RFBC #25: James
Percival Everett’s novel is not your father’s Huckleberry Finn.
Ernest Hemingway wrote, “All modern literature comes from one book by Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn.” H.L. Mencken wrote, “I believe Huckleberry Finn is one of the great masterpieces of the world, that it is the full equal of Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe.” James Joyce nicked some phrases from Huckleberry Finn “to give it some American color.” It’s been banned from some schools and removed from required reading lists because it’s filled with racial epithets. For some, it’s the greatest anti-racist novel ever written by an American author.
And for Percival Everett, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the jumping off point for James: more a reimagining than a retelling of the classic Mark Twain novel. James is told from the point-of-view of Jim, the runaway slave who accompanied Huck on his adventures. But if you come to James expecting Jim to be the character Twain painted him to be—well, you’re in for a surprise.
So it should be no surprise at all that James—nominated for the 2024 Booker Prize—is a book we’d want to discuss at Radio Free Book Club. That’s exactly what we did for our August 2024 show. Please know that there are spoilers for James on the other side of the photo below—and in the podcast of our show, which you can find in your streaming app of choice. Please give us a listen and let us know what you think.
Show notes:
The RFBC crew for our August 2024 show was Indianapolis writer Ken Honeywell; digital marketing genius and accomplished book summarizer Christine Hudson; writer/director/poet and Mark Twain enthusiast Tim Taylor; and English professor/author Sarah Layden. Our show was recorded at Listen Hear in Indianapolis and produced by our friend Galileo for 99.1 WQRT-LP.
Percival Everett’s having a moment. The 2024 Academy Awards Best Picture nominee American Fiction was adapted from Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, and James was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. Erasure also landed on the New York Times list of 100 Best Books of the 21st Century at number 20.
It’s not Huckleberry Finn. Twain’s novel is only a jumping-off point for James. By the middle of the book, the plots have diverged completely, with James heading into much darker, much realer territory. Interestingly, neither Christine nor Sarah nor Ken had read Huckleberry Finn as a student, so it was great to have Tim, who’d read it double-digit times, as our in-house Mark Twain scholar. As he put it these are separate journeys you really can’t even compare to one another.
James was written in Emmett’s notebook. As Sarah pointed out, James opens with a declaration that we are looking at “The Notebook of Daniel Decatur Emmett” and some handwritten song lyrics. This doesn’t mean anything until James encounters Emmett—an historical figure, and the author of “Dixie”—and his blackface minstrel troupe. James has the stub of a pencil and steals Emmett’s notebook, leaving us with the idea that James was James’s handwritten account of his story as told in that very notebook. Brilliant.
The boiler scene blew us away. It was foremost in our minds when we talked about memorable scenes and characters. Brock, who stoked the steamship boiler without ever eating or sleeping, who made the ship go, was a character who evoked our sorrow and pity and anger. And as Christine observed, when the ship blew up, the whole story blew up. The action was fast and furious after that: James reclaiming the notebooks, the return to Hannibal and the rape of Katie, the murder of Overseer Hopkins, the confrontation and abduction of Judge Thatcher, the siege of the breeding operation—a breathless ride to the end of the book.
Would we recommend it? We would. All four of us praised James as both stunningly good and important. Christine ranked it as one of the most important works ever written about the African-American experience. Sarah noted that all four of us were affected not only intellectually and emotionally but physically by the book.
Bonus recommendations: Tim recommended reading Huckleberry Finn as an adult—and any collection of the shorter works of Mark Twain that includes “The Mysterious Stranger” and “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg” as his greatest statements on the human condition. Christine recommended other classics of the African-American experience, including W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, bel hooks’s Ain’ I a Woman, and A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave—alone with Amor Towles’s new book of short fiction, Table for Two. Sarah recommended Baracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston, Kindred by Octavia Butler, and Claire Keegan’s short fiction collection So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men. Ken, a latecomer to Iris Murdoch, recommended the rollicking good time that is The Black Prince.
Next month: We can’t seem to go too long without talking about some kind of time travel novel. Thank goodness Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time is one of the big books of the year—and the topic of our September 2024 show. We hope you’ll give us a listen.
