Books: James

The picaresque novel is an enduring literary tradition that’s been holding readers in rapt attention since the 1550s. It typically features a plucky protagonist of low social standing narrating a series of (usually) first-person adventures that may or may not be related or linear but that together compose a tale of self-discovery or personal growth and almost always of biting social commentary.

 
Think Miguel de Cervantes’ 1605 Don Quixote, Voltaire’s 1759 Candide, Mark Twain’s 1884 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ralph Ellison’s 1952 Invisible Man … and on a grander, more modern scale, every book series, soap opera, sitcom and movie franchise that eventually uses the word “universe.”

Twain’s Huckleberry Finn follows the adventures (or at least the extraordinary experiences) of a young white boy in the antebellum (pre-Civil War) South who runs away to escape his abusive father and along the way joins forces with the runaway slave Twain calls N****r Jim, who’s escaping all the horrors you’d expect a human slave to want to escape from.

 
Twain narrates the novel exclusively through Huck Finn’s perspective as he and Jim raft down the Mississippi and encounter bounty hunters looking for Jim, charlatans, hostile crowds, distant family members (and other massive coincidences), love interests, and a host of other people and situations that hold them back and propel them forward to a number of discoveries—the most notable being Huck’s (and our) deeper understanding the cruelties and horrors of slavery.

But it’s told completely through the lens of a white man of privilege.

 
Percival Everett's 2024 novel James revisits Huck and Jim’s picaresque narrative and tells it entirely from Jim’s perspective. The fact that Everett has Jim call himself James (out of earshot of white people when necessary) is the first layer of the dignity, humanity and imperfect complexity he brings to the man as he and Huck stumble from horrors to joys to near misses to more horrors on their way through the antebellum South.

 
It’s not a spoiler to say that he gives James the ability to read and write. Or that he often strays far from Twain’s original narrative, especially as he fills in the blanks in James’ life during the times Twain has him separated from Huck.

 
I hate that my review of this book is mostly about the white literary history and context instead of James’ experience as a black man. But the book is so full of rich details and poignant moments and random brushes with history and a level of experience I could never possibly understand as a white man that I don’t want to decide for people what parts of it are mine to divulge.

 
I’ll leave it at this: The character James that Everett creates in the book is so compelling and so human that I was immediateky invested in everything he says, thinks, observes and does. And I know enough about the original Huck Finn story that I was often filled with dread about the things I knew awaited James as I read. Everett even gives the secondary and tertiary characters James and Huck meet on their picaresque journeys enough humanity and dignity that they stuck with me long after they had fulfilled their literary purposes and he’d left them behind.

James is one of two novels by black authors about black experiences I’ve been reading simultaneously during Black History Month. It is at times a very tough read. It alternates between gorgeously crafted prose and dry, jagged exposition as situations dictate. It’s filled with characters Everett gives deep intrinsic value with small, masterful brush strokes.

And it’s definitely something I’ll read again.