going. It does really move. And I'm excited for people who are just going to discover it this time around. Like the plot is much more straightforward than a lot of personal Everett that I've read. And that's one of my stray thoughts that has been occurring to me as we've been talking about this is I kind of am delighted by the idea of a bunch of people reading James and then picking up other personal Everett and finding out really how tricky this guy is. Right. Right. So wonderfully tricky. The book is about everything. Just it's as fundamentally American as a novel can be because nothing is more fundamentally American than the foundations of slavery and racism. And that Everett is doing that on the scale that he's doing it and with such a sense of humor and play is remarkable. I think that brings us to stray thought time, Rebecca. Where would you like to begin? Well, I mean, speaking of how this is a fundamentally American story, I wondered the first time I read it and I wondered again this time how does it work for readers outside the U.S.? Like this is a great it's just a great book. And I think you know people around the world can recognize that slavery is wrong and terrible and can look into American history and appreciate that. But what is it? I just wondered what it feels like to read it without having grown up in the full context, you know, of American society and that history of racism. I thought about this point when you you had this point in the document I started thinking about one thing I want to be very careful of this book. I should be more careful in all books, but this one really puts it on front street to be careful of even recognizing the limits of my own understanding and like where my own head versus heart versus gut knowledge is intermingle, but also what the limitations of those are. And this one with and then with Everett specifically, he is our James in this regard, which is this is his story he's presenting and he knows we know. We think we're the man in black, but we are Visini in this context for all you Princess Brideheads out there like you thinking you have mastery of where the poison is and where the ball is of appropriation of language of meaning. Everett has the last move. So I would encourage people and this should be true of all books. Think about what's the next move of understanding might be or where else that your current understanding might be something that the author is already accounted for, right? Bobby Fisher knows the moves. We are not Bobby Fisher in this situation. And so I think it's not a binary like inside the US without, but there's like a spectrum of closeness to the story and what and black experience and Finn and American literary tradition. But I think that's that's the easiest binary that can break this like monolith of understanding like either yes or no. It's like, okay, where do you fall on closeness to this story? And that's I think an interesting question. Yeah. And there's just so many layers of performance here. It was I will say also this book rewards multiple readings. Like there just is so much to find going back for a second time that James is performing for white people. James is performing in blackface. There are white performers co-opting blackness. There is a character named Norman who is a mixed race person who but looks white. So he's passing and at times he performs whiteness and at other times he performs blackness. Everett is performing for us that he knows all of this is going on. Everett also whose book erasure is about a black author who's told that his books are not black enough. Like all of that's happening. And then we as readers are performing in a way for Everett. And he like I don't often feel like the puppet master strings of a novelist, but it's important with Everett to remember that he's got them. That we are being moved and manipulated. These are not mistakes. This layering and complexity and right. Yeah. And like it's easy to think to do the like we know that he knows, but it's really he knows that we know or he knows that we think we know. Yeah. And that final knows is Everett's that's Everett's ledger domain right there at the end too. I think one upstake and I straight thought I had to is like all of that circles of signification, representation and performance ultimately leads to one conclusion though, which is this idea of like stable identity is garbage. Yeah. Right. Like black and white and race and gender and sexuality. Those are all real things with currency that matter. But in terms of being essential truth, like it really is a destruction of essentialism. In about as elegant way as you can imagine because of all of these layers that exist simultaneously and people moving smoothly or not so smoothly between them suggests movement is a possible. Therefore the category itself is only contingent. And like Huck having to decide at the end of the book which categories he wants to exist in or move. Or getting to decide. I mean even change the verb right there maybe is as interesting as anything. That's a great point. Yeah. Yeah. Other straight thoughts like it just surprised me on this read how early Everett starts dropping the breadcrumbs about Jim being Huck's father. I didn't I don't remember picking up on that as early in my first reading. We can ring the bell for Shakespeare references. Yeah. Because there is a monologue that a character who calls himself the king performs at a revival and it is Shylock from the Merchant of Venice which like you can just take that and do a whole master's thesis on that being the passage that Everett chose for these characters. And I just I think he is at the top of my list of writer teachers whose classes I would like to sit it on but absolutely not be graded by. Yeah. I mean it's interesting of course the Merchant of Venice like like with Huck Finn that's Shakespeare including a character from the oppressed denigrated class like this Jew right even in the context of this book just saying the word Jews like you're calling me Jew there's juiciness like a disrupts the whole thing. There are retellings of the Merchant of Venice from Shylock's point of view which you might imagine at the same time but I think very much leaning to there are these other characters that have slipped into the Western canon sort of as as ghosts or monkey wrenches into the machine that are interesting to revisit at the same time. Let's see. I thought I had the same thought that you did I think because we know that there's a loaf of bread at the end of the breadcrumbs on a secondary read the breadcrumbs seem larger earlier in the book. I was a little surprised both times how on the nose the parentage was I remember reading it the first time and thinking oh he's suggesting that maybe it's a possibility that Huck could be Jim's son but it becomes something they talk about together it becomes a subject right rather and I was just thinking about how on the nose and what that meant to be here because it seems to me and I give Everett a lot more no a lot of credit to think about what he's doing here but I think that ultimately produces in Huck a existential decision to make about how to be in the world right. That the world he is own identity is not simple and the world is not simple and then what do you do with that that is the terror because at the end of Huck Finn the book Huck sort of I'm going out west that's his journey to go to explore his charge into the world here is not to literally explore the territory of America but to explore the identity identity territory how am I going to navigate this frontier of which I and others maybe they know they are not explorers of it of being between this unstable shifting land of American cultural politics identity family genetics whatever you're going to have it so that's kind of where I got like I would have I'm not a writer I was expecting more of a elusive suggestion that it's a possibility wherever it's like no this is true but what does it mean and I found that thrilling about yeah I just I don't know that's why I'm not a writer I guess. I liked that I mean I think James even acknowledges that for himself that he tells Huck for as a gift to himself because he wanted Huck to have a moment of choice and he and really he wanted to see Huck make the choice and to give him the opportunity but I think of the thing he's craving there is that if he tells Huck the truth he's hoping that Huck will come we'll think it through and side with him but that also opens up so much rich it just opens up this rich field of messiness because Huck is then like okay well I don't want to be like the bad white people I don't want to own slaves but I also don't want to be a slave Huck uses the n-word he says he doesn't want he's not one and he doesn't want to be one right so am I gonna have to become a slave now because I'm black are you gonna tell people what's going to happen and that mapping of like white anxiety about blackness and anxiety about race into this character who finds out like who really has to reckon with what does he think about black people is he actually as good and kind as he thought now that he knows he's a black person and that's a little bit of a test too for James to see where Huck's gonna land. Yeah I think retellings have become a lot more popular of late we're gonna do some redilocks here redilocks here I guess I was thinking of other characters that this one is such a good fit for author and writer I was trying to think of other fits like what other characters I think as we go through zero to well read maybe that could be an another category like which character from this book could get a retelling hold could could hold an interesting book length retelling I don't have a good example here like everything in Greece has already been done we did Shylock here a minute before and all the Gatsby characters yeah right I mean you could think about there's a Daisy Buchanan book there've been retellings of Huck Finn from Pa Finn's point of view but but not James's itself but I think that's something interesting to think about is like where is there a character in one of these books that's rich enough that they could carry they could be the central pillar of another book like could Jordan Baker from the Great Gatsby I think so like I think there's some you know we could go through them one by one at some point but that got me thinking about this I was also thinking about Hamilton during this read which I didn't think about last time which of course I feel like is on the sensibility spectrum with James of like reengaging with American history from a modern sensibility about how we understand race and culture and equality and opportunity and the in the the failed promises and expectations of what America can and isn't all the time how related those projects are and how different they are because you know I think it's a reasonable critique of Hamilton there's kind of a cognitive dissonance to Hamilton to have all these people of color in it who are slaveholders and I have not seen or read a reckoning of that cognitive dissonance that I that I I still like Hamilton's a wonderful achievement I'm not trying to critique it but that is a central tension of that experience right is how can this be at the same time and maybe that cognitive dissonance is the point is maybe the best way out is through to say like that's interesting but how is this doing that like how would a personal Everett approach a founding fathers story document I thought was a fascinating that's a great thought experiment I don't know I love that question because I don't think Everett would have clearly he's you know he doesn't like musicals that's one thing we learned when we were talking about James earlier but like I don't think him race bending would be the way he would go about it I don't think so either he would do something else I'm not they could have some philosophical arguments for sure any other straight thoughts you want to do no that hits it for me all right all right quotes got there so many I mean we've hit on this but James just says at one point directly it always pays to give white folks what they want and then safe movement through the world depended on mastery of language fluency white folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don't disappoint them and then moments where the characters are playing with it like here's a little scene where it says Luke chuckled so when we see him staggering around later acting the fool will that be an example of pro-leptic irony or I had the same one and the person he's talking to response could be both and then the first person says now that would be ironic which I mean you once wrote a whole piece for book riot about how Alanis Morris that's ironic is not about actual irony so I thought nothing people use irony for means irony yeah pro-leptic irony for the heads out there is the irony of anticipation so this is where characters in the book are sort of it's almost like edipus thing I fear I'm on the brink of frightful speech like there's something out there that's coming like they're foreshadowing it for us and we know what's going to happen dramatic irony is just we know things the characters don't so that's a I think it's actually I spent a good six minutes on this paragraph like is it pro-leptic irony or like am I supposed to know and does everyone know and I'm like this is a quiz like I really got personal efforts ears were burning at that moment when he was like somewhere there's a man spending six minutes on this exchange I would love to know for the the digital readers out there like you can see where someone like pauses right because they're spending more time on this page do people bump on that at all these blow completely yeah at that one time another great one there's an interaction where James has talked with a white person who is like I I see us as equals or maybe this is in one of his imagined arguments with a philosopher but the white person says that he sees us himself and black people as equals doesn't support slavery and James is thinking to himself 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 just layers of stuff there yeah um let's see I can keep me a secret hook I can keep your secret too I think secret keeping is an interesting idea because the great secret of American slavery that no one can tell is that black people are just people right that there isn't there is no reason for this to be this thing it's all instrumental that is the great secret that everyone is sort of keeping black people are keeping it because again in this permutation here to to suggest otherwise would bring down the hammer right that would you're literally risking maybe guaranteeing your own obliteration to trouble that and for for white people it is a crumbling of the moral order that they built this thing on so that is the great secret is that there is no difference between black and white people other than all the differences that the system that slavery that american culture that western culture has built up to enable this thing to happen at some point but but but but but let's see where else do we want to go never address any subject directly when talking to another slave she said we call that what do we call that together they said signifying so they're teaching this of slave children and slave children what the grammar there's a grammar to black speech like there's way to do it right and wrong but then also what is this schooling that we're doing so it's very much an educational system to learn how to behave in this i think that's one difference with there's many different but the boys is idea double conscious i remember it is you don't ever learn you don't ever a moment where mom says to you you've got to like see through the eyes of like you just learn this through this is the one in the world and so this explicit like we're going to teach in a classroom setting this thing that can be learned that must be learned was pretty interesting what else do you have i mean this is a really great book if you want quotes about the power of reading and writing yes and so one that's worth pulling out on its own and that happens to be number one on goodreads is a moment where james is sitting reading a book by himself which is a thing that he very rarely gets to do and he says at that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me if i could see the words then no one could control them or what i got from them they couldn't even know if i was merely seeing them or reading them sounding them out or comprehending them it was a completely private affair and completely free and therefore completely subversive at one scene there he gets sold into a sawmill as a part of an elaborate confidence scheme between him and norman that really doesn't work great but he is told by another black person there you know dull tools are much more dangerous than sharp ones i pause to admire his metaphor but he continued so like it's both a metaphor and not yeah at the same time it's always working on those multiple levels here the problem with being lost on the river was that things appear different facing from the way they did looking north is it was if they were two different bodies of water the mississippi in fact seemed like many different rivers and so the mississippi as a metaphor for american racial identity right the world looks different if you're black the world's different right but the real thing is that it's both it's the same body of water it's just where the flora and cloe is going at one time let's see of course on one level was all too simple i'd exact revenge this every kills judge stature but for whom for one act or for many against one man many men or the world i wondered if i should feel guilty should i have felt some pride in my action so even thinking about things that is killing a member a holder up of the slave institution feels simple like as a moral condition but james is operating at multiple philosophical levels right this is not an unthinking kind of person who's just sort of acting out fashion that i'm glad we came back to the mention of judge thatcher and then the ending where he goes to this plantation i guess where his wife and daughter have been sold and he sets a bunch of stuff on fire and sets everybody free it is it's thrilling like that made that brought to mind the final scene of sinners for me like a similar feeling of like go get him like a cathartic vengeful violence righteous violence yes yeah just really wonderful anything else on quotes uh i could go on all day we better move along yeah we really could all right so is this book for you i mean i think our answer here is yes yeah the caveat being it's trigger warning stuff like sexual violence of all kinds language of the time representation you know white people's understanding representation and moralizing about black people is on the page all throughout yeah one of the reviewers that i read referred to evrit as american literature's philosopher king and so like if you want to see what that looks like and a person writing at the height of his powers this is it and the language stuff is incredible and the story works on a plot level as well like i think you could go into james doing the i just want to read a good story thing and then you'll just get a whole lot more than what you bargained for but language is just always the main event with him and patch it blurbed it and or reviewed it somewhere and said that this is a book that every american should read and i think that's right mm-hmm a moral question art asks which of these are primary here what is the good life what do i owe my neighbor how do i know what i know is this all there is how to deal with the certainty of death what else might there be what's the deal with good and evil free will real or no we have another full spectrum yes to all of these rebecca in those situations then what we do is we do a full to which of these are primary i guess that's actual questions not which of these apply because so many apply to so many but which are primary you know i mean there is what is the good life is driving this what do i want from my life what do i owe my neighbor or really fellow humans what do what do we all owe each other yeah um this is less about what james owes anyone but really about what humans owe each other and the ways that white people have failed black people of course there's the how do i know what i know and a real search for what else might there be or how else to live we're not really concerned with like metaphysical questions here in the is this all there is sense so those are i think those are answered pretty quickly there is no like the among the slaves when they're talking amongst themselves like the religion is just an excuse and it's convenient but there's no god so that question is asked and answered but it's certainly not primary i can't deal with what's to deal with good and evil ever it's not like super interested in what was driving this and seems to you know agree with the contemporary answer that i mean slavery was about money and capitalism and even the constitution was written in a way to justify that practice so he's not really concerned again on like the spiritual level with how do people arrive at doing something so evil um but he looks at the practical causes and impacts of it so i think really it's the what is the good life what do i owe my neighbor slash what do we owe each other i mean the good life the it's interesting i think if you think about a different world in which jim is not told like let's say that the thatcher's decide not to sell any of his nuclear family into slavery does he just live out his life as a slave with his family is that enough right like so what is the good life would that have been enough but here we don't get that worldview we get where that world is broken and his answer to is the good life it whatever it is it's not this it's not me by myself sold into slavery in new orleans i will hazard my mortal existence to do whatever if i die trying to restore my family unit so i die yeah but that is the good life for him but is it a good enough life to be in would they have revolted would they have rebelled would they have run away if the three of them were allowed to have their very circumscribed violence horribly morally wrong life together there's a suggestion that they had been doing that for a while and they weren't trying to escape though escape is sort of always on people's minds and that one is what i think i thought about there yeah terribly dangerous yeah yeah and always subject to at any moment that being riven by your soul today so the specter the sort of damocles is always over their head here rebecca are we sure this isn't about art and writing one of the most overt of the books we've talked about on the show but i'll just offer you a james quote straight from his mouth with my pencil i wrote myself into being i don't know that you can get any more direct than that even for personal ever that's pretty direct actually this is i mean one of my summary takes about this but ever it manages to be very direct about and to just say the thing which in so many ways about so many things throughout this book and that usually doesn't work in fiction it's usually like didactic or preachy or just annoying in some way but he's so good at it yeah why do you think it does work i agree with you it's a good point i think it's that he's so good at it and that it is couched and coming through like that the experience that james is having that it's not like a third person omniscient narrator right telling us all of these things but james we get we are along for the ride as james comes into himself and i i i also think that ever it's just a master yeah i think another thing that's possible is that it's there's other things going on beyond just this like yeah because i think this is actually right i mean i think one thing we could make the mistake of is equating any character with the author this is james writing this right and i i exhorted us and other locations to be careful of when we get a character writing because we think we're closer to the character right you are not you are farther from the character right because jay we get a lot of this is what jim is thinking this is not this this is what jim is writing yes and he's anticipating maybe then that someone will read it someday yes look even here we are in persoval Everett's web right and i i'm very happy wriggling and ready to get my blood drained by spider ever but i think you know if you look at it's actually not the writing it's the urge to write right it's the he even thought about some expression of self as being interesting necessary nourishing imperative so i don't know what you do with that because i think the actual true thing is like this the sentence or two before or the cultural existential ontological move that jim has made before we ever met him to learn how to read and then to be one of the few slaves who actually is interested in knowing how to write where did that happen we don't see that origin story no it's not it's not performed for us could you get the most out of watching the signal adaptation well rebecca there isn't one but oh boy variety reported in in late 2024 that universal pictures had acquired the rights to james with steven spielberg attached to executive produce it through his company amblin entertainment and at the time taiko a titi was said to be in early talks to direct that sentence makes me incredibly nervous we haven't heard anything more about this it's been a year and a half there hasn't been like a casting announcement or anything else who knows but also like my shoulders are up to my ears now because what titi did adapt is she gurus clara and the sun that film has been finished for months was originally nothing yeah it was originally supposed to be coming out later this year like late 2026 and there has been nothing nobody like i went on a side quest down like movie buff reddit rabbit holes how was that no one knows what's going on with clara and the sun and the pervasive feeling at least on reddit with the reddit detectives is that the movie will not see the light of day or it'll get like dumped in a february or something but there's no like it's april if it were going to be one of the big movies of the fall we'd probably have heard about it so i don't know uh and i of course i'm just bringing bias here to i am concerned about taiko a titi adapting like yeah it could be the summer festivals it could get in tellurie or something like that that i don't know sometimes but i'm i'm nervous about this mixture and this the tone of this book is just hard to do well that's a mind note here's like how do you do this because the oscillation between brutality and absurdity and philosophical and tenderness and extreme violence and like fishing on the river and quite beautiful moments like i was trying to think of a movie that again subject matter be damned like i'm not even looking for what tonally feels like this i don't know i really couldn't come up with anything and i'm not a movie expert so i'm sure there's things out there but i really had a hard time thinking about something that could do the range but also feel like if it's a piece because that's another thing about james that has such range and huck finn is like this as well it doesn't have the real dark night of the soul racial violence stuff that james does but james feels like this world because it is a map of our world and the world it encompasses all the contradictions and extremes but feels movies just art has a hard time doing this yeah it's i think it just really a tough one to try to strike the tone like barry jinkens adaptation of the underground railroad which i think was either six or eight episodes on amazon was beautifully rendered and terribly difficult to watch because it is also just like so straight ahead about the brutalities of slavery and that's really important like it took me like eight weeks to watch it just very they dropped them all at once which was quite a choice but like i had to really pace myself through taking that in and that's a less very challenging but less challenging work of translation than a book that has all of these this movement between tone and absurdity and like the layers of performance i don't i don't know i don't know man even sinners which has some of that like the violence of that is heightened and supernatural in the form of this vampire thing so there's some distance and like suspension of disbelief the thing about james and this kind of book is there is sort of no suspension of disbelief that's one of the weird places we find ourselves landing in the thing i thought about a lot with considering adaptation was ramelle ross's adaptation of the nickel boys which is shot through did you ever see it like i never did i never picked it up i should it's shot as if we are seeing the world through the eyes of the main character like in their body and maybe something that did that could work here where we were really in james's head through the story but it's this is such a tough one i want persoval everett to like get a if it's going to be adapted i want it to be really really good like get your adaptation money but i'm so worried about it yeah i think the degree of difficulty is extraordinarily high and that's maybe the simplest way to put this here a movie musical tv series or muppets muppets glalie is the wrong answer i think movie i agree with you you have movie here maybe four or five episodes but i think it's not it's not huge it's not yeah yeah if you're gonna do it like a movie you could do this in a two and a half hour movie i think yeah all right rebecca miscellaneous trivia adaptations rumors mr. shabu quotes and more you have the best one here so all right this is one of only eight novels to ever win both the national book award and the pull-and-surprise for fiction colson whitehead did it in 2016 with underground railroad the last time before that was 1993 annie proves the shipping news jeff o'neill can you guess any of the other ones i don't it was a rough hard there was a lot in there no that was the last before the last so we're in the 80s 70s and 80s and 60s and stuff yeah then the last one but i want to say like solid bellow or like humboldt's gift or something like that something from the i don't know that's the best i can do i don't have nothing jumps to yeah so the color purple by alice walker okay rabbit is rich john updike the fixer by bernard malamud the collected stories of catherine and porter oh yeah right and then a fable by william faulkner and what i think is interesting i've not read me either about this not only that it's really rare to win both the national book award and the pull it sir like one of the reasons that's rare is that those awards value different things pull it sirs are sort of about fundamentally american stories the national book awards prize experimentalism a little bit more a weird book so it's interesting to see persifil everett do it and colson whitehead do it and then that the color purple is one of them like of these eight novels to bring both bells three of them are concerned with race in america which the most again three of the last four because the color purple is like 84 82 yeah early 80s yeah so yeah underground railroad called the color purple and and james but three of those eight really incredible um apparently persifil everett had the idea for this while playing tennis and you just thought has anyone told has anyone told huck finn from jen's point of view love it there's a famous story of murakami haruki murakami deciding to be a writer during a baseball game like one one particular fly ball is like i think i should be a novelist so i'm again i'm just very careful of these dudes man yeah very careful of these writers saying this is where this idea came from it could be true it's heisenberg's uncertainty origin story i don't know what to do with it just it's strange and then for folks who do pick up the book uh the leader of the minstrel troupe in the book is named daniel de cader emet that's a real person he was a real american songwriter who did indeed perform in blackface so everett has pulled him out of his history and brought him into fiction here the book begins with these lyrics of these minstrel songs and i have to admit rebecca that butted up against my interpretive ability i wasn't sure what to do with that i didn't spend a lot of time on it but yeah i had forgotten that i might go into a hot take here actually maybe as well orthogonal hot take teach huck finn racial epithet and all so in this book everett uses the n word like it's it's just there and he talked a little bit in an interview about like that's what the experience is that these documents are historical cultural and artistic all at the same time and i am not a black person and i know that hits differently and maybe that's leave it up to the teachers and you're you know but there's ways of dealing with these documents that doesn't embrace their context and their flaws and their sins even to that point but still have something to teach us and in this book james there's a part about when jim is wondering about throwing away the lyrics to this song oh yeah song and even says you know even if even if i don't even if i don't throw them away even if i throw them away or burn them these songs will still be out there this book is still these ideas are still out there whether or not you engage they're still out there so you might as it's better to engage with them than to pretend they don't exist or ignore them because they're still powerful if they weren't still powerful we wouldn't be having this conversation right so if they are powerful deal with them take them on do something to them yeah i i totally agree and like not for nothing most of the public complaints about huck finn that have led to bannings uh are white parents complaining that it makes their white kids feel bad about themselves i in those cases i say teach it twice yeah once a week and twice on sunday right yeah and ever it's on board with that even i mean even tony morrison said that she thought that huck finn was a perfect novel because it replicates the society that it's about and that it like it has problems because of course it does because it comes out of an american society that is founded on racist ideas and we can't that is the water that we existed we can't get out of it and i think it regrounds us in what like the past was like this is what it was like there's no this it's there's no whitewashing or sugarcoating or whatever kind of metaphor you want to use like that's what it is because otherwise you get these like revisionist forgetting yeah and especially now that james exists like being able to teach them side by side of here is what it looks like when a white writer who like was interested in humanity and was a critic of the institutions of slavery here is like the best what the best possible version of that looks like and it's still so limited in huck finn and then here is what we get with 150 years of perspective from a black writer who you have in the notes also that everett's great grandmother was enslaved at one point like this is just not that far in the rear view mirror right teach them side by side and show what it looks like for for someone to write a character who's been marginalized and oppressed in the worst possible ways and to give them full humanity and full agency what a fascinating side by side study that would be yeah another hot take of mine short and copyright windows reinterpretation reimagining and shifted perspectives they don't diminish they enhance literary discourse and they burnish not diminish the relevance of the original text so that we have to wait death plus 75 years to write a great gatsby rejoinder shifted perspective the one i'm thinking about right now and it's a it's a mess is this whole harry potter situation right yeah think of that was 20 years and there'd be counter harry potter narratives right that would be fascinating lucrative and maybe useful at this particular moment yeah someone does harry potter but they're all trans and yeah or whatever something different where it isn't sort of encased in amber like like even this trailer for this new one's like why are we doing this i'll save this for our next step like be our pod but like i was so relieved i don't to care about it because it just looks like a read like he just doesn't there's nothing interesting there at all it just looks like a reheat yeah but like but letting other artists take a crack at these what now at some point they become cultural property and they're in the mix and i think we do these works of disservice by sort of keeping them under lock and key for so long i agree like if an ad you know if an adaptation or a reimagining of something isn't good it just fades away yeah the original text is still there it doesn't damage the original one and a good one does reenliven the discourse yeah i like that my hot take is who would dare issue a hot take about persoval everett i feel like if you even try persoval everett just appears and is like you rang do you want to defend yourself well he himself i had my bullet point as a rejointer years because he himself said he would be interested in a scathing review i don't think there were any scathing reviews of this no but i would imagine that would sort of be like the the court jester on the throne sort of playing with the balling oh that's yeah you know like uh-huh interesting huh oh yeah you didn't like that dance you know like i don't even think there's it'd be like fighting a ghost like i don't know they could land a punch necessarily in there yeah i didn't come across any scathing reviews of this yeah there weren't scathing there was maybe one or two that were like pretty good but that's that's the the worst one i i guess the the the point you just made that in a in 150 years this book will be 150 years old which is sounds like a tautology but i say that because at some point a rejoinder to this you know maybe from sammy's point of view sammy who is the 15 year old slave who's been i don't know how to sammy's a girl girl is important to say sexually abused and was born in this pit and she escapes with james for like is it even a day it's very short very short before she's shot and killed and there's a moment between norman of james of like wondering about like was that the right thing to do yeah right because she could have lived a life and then james like was that a life and right they move on but you can imagine someone saying that's that's where i want to center my story and i think there's more there and what were her for 15 years like and something else that goes on anyway further reading readalikes books inspired by this one etc rebecca what did you i mean if if you want to go into like serious land on the underground railroad by colson whitehead and let us descend by jasmine ward both also go some of our best contemporary american novelists writing unflinching depictions of slavery the one that's closest to like the vibe of persoval everett or the tone of this book though i think is the sellout by paul baby which we will have a great time doing on this show someday but it's about a person who is wrestling with the inward in huck finn and their solution is that they change every appearance of it to like warrior um and other seemingly positive or euphemistic terms and the absurdity of that escalates to a wonderful effect if you've not read paul baby that's a great experience that's a really good one i think those are all makes sense i think underground railroad for those of you don't know it has not unlike james a central conceit which is this one is like this other language of black people and that one was what if the underground railroad was a real train railroad not just a metaphor for getting people from the south to the north quite quite wonderful magic realism happening there so i have two that are coming at it from different angles one is margaret at was the panellope ad which in hot greek summer that's coming i'm sure people will look at to this one again it is a retelling of the odyssey from panellope's perspective panellope if you don't know odyssey's wife who has spent 20 years keeping dudes at bay through trickeration and and frankly men not understanding how art's how weaving works yeah really not really not caring about women's interests gets me to like to really get some mileage out of it at the same time there's been a lot of greek retellings in the years since i don't i mean i guess outside i guess seer see and then song of achilles song of achilles those are the two that i think have stood up i don't think stood up the best that just have more energy around them like they just sold a lot people talk about them but margaret atwood's panellope had someone who's been interested in mythology and fables and world building a specfic and also not unlike everett has done all kinds of different writing that's a great point yeah i've not read the panellope ad maybe i'll put it on my long list for the summer it's good um the other one i'm going to go into my my old um literary historians bag and suggest the autobiography an x-coloured man by james welden johnson which is a novel published in 1912 by james welden johnson who's a black man but interestingly it was published anonymously so there's this so this story who of a man passing but it has this episodic nature not unlike rafaelisons invisible man or this book specifically james but it's also about passing moving in between and around navigating american racial stereotypes and violence and policing but because it was anonymous like is this true is this not true a real jester moment ahead of its time uh was republished a little bit later it didn't get very good reviews i think because it was ahead of its time i i'd love to know if perso levitt has ever encountered that book but in reading it it's been 20 years since i've read it i have to say i was like wow they published this in 1912 it was 1912 let me double check this yeah 1912 and republished in 1927 during the harlem renaissance when there was a flowering of interest in stories by and about black people in the 1927 edition i believe knopf published it and that it had his name on it i think it's also just fascinating that james is published by double day which is a member of the knopf double day published so like it's in a linear like a literary lineage as well at the same time so if you're if you're a real wreck you might check out i'd have our next colored man by james ralton johnson cocktail party crib sheet rebecca gosh okay you can say that the satire here allows everett to convey the absurdity of slavery with unflinching observation but also through a lens that's more digestible and actually entertaining like it's strange to say but the book is very entertaining and all of that is itself a comment on the uses and limits of art like he's using his book to do all these things and then to talk about doing all of these things we've talked also about how what counts as adventure for a white person is a harrowing fight for survival for a black person and the risk has then different definitions and different stakes james writing himself into being and discovering that freedom of reading and writing made me think about what we talked about with orwell that intellectual freedom is the root of all other freedoms rushed into it yeah and that if you ever think you have your arms all the way around persoeveret you have gone astray i love that point i think i had similarly that this entertaining piece you know and gladiator like the meme of like are you not are you not entertained i think if you find yourself entertained by a section you might imagine everett sort of on the side with her elbow up saying oh that in that's what entertains you so oh so you're entertained that's entertaining right you know that there's more going on there and that when you find something pleasurable that might be the moment to engage your critical consciousness because you it's very easy to engage your critical conscious when something irritates you and rages you so you feel yourself being provoked it's much more difficult to engage your critical consciousness when you're being entertained or you find something pleasurable or good at the same time and i think there's a yeah to pause the minstrel showness element of this the performative nature for white people on the part of black people might give especially white readers of this pause when they say how entertaining it is and that includes me and you and yes yeah at the same time yeah we're in the web we're in the web but just knowing you're in the web is step zero i don't know how to get out of the web but the first thing is a boy nice web you got here i'm kind of happy to just be stuck in the person for like i don't know personally uh and i have here that like you said before great everett's great grandmother was at one point enslaved so this shit is just not that far away uh final beat a zero to well read score each one gets a score from one to ten with ten being the highest the five categories are historical importance readability current relevance of central questions book nerd read credit oh damn factor i expect extremely high score here yes rebecca the historical importance is probably the the week is just because we're it's hard to know it's 20 months away yeah it's just hard to know where this is going to sit but it's also hard to imagine that this doesn't stay in the pantheon so i think i predict like a nine ten but at this moment it's at an eight five i had eight as like i think anything that's less than two years old essentially can top out it can only be eight okay you know higher at this point for me readability i mean it's extremely readable but there are some landmines of harrowing things which make it difficult in that regard having said that eight and a half nine i think eight let's go with nine it's high yeah like if you're a reader of literature you've read scenes of difficult things before right these are rendered as well as you can right i think current relevance of central questions this is a difficult one because race of course is always a part of the american discourse but couched in historical context and then nested within reflections in response to a 150 year old book like it's a 10 in a six like somewhere i don't know i think it's just a 10 okay yeah okay i'm not mad at that okay great book nerd read kind of think is a little bit lower just because it has been so popular it was lauded right away so like that you went out of your way to read james is not really a thing for someone who reads literary it was i remember read the first time i was reading it reading part of it on a plane and the person next to me leaning across the aisle and being like isn't it good and i was like yes we're in a club but that doesn't happen that often no it doesn't so i don't know five or six i think any novel that is a literary retelling of huck finn with a high concept has to be at least a six okay but let's go everywhere most people have but here's the other thing most people haven't heard of it i don't know six i'm happy in there yeah we'll give it a six the oh damn factor it's 10 for me 25 yeah yeah it's a 10 for me it's a 10 ever it can do things i don't know that every i know that ever it can do things that aren't possible and yet i'm still surprised i can say nothing more than that yeah it's one of those experiences with art that makes you feel like you're levitating at moments it's incredible makes you feel like you're smart which is which you gotta watch out for be careful out there yeah no one get hurt don't be a hero come join us on patreon.com.com.com. For detailed show notes our free newsletter and membership options including listening us to gab about the office hours sections we'll talk more about james and i think look at some of his peers living great american writers and who could win a Nobel which is just a way of talking about who is foremost amongst our most esteemed writers follow us on socials at zero to well read podcast including youtube instagram and other folks other places out there shoot an email zero to well read at bookread.com it doesn't matter where you are in your listening journey you could be listening to gatsby should just react to that yeah it could be we just got an email about the secret history yeah we did so that we're always welcome there we'll do a mailbag episode there if you have a timelese thing i may respond to you i try to respond to a lot of those though i don't get to all of them thanks to thrift books for sponsoring this season of zero to well read go check out thriftbooks.com where you can find well now maybe you can get some hard covers used because now the paperback's out i don't know i have a signed first edition i don't really do that but james and evrit you're going to be happy that you're holding on to that yeah yeah also zero to well read is a proud member of the airwave podcast network rebecca we did it we've done this book twice but we actually got one in the can i'm so happy me too a delight always glad for personal effort