transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] 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. I'm looking at 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'Neal.

Speaker 2:
[00:59] And I'm Rebecca Schinsky. 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.

Speaker 1:
[01:10] 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 bookdale, which maybe we'll get into a little bit here. There's some publishing imprint stuff that's interesting 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 get 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.

Speaker 2:
[02:24] 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 the 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.

Speaker 3:
[02:53] That's unbelievable.

Speaker 2:
[02:55] Two years is a really, really wide window. And it indicates that there was runway for this. People were willing to 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.

Speaker 1:
[03:15] 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-free episodes and bonus content, you can go patreon.com/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 wellread at bookrat.com. We use mail bags. I respond to people directly. A lot of nice comments there. I got a review the other day on Apple Podcast saying, this podcast is single-handedly up my reading life or upgraded or whatever. Love to see that. If you have a moment to review, that's wonderful. But even just five seconds to hit the five stars, Apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever you listen is really great there. Rebecca, I guess synopsis first and then we'll talk about the moment this came out, I think makes the most sense.

Speaker 2:
[04:04] I think we've got to do some synopsis stuff and we'll do the non-spoiler section and then a spoiler section. If you really don't want to be spoiled about James, you'll have a chance to 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 going to separate him from his wife and daughter, which is unthinkable, untenable for him. 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 going to 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' 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.

Speaker 1:
[05:43] 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, you know, 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 encountering Percival Everett, which we will get into here as well. So the more you know, the more you are going to get out of it, you got to be careful with Percival Everett. 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 are some of both. You can see where there is wholesale invention. We will get to this, but there is 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 is a collision of performance and vision and identity and all the things I think Everett is most interested in colliding into this soup that is so hard to figure out where you are, the more you have, the better. But it is 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.

Speaker 2:
[07:26] 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 going to 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 want to 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.

Speaker 1:
[08:27] There's a spoiler alarm here. So there's two things, right, Rebecca? Do you want to take one and I'll take the other? I don't know. Right. How do you want to go? Why don't you take the first one? I'll do the best.

Speaker 2:
[08:35] 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. When we first see James, he is talking in early 19th century African American vernacular. What you would have seen in Mark Twain's book, the way that Jim spoke in the book.

Speaker 1:
[09:05] Jim's dialogue in Huck Finn is I think very much what he's going for here.

Speaker 2:
[09:09] He's speaking to white people and then we see him retreat to a room with other black people, with other slaves. That's the language that he uses in the book rather than the contemporary enslaved person. So we're going to use Everett's language throughout this episode. But he turns to other slaves and he starts speaking in very formal, highly educated English. And we find out, this happens in 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.

Speaker 1:
[10:13] 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 the 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 Jim, his relationship to Huck is paternal, but it's also not paternal. Like it's complicated. I think that's we're going to see. You're going to say that's a lot of times is it's complicated. Then Huck has to reckon with what that means and then his optionality, right? Because 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. 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. He has a burgeoning critical consciousness and a beginner's mind about morality. That turns out to be right more or less. In here, 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? Then what that means for Jim and James. I think it's interesting that even in hearing us talk about it, we're going to be flipping back before it between Jim and James. 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, my name is James. 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, inner revocable action, I would say. Yes. At the end, 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 sounds as bad as it can possibly be, and stages an insurrection. It's the early days of the American Civil War, so there's other things going on 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. That's part of the appropriation, reimagining, revisioning of whatever it is doing in James. I think those are the three big changes. Now, there's other inventions inside questions, 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 did a little bit of why it's important, but let's do accolades and acclaim, Rebecca. What scoreboarding did you do for the best of the book of the year? Oh my gosh.

Speaker 2:
[13:14] 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 going to be the book of the year. 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. 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 wordplay 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, basically just for the sake of zagging.

Speaker 1:
[14:17] That was the Boys of Riverside, right? I think it was that year. Yes.

Speaker 2:
[14:19] 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. 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 Reader's List. Recent and powerful, 540,000 plus Goodreads ratings, with an average of 4.42 stars, which is 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.

Speaker 4:
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Speaker 2:
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Speaker 1:
[18:51] You see, you have here that's not a critique of Huck Finn or Mark Twain. Like it is it's a revisioning like Everett respects, understands Twain and Huck Finn as well as anybody. And part of that is seeing what he Twain did and did not see, especially about black people. So as a work of art, he really respects it as a cultural document. He also sees the way that it's limited. 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 say 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 or the Aristotle, 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 reading things and repurposing things that were sort of around, right? Really, it's really with the invention of copyright and 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 2, in the Book of Don Quixote, false dons from other Don Quixotes appear, right?

Speaker 2:
[20:27] It's like a I am sorry, this moment.

Speaker 1:
[20:28] A very personal everything to do, right? Yeah. 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 want to do something interesting, right? You want to 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 want to transition that. It's a really good one from Everett.

Speaker 2:
[21:15] 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 acknowledgments 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 enshrining 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. It's Huck Finn is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This book is not called The Adventures of James. Like what looks like adventure to Huck is constant threat.

Speaker 1:
[22:21] Cormac McCrorthy like the road survival is horrorscape.

Speaker 2:
[22:25] 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 went from the perspective of a few hundred years later and being a black person himself can see.

Speaker 1:
[22:46] 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.

Speaker 2:
[23:04] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[23:05] And both the Repertization 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's James on that book, which is really powerful and interesting. This is what literary history can do.

Speaker 2:
[23:32] I love this point.

Speaker 1:
[23:33] 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'm 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 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 out before Dr. No, which is a kind of not a dissimilar perspective, though the execution is different, of like a James Bond type spy novel like Dr. No, but it's about, I think it's as infinity or nothing, which is the big idea in that, like it's an Everett sort of mind bender at the same time. The Trees, which it came out before, which is metaphors about lynching and not metaphors about lynching. And then of course Erasure, his book, which gets 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. He says he didn't really care. 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, I remember saying to you at the time, what else, you couldn't write this plot, Lauren, for Everett's career any more deterministically than this. It's almost unbelievable at this moment.

Speaker 2:
[25:18] It is. It really is. Yeah, I was surprised to learn doing my research for this episode that his debut novel, Suiter, 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 Award 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 it is incredibly cool to see. And he's got dozens and dozens of books. 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 master's 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.

Speaker 1:
[27:00] If you want to entertain yourself for a good five to 10 minutes, it's, it's a good reading experience just to read the descriptions of his books on his Wikipedia page. Like it's like, 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 AB 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 Percival Everett's Heart of Hearts, what the reason was. I'm sure he got a huge check. Maybe at the time the book came out, and certainly while I was writing it, he had younger kids. He's like an older, his kids are like 13 and 15 and he's 67. So that can change your dynamic 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 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. 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 in front of 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, if I could make the universe where I want, we see on Booktalk and Bookstagram right now, some author will blow up and they have a huge backlist and then all the books.

Speaker 2:
[28:34] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[28:35] That's the world I want to live in.

Speaker 2:
[28:37] But Percival Everett.

Speaker 1:
[28:37] I am not Cindy Poitier and the Trees and Dr. No are number three, four, and five of the best-selling books of 2026 because Booktalk got a hold of it. But I'm afraid that's not the world we live in right now.

Speaker 2:
[28:49] But of those dozens of books that he's written, having been with a small publisher for most of his career didn't hold him back. Erasure from 2001 was well-recognized at the time and then, as you said, became the American fiction film. I am not Sydney Poitier from 2009, another one that he's best known for, where the main character's name is not Sydney Poitier. Just incredible Percival Everett shit. Then The Trees from 2021 is the other of the big three of Percival Everett. But across this career, he's been nominated for just about every literary award there is. The Trees was a finalist for the 2022 Booker Prize. Then of course, he won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer for James, as we said. 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 the idea that you can just be enrolled at USC and take a class with Percival Everett.

Speaker 1:
[30:00] Can you imagine turning a short story to Percival Everett? I don't know.

Speaker 2:
[30:03] Absolutely not.

Speaker 1:
[30:04] 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 Sunday.

Speaker 2:
[30:12] 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 the students are workshopping someone else's short story. And the students are kind of like, I don't really 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.

Speaker 1:
[30:49] There is a, the jester is smarter than the king dynamic with Everett. 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.

Speaker 2:
[31:01] Oh yeah.

Speaker 1:
[31:01] Is this, what is going on? Right, is this, it could be the real dope. This could be the actual, you know, the honest confessions, musings, observations of the real Percival Everett. I would also believe 100% of the time it's him playing a character in his own mind named Percival Everett. Percival Everett 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 present as much as anything is that sense of possibility, the interpretive richness, the linguistic playfulness in creation, like the philosophical range that he brings to bear. I mean, sort of everything's on the table to consider, think about and happen to us and for us in a Percival Everett book. It really reminds me of George Saunders in a lot of ways. Like I was thinking about the career where Lincoln and the Barrow 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 Barrow, 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 flipping awesome. And I think I get that with James and Everett, especially at this particular moment. So exciting for us.

Speaker 2:
[32:20] 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.

Speaker 1:
[32:28] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[32:28] So like all of the warnings.

Speaker 1:
[32:29] But it's like saying I am a liar. Right. Like I don't know what to do with that.

Speaker 2:
[32:32] I think he's just 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. 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 has demonstrated that he can move around between genres. Every book is different from every other one in his oeuvre. But there's something exciting about each one. I am so far from my completionist reading of Percival Everett.

Speaker 1:
[33:38] And I feel great about this. I've got a bunch to do too. Yeah, that's so exciting.

Speaker 2:
[33:41] Yeah, 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 too. But in my understanding, there's not a stinker among the bunch, which is also great news.

Speaker 1:
[33:54] 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 this our own experience of reading and what it's 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 can happen to a people, a culture that allows them to perpetuate and, I guess, authorize and enjoy even 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 Huck is not the downy innocent 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. There is something to that inquiry and that sweetness and innocence and ignorance of Huck, and those are all things together, that's retained and troubled to some degree, but it's still there. That Huck can do this means that not all is lost to some degree.

Speaker 2:
[35:28] Yeah, I think Everett is ironic but not cynical.

Speaker 1:
[35:34] Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2:
[35:34] And 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 the most justifiable reasons in the world. But the book is not an angry, cynical read of humans. It comes from a place of warmth and of belief 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 I read it.

Speaker 1:
[36:10] 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 not just his place.

Speaker 2:
[36:24] And that's a thing that Everett himself said, that it's Twain's humor and humanity that drove him. And I think you can see humor and humanity throughout this book.

Speaker 1:
[36:32] 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 podcast. So this is our second go-around 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.

Speaker 2:
[36:48] No, I just remember getting on the mic to record that book club episode and being like, okay, we both loved it, right?

Speaker 1:
[36:54] Yeah, right.

Speaker 2:
[36:55] Great.

Speaker 1:
[36:56] 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 to do.

Speaker 2:
[37:13] It really is. But I remember the feeling of those first five pages, sitting down and starting it and seeing James talking in what they call slave language or the slave dialect, and then switching into his actual educated dialect, and being like, this is what we're going to do here, all right. That just was the first thing that really lit me up about, okay, Percival Everett, here we go, 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 skill.

Speaker 1:
[38:03] And then it feels like a piece, that you go from horrible racial and sexual violence to not, to not that at the same time. I don't know, and we'll 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 it's 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 sort of a, I don't know, almost a sidecar 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 minstrelshe 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.

Speaker 2:
[39:17] What a thing he gets away with. Like the code switching really literalizes the dual consciousness that WEB. Du Bois wrote about, of black people experiencing in America. And then I found New York Times linguist, writer John McQuarter 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 in guiltily finding it hard to feel Twain's Jim or the less educated black characters in Uncle Tom's cabin, because even without outright distortions, their speech seems so unfamiliar.

Speaker 1:
[39:52] Yeah, it's distancing. That's right.

Speaker 2:
[39:53] Yeah. And that allowing James to speak in language that people who are picking up a Percival Everett book understand and are expecting from a work of literary fiction does draw us closer in to really see this full humanity that Everett's giving him. And then there is like, the side car 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 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 is shackled, and he talks about the nostalgic terror of being shackled, this memory in his body of that. But that those things are happening in and around, and sometimes because of the absurd silly things that happened in the story is just such a monumental feat.

Speaker 1:
[41:29] So I think, you know, the double conscious, Du Bois' idea of double conscious, I'm glad you put that here, just for people who 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, 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? So that's 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 that are 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, is to sort of defeat these demons of Western philosophical thought that have authorized or otherwise downplayed even as like, 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.

Speaker 2:
[43:10] Right.

Speaker 1:
[43:11] 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.

Speaker 2:
[43:18] 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.

Speaker 1:
[43:30] And why that works, right? Like they think this way, but what that means for them.

Speaker 2:
[43:34] Yeah, so it's not just like that you drop the Gs 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 lets them-

Speaker 1:
[43:48] That's an amazing sequence.

Speaker 2:
[43:49] Right? That you have to do it in a certain way where you have to 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 keeps them safe but they also push the edges of it and seek to subvert it wherever they can.

Speaker 1:
[44:32] Because the ultimate knowledge is if they were to perform, at least in the context of this book, their full humanity to use their standard English, to show that Jim especially can write, that 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 that 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 dignity and 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 it has to be this way or it can't be at all. And that's the thing that James himself sees. And that I think Huck quite beautifully 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 interested in at that moment.

Speaker 2:
[46:04] At the time.

Speaker 1:
[46:04] Because we see Huck, he's this kid, he's like, I like Jim. That's as simple as it is, Rebecca. He's my friend. That's as simple as it is in Huck Finn.

Speaker 2:
[46:12] 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 this man has been horrible to him. James is pointing a gun at him and is speaking in his real voice. 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 that's the thing that is really frightening. Because if this person is intelligent, if he can speak in this way, I don't have as much power as I thought.

Speaker 1:
[47:07] Right. 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. That Huck, no other white character in the book, in my memory, recognizes their own limitations of understanding, but then tries to re-engage. That's 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 here, that because he is Jim's son and then part black or not, like how much is essentialist or not, or how much Huck is just Huck and his own interiority, his own upbringing, Jim being around him from 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 to, there's a scene where Jim becomes part of this minstrel troupe, and the signification, the layers of irony and representation there are almost too 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.

Speaker 2:
[48:18] Like he had to get into whiteface to get into blackface.

Speaker 1:
[48:20] 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.

Speaker 2:
[48:39] Yeah, on the surface.

Speaker 1:
[48:40] 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 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. You 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 it. And then it makes you more gullible, right? One of the great things about the Duke and Dauphin, 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, Rebecca.

Speaker 2:
[49:36] Yeah, it really is. And it's funny. And then you're like, am I allowed to think this is funny?

Speaker 1:
[49:42] Yes, it's like gallows humor on every level.

Speaker 2:
[49:44] And then, okay, 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, 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 rich and controversial look.

Speaker 1:
[50:20] And still, it's still a current, it's during this like how to talk, how to not talk about and talk about black people's hair.

Speaker 2:
[50:26] 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 just 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.

Speaker 1:
[50:52] Well, in that particular character, this white person says to Jim earlier in that scene, you know, I can smell a slave from 50 yards, I know 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... He really doesn't understand how anything works. And that's why that moment really launches into part two of the book, which is much more chaotic, it's much more... The whole thing is dangerous, 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 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, it's not... I think it's not nothing that we get the first rumblings of the civil wars 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 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 iPad. 300 pages. It's 284 pages, my hardcover's 300. It reads quickly, I read it in like three hours.

Speaker 2:
[52:29] 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 gonna discover it this time around. The plot is much more straightforward than a lot of Percival 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 picking up other Percival Everett and finding out really how tricky this guy is.

Speaker 1:
[53:03] Right. Right.

Speaker 2:
[53:05] Just 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.

Speaker 1:
[53:29] I think that brings us to straight thought time, Rebecca. Where would you like to begin?

Speaker 2:
[53:33] 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 US? 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 of American society and that history of racism. I thought about that a lot.

Speaker 1:
[54:06] I love this point. When 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, like where my own head versus heart versus gut knowledge is intermingle, but also what the limitations of those are. This one, 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 Vizini in this context for all you Princess Brideheads out there. 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 has 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 Huck Finn and American literary tradition. But I think 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 too.

Speaker 2:
[55:35] 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 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.

Speaker 1:
[56:38] These are not mistakes. This layering and complexity and depth. Right.

Speaker 2:
[56:41] 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.

Speaker 1:
[56:50] 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 the straight thought I had too 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.

Speaker 2:
[57:09] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[57:09] 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, 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, suggest movement is impossible. Therefore, the category itself is only contingent.

Speaker 2:
[57:36] Like Huck having to decide at the end of the book, which categories he wants to exist in or move between.

Speaker 1:
[57:43] We're getting to decide. I mean, even if you change the verb right there, maybe is as interesting as anything. That's a great point. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[57:48] Other straight thoughts. It just surprised me on this read how early Everett starts dropping the breadcrumbs about Jim being Huck's father. I don't remember picking up on that as early in my first reading. We can ring the bell for Shakespeare references, 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 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 think he is at the top of my list of writer teachers whose classes I would like to sit in on, but absolutely not be graded by.

Speaker 1:
[58:32] Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Of course, The Merchant of Venice, 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 Jews in this, like it 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 in to the Western canon sort of 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, but I think because we know that there's a loaf of bread at the end of the breadcrumbs on a second reread, 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? And I was just thinking of 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? Yeah. That the world, his own identity is not simple and the world is not simple, and then what do you do with that? Because at the end of Huck Finn, the book, Huck, 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 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, I was like I would have, I'm not a writer, I was expecting more of a elusive suggestion that it's a possibility where Everett's like, no, this is true, but what does it mean? And I found that thrilling, but I just, I don't know. That's why I'm not a writer, I guess.

Speaker 2:
[60:53] I liked that, I mean, I think James even acknowledges that for himself that he tells Huck 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 the thing he's craving there is that if he tells Huck the truth, he's hoping that Huck will come, will 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's not one and he doesn't want to be one. Am I going to have to become a slave now because I'm black? Are you going to tell people what's going to happen? That mapping of white anxiety about blackness and anxiety about race into this character 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 going to land.

Speaker 5:
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Speaker 2:
[62:43] Anywhere.

Speaker 3:
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Speaker 2:
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Speaker 3:
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Speaker 2:
[62:52] Hilton Honors, baby.

Speaker 3:
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Speaker 6:
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Speaker 7:
[63:09] K-Pop demon hunters Saja Boyz breakfast meal and Huntrix meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi?

Speaker 2:
[63:18] It's not a battle.

Speaker 4:
[63:19] So glad the Saja Boyz could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.

Speaker 6:
[63:23] It is an honor to share.

Speaker 7:
[63:25] No, it's our honor.

Speaker 6:
[63:27] It is our larger honor.

Speaker 7:
[63:28] No, really. Stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side.

Speaker 5:
[63:37] I participate in McDonald's while supplies last.

Speaker 1:
[63:39] Yeah. I think retellings have become a lot more popular of late. We're going to do some read-alikes 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. What other characters, I think, as we go through Zero to Well-Read, maybe that could be another category. Which character from this book could hold an interesting book link retelling? I don't have a good example here. Everything in Greece has already been done. We did Shylock here a minute before.

Speaker 2:
[64:13] All the Gatsby characters.

Speaker 1:
[64:15] Yeah. You could think about, there's a Daisy Buchanan book. There have been retellings of Huck Finn from Pa Finn's point of view, but not James's itself. I think that's something interesting to think about is, 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. Could Jordan Baker from The Great Gatsby? I think so. I think 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 re-engaging with American history from a modern sensibility about how we understand race and culture, and equality, and opportunity, and 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 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 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 as soon as they like, that's interesting. But how is this doing that? Like, how would a Percival Everett approach a founding father's story document? I thought was a fascinating thought experiment. I don't know.

Speaker 2:
[65:53] I love that question.

Speaker 1:
[65:54] Because I don't think Everett would have, clearly 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.

Speaker 2:
[66:06] I don't think so either.

Speaker 1:
[66:07] He would do something else.

Speaker 2:
[66:09] They could have some philosophical arguments for sure.

Speaker 1:
[66:12] Any other straight thoughts you want to do?

Speaker 2:
[66:14] No, that hits it for me. All right.

Speaker 7:
[66:16] Notable quotes.

Speaker 2:
[66:18] There are 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 proleptic irony or dramatic irony? 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 about you.

Speaker 1:
[67:05] Almost nothing people use irony for means irony.

Speaker 2:
[67:08] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[67:09] Proleptic 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 Oedipus saying, 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 it's going to happen. Dramatic irony is just, we know things that characters don't. So that's a, I think it's, like I spent a good six minutes on this paragraph. Like is it proleptic irony or like am I supposed to know?

Speaker 3:
[67:36] And does Everett know?

Speaker 1:
[67:37] And I'm like, this is a quiz. Like I really got.

Speaker 2:
[67:39] Percival Everett's ears were burning at that moment when he was like, somewhere there's a man spending six minutes on this exchange.

Speaker 1:
[67:46] I would love to know for the digital readers out there, like you can see where someone like pauses, right? Cause they're spending more time on this page. Do people bump on that at all? Or do they just blow completely away at that one time?

Speaker 2:
[67:57] Another great one, there's an interaction where James has talked with a white person who is like, 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 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.

Speaker 1:
[68:37] Yeah. Let's see. I can keep me a secret, Huck. I can keep you a 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 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 suggest otherwise would bring down the hammer, right? You're literally risking, maybe guaranteeing your own obliteration to trouble that. And 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 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. We're teaching this classroom of slave children, enslaved children, what the grammar, there's a grammar to Black Speech. There's a 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 Du Bois' idea, double-conscious, I remember it, is you don't ever learn, you don't ever have a moment where your mom says to you, you've got to like see through the eyes, like you just learn this through being 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?

Speaker 2:
[70:23] I mean, this is a really great book if you want quotes about the power of reading and writing.

Speaker 1:
[70:28] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[70:28] 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.

Speaker 1:
[71:07] At one scene, 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 paused to admire his metaphor, but he continued. So like it's both a metaphor and not 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 floor and clothes going at one time. Let's see. Of course, on one level was all too simple. That exacted revenge is every kills Judge Thatcher. 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 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? He is not an unthinking kind of person who's just sort of acting out.

Speaker 2:
[72:34] Gosh. 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's thrilling. That brought to mind the final scene of Sinners for me, a similar feeling of go get them.

Speaker 1:
[73:02] Like a cathartic, vengeful violence, righteous violence.

Speaker 8:
[73:05] Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[73:06] Just really wonderful. Anything else on quotes?

Speaker 1:
[73:09] I could go on all day. We better move along here.

Speaker 2:
[73:11] We really could. All right. So is this book for you? I think our answer here is yes.

Speaker 1:
[73:18] The caveat being it's trigger warning stuff.

Speaker 2:
[73:21] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[73:21] Sexual violence of all kinds, language of the time, representation, white people's understanding, representation, and moralizing about black people is on the page all throughout.

Speaker 2:
[73:34] One of the reviewers that I read referred to Everett as American literature's philosopher king. So if you want to see what that looks like and a person writing at the height of his powers, this is it. 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 Patchett 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.

Speaker 1:
[74:10] Immortal 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 applied to so many, but which are primary?

Speaker 2:
[74:38] You know, I mean, there's 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 we all owe each other? 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.

Speaker 1:
[75:12] Those are answered pretty quickly. There is no doubt. Amongst the slaves, when they're talking amongst themselves, the religion is just an excuse and it's convenient, but there's no God. That question is asked and answered, but it's certainly not primary.

Speaker 2:
[75:24] What's the deal with good and evil? Everett's not super interested in what's driving this and seems to agree with the contemporary answer that 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 the spiritual level with how do people arrive at doing something so evil, 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?

Speaker 1:
[75:59] I mean, the good life, it's interesting. I think if you think about a different world in which Jim is not told, like let's say that the Thatchers 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. 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. 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, violent, 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. The escape is sort of always on people's minds.

Speaker 2:
[77:06] And that one is one thing I thought about there.

Speaker 1:
[77:08] 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?

Speaker 2:
[77:22] 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.

Speaker 1:
[77:32] I don't know that you can get any more direct than that. Even for Percival Everett, that's pretty direct.

Speaker 2:
[77:37] Actually, this is one of my summary takes about this, but Everett 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 didactic or preachy or just annoying in some way, but he's so good at it.

Speaker 1:
[78:01] Yeah, why do you think it does work?

Speaker 2:
[78:02] I agree with you.

Speaker 1:
[78:03] It's a good point.

Speaker 2:
[78:04] I think that he's so good at it and that it is couched and coming through the experience that James is having, that it's not a third-person omniscient narrator telling us all of these things. But we are along for the ride as James comes into himself. I also think that Everett's just a master.

Speaker 1:
[78:29] Yeah, I think another thing that's possible is that there's other things going on beyond just this. Because I think this is actually right. I think one thing we could make the mistake of is equating any character with the author. This is James writing this, right? I exhorted us in other locations to be careful of when we get a character writing, because we think we're closer to the character. You are not. You are farther from the character, right? Because we get a lot of, this is what Jim is thinking. This is not this. This is what Jim is writing.

Speaker 2:
[78:57] Yes, and he's anticipating maybe then that someone will read it someday. Look, even here we are in Percival Everett's web.

Speaker 1:
[79:06] Right. And I'm very happy wriggling and ready to get my blood drained by a spider. But I think, you know, if you look at it, 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 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. It's not performed for us. Could you get the most out of watching the Signal Adaptation? Well, Rebecca, there isn't one, but-

Speaker 2:
[79:55] Oh, boy. Variety reported 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 Atiti 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 a casting announcement or anything else. Who knows? But also, my shoulders are up to my ears now, because what Atiti did adapt is She-Gurus, Clara and the Son. That film has been finished for months.

Speaker 1:
[80:45] We've heard nothing.

Speaker 2:
[80:46] Yeah, it was originally supposed to be coming out later this year, late 2026, and there has been nothing. I went on a side quest down movie buff Reddit rabbit holes.

Speaker 1:
[80:58] Wow, how was that?

Speaker 2:
[81:00] No one knows what's going on with Clara and the Son, 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 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. And of course, I'm just bringing bias here too. I am concerned about Taika Waititi adapting like big literary.

Speaker 1:
[81:26] Yeah, it could be the Summer Festivals. It could get in Telluride or something like that, that I don't know. Sometimes there's things coming up.

Speaker 2:
[81:31] But I'm nervous about this mixture. And this, the tone of this book is just hard to do.

Speaker 1:
[81:37] Well, that's a mind note is 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 that. Like what tonally feels like this?

Speaker 2:
[81:56] I don't know.

Speaker 1:
[81:56] 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.

Speaker 2:
[82:31] Yeah, it's just really a tough one to try to strike the tone. Barry Jenkins' 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 so straight ahead about the brutalities of slavery. And that's really important. Like, it took me like eight weeks to watch it. They dropped them all at once, which was quite a choice, but I had to really pace myself through taking that in. And that's a very challenging but less challenging work of translation than a book that has all of this movement between tone and absurdity and the layers of performance. I don't know, man.

Speaker 1:
[83:20] Even Sinners, which has some of that, the violence of that is heightened and supernatural in the form of this vampire thing. So there's some distance and 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.

Speaker 2:
[83:39] The thing I thought about a lot with considering adaptation was Rimmel Ross' adaptation of The Nickel Boys, which is shot through, did you ever see it?

Speaker 1:
[83:48] I never did. I never picked it up. I should.

Speaker 2:
[83:50] It's shot as if we are seeing the world through the eyes of the main character, like in their body. Maybe something that did that could work here where we were really in James' head through the story. But this is such a tough one. I want Percival Everett to get, if it's going to be adapted, I want it to be really, really good. Get your adaptation money, but I'm so worried about it.

Speaker 1:
[84:18] Yeah, I think the degree of difficulties is extraordinarily high. That's maybe the simplest way to put this here. A movie, musical TV series or Muppets, Muppets Clearly is the wrong answer. I think movie, I agree with you. You have movie here, maybe four or five episodes, but I think movies. It's not huge. It's not huge.

Speaker 9:
[84:34] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[84:34] If you're going to do it like a movie, you could do this in a two and a half hour movie, I think.

Speaker 1:
[84:40] All right, Rebecca, Miscellaneous Trivia, Adaptations, Rumors, Mr. Shaped with Quotes and more. You have the best one here.

Speaker 2:
[84:45] All right. This is one of only eight novels to ever win, both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Colson Whitehead did it in 2016 with Underground Railroad. The last time before that was in 1993, Annie Prews, The Shipping News. Jeff O'Neal, can you guess any of the other ones?

Speaker 1:
[85:08] I don't, was there a Roth?

Speaker 2:
[85:09] This is hard. There was not. Is there a Roth in there? No.

Speaker 1:
[85:16] That was the last, before, so we're in the 80s, 70s and 80s and 60s and stuff.

Speaker 2:
[85:21] Yeah. The last one before the Shipping News was in the 80s.

Speaker 1:
[85:24] I want to say like Sal Bellow or like Humboldt's Gift or something like that. Something from the, I don't know, that's the best I could do. Nothing jumps to mind.

Speaker 2:
[85:30] Yeah. So, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Rabbit is Rich, John Updike, The Fixer by Bernard Malamud, The Collected Stories of Katherine Ann Porter.

Speaker 1:
[85:41] Oh yeah. Right.

Speaker 2:
[85:43] And then, A Fable by William Faulkner. And what I think is interesting-

Speaker 1:
[85:48] Which I have not read.

Speaker 2:
[85:49] Me neither. About this, not only that it's really rare to win both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer. One of the reasons that's rare is that those awards value different things. Pulitzers 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 Percival Everett do it and Colson Whitehead do it. And then, that The Color Purple is one of them. Of these eight novels, to ring both bells, three of them are concerned with race in America, which the most, again-

Speaker 1:
[86:26] Three of the last four, because the Color Purple is like 84, 82.

Speaker 2:
[86:30] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[86:31] What year was that?

Speaker 2:
[86:31] Early 80s. Yeah. So, yeah. Underground Railroad, The Color Purple and James. But three of those eight, really incredible.

Speaker 1:
[86:40] Apparently, Percival Everett had the idea for this while playing tennis, and he just thought, has anyone told Huck Finn from Jim's point of view?

Speaker 2:
[86:48] Love it.

Speaker 1:
[86:49] There's a famous story of Murakami, Hiroki Murakami, deciding to be a writer during a baseball game, like one particular flyballist is like, I think I should be a novelist. So again, I'm just very careful of these dudes, man.

Speaker 2:
[87:01] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[87:01] 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 that.

Speaker 2:
[87:09] It's strange. Then for folks who do pick up the book, the leader of the minstrel troupe in the book is named Daniel Decatur Emmett. That's a real person. He was a real American songwriter who did indeed perform in Blackface. So Everett has pulled him out of history and brought him into fiction here.

Speaker 1:
[87:26] 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.

Speaker 2:
[87:39] I had forgotten that too.

Speaker 1:
[87:40] We might go into a hot take here, actually. Maybe as we'll... orthogonal hot take. Teach Huck Finn, Racial Epithet and All. So in this book, Everett uses the N-word. Like 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 your, 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, this menstrual 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 well, 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. So if they are powerful, deal with them, take them on, do something to them.

Speaker 2:
[88:57] Yeah, I totally agree. And like, not for nothing, most of the public complaints about Huck Finn that have led to bannings are white parents complaining that it makes their white kids feel bad about themselves.

Speaker 1:
[89:09] In those cases, I say teach it twice. That is my opinion of that particular one.

Speaker 2:
[89:13] Once a week and twice on Sunday. Yeah, and Everett's on board with that. I mean, even Toni Morrison said that she thought that Huck Finn was a perfect novel because it replicates the society that it's about. And that it has problems because of course it does, because it comes out of an American society that is founded on racist ideas. And that is the water that we existed. We can't get out of it.

Speaker 1:
[89:34] And I think it regrounds us in what the past was. This is what it was. There's no whitewashing or sugarcoating or whatever kind of metaphor you want to use. That's what it is, because otherwise you get these revisionist forgettings.

Speaker 2:
[89:47] And especially now that James exists, being able to teach them side by side of here is what it looks like when a white writer who was interested in humanity and was a critic of the institutions of slavery, here is 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. This is just not that far in the rear view mirror. Teach them side by side and show what it looks like for someone to write a character who has 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.

Speaker 10:
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Speaker 9:
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Speaker 11:
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Speaker 8:
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Speaker 11:
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Speaker 1:
[91:37] Yeah, another hot take of mine. Shorten 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 who rejoined her, shifted perspective. The one I'm thinking about right now, and it's a mess, is this whole Harry Potter situation. Think of that was 20 years and there'd be counter Harry Potter narratives. That would be fascinating, lucrative, and maybe useful at this particular moment.

Speaker 2:
[92:13] Yeah, someone does Harry Potter but they're all trans.

Speaker 1:
[92:16] Or whatever. They're just something different where it isn't encased in amber. Even this trailer for this new one is like, why are we doing this? I'll save this for our next BR pod. But I was so relieved that I don't have to care about it because it just looks like a re-heat. There's nothing interesting there at all.

Speaker 2:
[92:32] It just looks like a reheat.

Speaker 1:
[92:34] But letting other artists take a crack at these, what now, at some point, they become cultural property and they're in the mix. I think we do these works of disservice by keeping them under lock and key for so long.

Speaker 2:
[92:49] I agree. If an adaptation or a re-imagining of something isn't good, it just fades away. The original text is still there. It doesn't damage the original one and a good one does re-enliven the discourse. I like that. My hot take is, who would dare issue a hot take about Percival Everett? I feel like if you even try, Percival Everett just appears and is like, you rang.

Speaker 3:
[93:13] Do you want to defend yourself?

Speaker 1:
[93:15] 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.

Speaker 2:
[93:22] No.

Speaker 1:
[93:23] But I would imagine that would be like the court jester on the throne playing with the ball. Oh, that's interesting. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[93:30] You didn't like that?

Speaker 1:
[93:32] I don't even think there's, it'd be like fighting a ghost. I don't know they could land a punch necessarily in there.

Speaker 2:
[93:39] Yeah, I didn't come across any scathing reviews of this.

Speaker 1:
[93:42] Yeah, there weren't scathing. There was maybe one or two that were like, pretty good, but that's the worst one. I guess the point you just made that in 150 years, this book will be 150 years old, which sounds like a tautology, but I say that because at some point, I rejoined her to this. Maybe from Sammy's point of view, Sammy who is the 15-year-old slave who's been, I don't know how to...

Speaker 2:
[94:07] Sammy's a girl, it's important to say.

Speaker 1:
[94:08] Repeatedly, sexually abused and was born in this pit. And she escapes with James for like, is it even a day?

Speaker 2:
[94:17] It's very short.

Speaker 1:
[94:18] Very short before she's shot and killed. And there's a moment between Norman and James of like wondering about like, was that the right thing to do? Yeah. Right, because she could have lived a life and then Jim's like, was that a life? And they move on, but you can imagine someone saying, 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, Rita likes books inspired by this one, et cetera. Rebecca, what did you put in there?

Speaker 2:
[94:43] If you want to go into like serious land, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward, both also some of our best contemporary American novelists writing unflinching depictions of slavery. The one that's closest to like the vibe of Percival Everett or the tone of this book though, I think is The Sellout by Paul Beatty, which we will have a great time doing on this show someday, but it's about a person who is wrestling with the N-word in Huck Finn, and their solution is that they change every appearance of it to like warrior, and other seemingly positive or euphemistic terms, and the absurdity of that escalates to wonderful effect. We've not read Paul Beatty. That's a great experience.

Speaker 1:
[95:30] That's a really good one. I think those are all make sense. I think Underground Railroad, for those of you who don't know it, 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 wonderful.

Speaker 2:
[95:47] Some magic realism happening there.

Speaker 1:
[95:49] So I have two that are coming at it from different angles. One is Margaret Atwood's The Penelope Head, which in the hot Greek summer that's coming, I'm sure people will look at this one again, it is a retelling of the Odyssey from Penelope's perspective. Penelope, if you don't know, Odysseus' wife, who has spent 20 years keeping dudes at bay through trickeration and frankly, men not understanding textile arts.

Speaker 2:
[96:14] How weaving works.

Speaker 1:
[96:15] Yeah, really not caring about women's interests gets Penelope 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 Searcy and then Song of Achilles, those are the two that I think have stood up. I don't think they stood up the best. They just have more energy around them. Like they just sold a lot. People talk about them. But Margaret Atwood's Penelope had someone who's been interested in mythology and fables and world building and specfic. And also not unlike Everett has done all kinds of different writing.

Speaker 2:
[96:53] That's a great point. I've not read the Penelope ad. Maybe I'll put it on my list for the summer.

Speaker 1:
[96:59] The other one I'm going to go into my old literary historian's bag and suggest the Autobiography and X-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson, which is a novel published in 1912 by James Weldon Johnson, who's a black man. But interestingly, it was published anonymously. So there's this story of a man passing, but it has this episodic nature, not unlike Ralph Ellison's 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 was republished a little bit later. It didn't get very good reviews, I think, because it was ahead of its time. I'd love to know if Percival Everett 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. Was it 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 Doubleday, which is a member of the Knopf Doubleday Publish. So it's in a lineage, like a literary lineage as well at the same time. So if you're a real one, you might check out Ida Barak, The Ex-Colored Man by James Holden Johnson. Cocktail party crib sheet, Rebecca. Gosh.

Speaker 2:
[98:33] 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 that 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.

Speaker 3:
[99:18] Rush D2, right?

Speaker 2:
[99:19] Yeah. And that if you ever think you have your arms all the way around Percival Everett, you have gone astray.

Speaker 1:
[99:27] I love that point. I think I had similarly that this entertaining piece, you know in Gladiator, like the meme of like, are you not entertained?

Speaker 2:
[99:34] Are you not entertained?

Speaker 1:
[99:36] 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'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 it's very easy to engage your critical consciousness when something irritates you, enrages 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. I think there's a, the minstrel show-ness 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 in that at the same time.

Speaker 2:
[100:29] Yeah, we're in the web.

Speaker 1:
[100:30] 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 like, boy, nice web you got here.

Speaker 2:
[100:37] I'm kind of happy to just be stuck in the Percival ever web personally.

Speaker 1:
[100:41] And I have here that, like you said before, Everett's great grandmother was at one point enslaved. So this shit is just not that far away. Final beat, 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.

Speaker 2:
[101:02] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[101:03] Rebecca, the historical importance is probably the weakest just because we're 18 months.

Speaker 2:
[101:06] It's hard to know.

Speaker 1:
[101:07] It's 20 months away.

Speaker 2:
[101:09] 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, 10, but at this moment it's an eight, five.

Speaker 1:
[101:24] I had eight, I was like, I think anything that's less than two years old essentially can top out, it can only be eight. It can get no 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?

Speaker 2:
[101:43] I think an eight and a half. Let's go with nine, it's high. If you're a reader of literature, you've read scenes of difficult things before. These are rendered as well as you can.

Speaker 1:
[101:54] 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 a historical context and then nested within reflections and response to a 150-year-old book, it's a 10 and a six. I don't know, I think it's just a 10. Just a 10, okay.

Speaker 2:
[102:15] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[102:16] I'm not mad at that.

Speaker 2:
[102:17] Okay, great.

Speaker 1:
[102:19] Book nerd read cut I think is a little bit lower just because it has been so popular. It was lauded right away so that you went out of your way to read James is not really a thing for someone who reads literary fiction.

Speaker 2:
[102:27] It was, I remember 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 happen that often. So I don't know, five or six?

Speaker 1:
[102:40] Like it's just. I think any novel that is a literary retelling of Huck Finn with a high concept has to be at least a six.

Speaker 2:
[102:49] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[102:50] But it's 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.

Speaker 2:
[102:57] Yeah, we'll give it a six. The oh damn factor.

Speaker 1:
[102:59] It's 10 for me.

Speaker 2:
[103:00] 25, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[103:01] Yeah, it's a 10 for me.

Speaker 2:
[103:03] It's a 10.

Speaker 1:
[103:03] Everett can do things I don't know that every, I know that Everett can do things that aren't possible, and yet I'm still surprised I can say nothing more than that.

Speaker 2:
[103:11] Yeah, it's one of those experiences with art that makes you feel like you're levitating at moments. It's incredible.

Speaker 1:
[103:17] Makes you feel like you're smart, which is-

Speaker 2:
[103:19] Which you got to watch out for.

Speaker 1:
[103:21] Be careful out there. No one get hurt. Don't be a hero. Come join us on patreon.com/zero to Well-Read 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 podcasts, including YouTube, Instagram, and other folks, other places out there. Shoot us an email. Zero to Well-Read at bookrad.com. It doesn't matter where you are in your listening journey. You could be listening to Gatsby. Should just react to that.

Speaker 2:
[104:00] Yeah. We just got an email about the secret history.

Speaker 1:
[104:03] Yeah. We did. So that we're always welcome there. We'll do a mailbag episode there. If you have a timely 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 Thriftbook 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 hardcovers used because now the paperback is out. I don't know. I have a signed first edition. I don't really do that, but James and Everett.

Speaker 2:
[104:27] You're going to be happy that you're holding on to that.

Speaker 1:
[104:29] Yeah. Also, Zero to Well-Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Rebecca, we did it. We've done this twice, but we actually got one in the can. I'm so happy.

Speaker 2:
[104:39] Me too. A delight. Always glad for Percival Everett.