“Canon formation is necessarily skewed. It’s necessarily racist and sexist. As soon as you’re saying there are these texts that must be read, someone has to choose. Who chooses?...Whoever controls language, controls everything. If someone has no voice, they cannot get what they want or what they need. Any work of art that comes out of this American culture is about race. If there is no race in it, that is a statement about race…"
–Percival Everett
Percival Everett Is Challenging the American Literary Canon
by Eliana Dockterman
February 6, 2025
TIME
Percival Everett claims he is not as brilliant as his fans know him to be. He deeply researches the worlds in which his novels are set, yet swears that everything he learns falls out of his head as soon as each book is published. “So I’m no smarter at the end than I was at the beginning,” he says, shrugging his shoulders. Years ago, sick of his writing students asking him if they were good enough to be published, he took a class to a bookstore in Middlebury, Vt., to prove he was not unique. “Look around,” he told them. “Anyone can be published. ‘Are you good enough to make a difference?’ is the question.”
With his latest, James, a reimagining of Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of the escaped slave Jim—who drops his nickname for the more noble-sounding James—Everett has jump-started a conversation about the great American novel, how issues of race interplay with the so-called American canon, and how we talk to our children about America’s past. But just a few hours before he wins the National Book Award for fiction, he demurs when pressed on the book’s impact. “If a reader is coming to me for any kind of message or answer about anything in the world,” he says, “they’re already in deep trouble.”
For many, however, James has become an important companion piece to Mark Twain’s work, the book “all American literature comes from,” to quote Ernest Hemingway. “I’ve been getting lots of mail from former and current English teachers thanking me that they can now teach Huck Finn again because they can do it alongside James,” he admits, “which is great news for me and certainly flattering, but doesn’t come as a great surprise. It’s a problematic text.”
Everett, 68, would do away with the canon altogether if he could. But at the very least he hopes that writers, readers, and educators can acknowledge the inherent issues with putting certain books on a pedestal. “My joke is, ‘The canon is loaded,’” says Everett. “Canon formation is necessarily skewed. It’s necessarily racist and sexist. As soon as you’re saying there are these texts that must be read, someone has to choose. Who chooses?”
While Jim is little more than a sidekick on Huck’s journey down the Mississippi in the original, in Everett’s version he is at the center of the story. James and other Black characters code switch when white characters are present; on his own, James interrogates philosophers like Voltaire for his repugnant views on slavery. “Enslaved people, it had occurred to me, are always depicted as simple-minded and superstitious, and of course, they weren’t,” Everett says. “So I embarked on this.”
Everett gives James the gift of language, and James writes his account of his travels with a stolen pencil stub—one which comes at great human cost. “Whoever controls language, controls everything. If someone has no voice, they cannot get what they want or what they need,” says Everett.
Everett, who has published two dozen novels, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist Telephone, has historically bristled at being categorized in the genre of African American fiction, especially considering he has written everything from propulsive westerns to a novella styled like a Lifetime movie. “Any work of art that comes out of this American culture is about race. If there is no race in it, that is a statement about race,” he says.
This frustration is at the heart of Erasure, one of Everett’s early and best-known novels, which was adapted into the Oscar-winning 2023 film American Fiction. The story centers on Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, the author of experimental novels that don’t sell particularly well. Monk becomes so exasperated with the publishing industry bolstering Black fiction that depicts only stereotypes that he pens a novel as an illiterate thug to prove a point. The book is a hit, much to the author’s chagrin. James, too, will get the Hollywood treatment, with Steven Spielberg producing and Taika Waititi in talks to direct, though Everett insists this attention is “fleeting.” “I'll write some experimental novel next that no one will understand,” he says. “You would have to be crazy to get into literary fiction to get famous or to get rich.”
With his latest, James, a reimagining of Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of the escaped slave Jim—who drops his nickname for the more noble-sounding James—Everett has jump-started a conversation about the great American novel, how issues of race interplay with the so-called American canon, and how we talk to our children about America’s past. But just a few hours before he wins the National Book Award for fiction, he demurs when pressed on the book’s impact. “If a reader is coming to me for any kind of message or answer about anything in the world,” he says, “they’re already in deep trouble.”
For many, however, James has become an important companion piece to Mark Twain’s work, the book “all American literature comes from,” to quote Ernest Hemingway. “I’ve been getting lots of mail from former and current English teachers thanking me that they can now teach Huck Finn again because they can do it alongside James,” he admits, “which is great news for me and certainly flattering, but doesn’t come as a great surprise. It’s a problematic text.”
Everett, 68, would do away with the canon altogether if he could. But at the very least he hopes that writers, readers, and educators can acknowledge the inherent issues with putting certain books on a pedestal. “My joke is, ‘The canon is loaded,’” says Everett. “Canon formation is necessarily skewed. It’s necessarily racist and sexist. As soon as you’re saying there are these texts that must be read, someone has to choose. Who chooses?”
While Jim is little more than a sidekick on Huck’s journey down the Mississippi in the original, in Everett’s version he is at the center of the story. James and other Black characters code switch when white characters are present; on his own, James interrogates philosophers like Voltaire for his repugnant views on slavery. “Enslaved people, it had occurred to me, are always depicted as simple-minded and superstitious, and of course, they weren’t,” Everett says. “So I embarked on this.”
Everett gives James the gift of language, and James writes his account of his travels with a stolen pencil stub—one which comes at great human cost. “Whoever controls language, controls everything. If someone has no voice, they cannot get what they want or what they need,” says Everett.
Everett, who has published two dozen novels, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist Telephone, has historically bristled at being categorized in the genre of African American fiction, especially considering he has written everything from propulsive westerns to a novella styled like a Lifetime movie. “Any work of art that comes out of this American culture is about race. If there is no race in it, that is a statement about race,” he says.
This frustration is at the heart of Erasure, one of Everett’s early and best-known novels, which was adapted into the Oscar-winning 2023 film American Fiction. The story centers on Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, the author of experimental novels that don’t sell particularly well. Monk becomes so exasperated with the publishing industry bolstering Black fiction that depicts only stereotypes that he pens a novel as an illiterate thug to prove a point. The book is a hit, much to the author’s chagrin. James, too, will get the Hollywood treatment, with Steven Spielberg producing and Taika Waititi in talks to direct, though Everett insists this attention is “fleeting.” “I'll write some experimental novel next that no one will understand,” he says. “You would have to be crazy to get into literary fiction to get famous or to get rich.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/27/percival-everetts-deadly-serious-comedy
Books
September 27, 2021 Issue
Percival Everett’s Deadly Serious Comedy
The novelist has regularly exploded our models of genre and identity. In “The Trees,” he’s raising the stakes, confronting America’s legacy of lynching in a mystery at once hilarious and horrifying.
by Julian Lucas
September 20, 2021
The New Yorker
IMAGE: In “The Trees,” a postmodern thriller about lynchings avenged, a character remarks, “Dead is the new Black.” Illustration by Leonardo Santamaria
Audio: Listen to this article. To hear more, download
Audm for iPhone or Android
Percival Everett has one of the best poker faces in contemporary American literature. The author of twenty-two novels, he excels at the unblinking execution of extraordinary conceits. “If I can make you believe it, then it’s fair game,” he once said of his books, which range from elliptical thriller to genre-shattering farce; their narrators include a vengeful romance novelist (“The Water Cure”), a hyperliterate baby (“Glyph”), and a suicidal English professor risen from the dead (“American Desert”). Everett, sixty-four, is so consistently surprising that his agent once begged him to try repeating himself—advice he’s studiously ignored. “I’ve been called a Southern writer, a Western writer, an experimental writer, a mystery writer, and I find it all kind of silly,” he said earlier this year. “I write fiction.”
Beneath his work’s ever-changing surface lies an obsession with the instability of meaning, and with unpredictable shifts of identity. In his short story “The Appropriation of Cultures,” from 1996, a Black guitarist playing at a joint near the University of South Carolina is asked by a group of white fraternity brothers to sing “Dixie.” He obliges with a rendition so genuine that the secessionist anthem becomes his own, shaming the pranksters and eliciting an ovation. Later, he buys a used truck with a Confederate-flag decal, sparking a trend that turns the hateful symbol into an emblem of Black pride. The story ends with the flag’s removal from the state capitol: “There was no ceremony, no notice. One day, it was not there. Look away, look away, look away . . .”
Such commitment to the bit is exemplary of Everett’s fiction. Yet nothing he has written could be sufficient preparation for his latest book, “The Trees” (Graywolf), a murder mystery set in the town of Money, Mississippi. The novel begins, stealthily enough, as a mordant hillbilly comedy, Flannery O’Connor transposed to the age of QAnon. We are introduced to Wheat Bryant, an ex-trucker who lost his job in a viral drunk-driving incident; his faithless wife, Charlene; his cousin Junior Junior Milam; and his mother, Granny C, who zones out on a motorized shopping cart while the family bickers about hogs. The old woman appears to be having a stroke but is actually reflecting on “something I wished I hadn’t done. About the lie I told all them years back on that nigger boy”:
“Oh Lawd,” Charlene said. “We on that again.”
“I wronged that little pickaninny. Like it say in the good book, what goes around comes around.”
“What good book is that?” Charlene asked. “Guns and Ammo?”
Granny C, it turns out, is a fictionalized Carolyn Bryant Donham, whose accusation that Emmett Till had whistled at and grabbed her, at the country store in Money where she worked, instigated the twentieth century’s most notorious lynching. On August 28, 1955, Donham’s husband, Roy Bryant, and her brother-in-law J. W. Milam kidnapped, tortured, and killed the fourteen-year-old boy for violating the color line. The case drew condemnation throughout the world but ended in Bryant and Milam’s acquittal by an all-white jury. (They later confessed to a reporter in exchange for three thousand dollars.) Donham, alleged by some witnesses to have participated in the abduction, went on to live in peaceful anonymity—until 2017, when, in an interview with the historian Timothy Tyson, she admitted to fabricating details of her encounter with Till. The octogenarian “felt tender sorrow” over Till’s fate but offered no apology. Her longevity renewed outrage about the half-century-old crime: Till died at fourteen; his accuser lived to finish her memoirs, which are due to be made public in 2036.
“The Trees” is not much interested in anyone’s tender sorrow. In the opening chapters, Wheat and Junior Junior—invented sons of Till’s killers—are found castrated, and with barbed wire around their necks. Beside each white victim lies a dead Black man in a suit, disfigured as Till was and clutching the white man’s severed testicles like a trophy. Later, Granny C is found dead of shock beside an identical besuited corpse. Similar murders occur elsewhere in the area, and, each time, a spectral body appears, stirring terrified rumors of a “walking dead Negro man.” The killings spread throughout the country; in several Western states, the vanishing corpse seems to be that of an Asian man. Is it the handiwork of a serial killer? A cadre of vigilante assassins? A swarm of vengeful ghosts?
Into this maelstrom Everett hurls three Black detectives: Ed Morgan, a gentle giant with a young family; Jim Davis, a wisecracking bachelor; and Herberta Hind, a misanthropic professional who joined the F.B.I. to spite her radical parents. (Jim and Ed work for the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, often to their embarrassment: “That’s some crazy shit to yell out. MBI! Fucking ridiculous.”) Received with fear and prejudice by the town’s white citizens, the trio feels distinctly ambivalent about the case, which they initially treat as a dark joke. “Maybe it’s some kind of Black ninja,” Jim says. “Jamal Lee swinging lengths of barbed wire in Money, Mississippi.”
The detectives zero in on what seems like a conspiracy involving a soul-food restaurant (with a secret dojo) and a centenarian root doctor, Mama Z, who keeps records of every lynching in America. The stage is set for a Black-cop ex machina à la “In the Heat of the Night,” “BlacKkKlansman,” or the 2021 New York mayoral election. But the detectives quickly find themselves in the wrong genre of justice. What begins as a macabre sendup of the unreconstructed South culminates in a more unsettling and possibly supernatural wave of vengeance, as the killings assume the dimensions of an Old Testament plague:
Some called it a throng. A reporter on the scene used the word horde. A minister of an AME church in Jefferson County, Mississippi, called it a congregation . . . and like a tornado it would destroy one life and leave the one beside it unscathed. It made a noise. A moan that filled the air. Rise, it said, Rise. It left towns torn apart. Families grieved. Families assessed their histories. It was weather. Rise. It was a cloud. It was a front, a front of dead air.
The unresolved legacy of lynching might seem like a surprising choice of theme for the cool, analytic, and resolutely idiosyncratic Percival Everett. Brought up in a family of doctors and dentists, in Columbia, South Carolina, he studied the philosophy of language in graduate school, drifting from the dissection of invented dialogue into full-blown fiction organically. He wrote his début novel, “Suder” (1983)—the story of a baseball player’s madcap odyssey after a humiliating slump—as a master’s student in creative writing at Brown, where he met the great literary trickster Robert Coover. Everett, too, established himself as an author of terse and wily postmodern fiction, drawing on such influences as Lewis Carroll, Chester Himes, Zora Neale Hurston, and, especially, Laurence Sterne, whose “Tristram Shandy” remains a model for his playfully withholding work.
A character named Percival Everett makes opaque cameos in several of his novels but offers few keys to his creator’s life. Publicity-avoidant—he told audiences on his one book tour, for his twelfth novel, “Erasure” (2001), that he was there only because he needed money for a new roof—Everett likes to downplay his literary vocation. He routinely describes fiction as a sideline to hands-on pursuits like fly-fishing, wood carving, ranching, and training animals, especially horses, whom he credits with teaching him to write. Everett himself teaches English at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, Danzy Senna, a novelist and a fellow U.S.C. faculty member. Yet he’s reluctant to admit that he has anything to teach. He speaks of writing fiction as a Zen-like process of unlearning, each novel leaving him more aware of his ignorance than the last. As he once said, “My goal is to know nothing, and my friends tell me I’m well on my way.”
His protagonists, too, are buffeted by destabilizing revelations—crises of identity that double as crises of genre. In “American Desert” (2004), the jolt of being resurrected forces Ted Street to reëvaluate a broken marriage, even as Christian fundamentalists try to conscript him into millenarian schemes. Baby Ralph, the narrator of “Glyph” (2014), terrifies adults with his mastery of language—especially his father, an insecure post-structuralist academic—upending several disciplines by writing prodigiously yet refusing to speak. (“I was a baby fat with words, but I made no sound,” he reflects.) The novel is a characteristically Everett mixture of deadpan wit, slapstick accident, and serious philosophical inquiry, often conducted by famous figures cribbed from reality: Hurston, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and an inexplicably heterosexual Roland Barthes.
An Oprah Winfrey stand-in makes an appearance in “Erasure,” Everett’s best-known work, which ridicules the pressure on Black writers to publish “authentic” testimonials of urban poverty. Thelonious Ellison, a frustrated author of rarefied experimental fiction, is caring for his Alzheimer’s-stricken mother when he learns about “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto,” a runaway best-seller by a Black Oberlin graduate. Ellison is so enraged that he writes a pseudonymous parody, titled “My Pafology” (later simply “Fuck”), which is included as a novel within the novel. To his astonishment, it becomes a best-seller—an irony compounded by the breakout success of “Erasure.”
Another cat-and-mouse game with stereotypes unfolds in Everett’s hilarious “I Am Not Sidney Poitier” (2009), a picaresque story of a wealthy Black orphan with a fatefully strange name. Not Sidney Poitier, as he is called, is raised by servants on the estate of Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, because his late mother made a generous investment in a predecessor of the network. Unencumbered by family, necessity, or identity, he sets off on a series of adventures that riff on his eponym’s films. The actor’s cipher-like versatility—a dignified emissary of Black America in every role—provides endless material for parody: Not Sidney escapes from prison shackled to another inmate (“The Defiant Ones”), dates a light-skinned girl from a colorist family (“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”), and fixes a roof for a commune of religious women (“Lilies of the Field”). Yet a darker theme of self-surrender runs throughout. During an extended allusion to “In the Heat of the Night,” Not Sidney is asked to examine what appears to be his own dead body at an Alabama police station:
As we stepped out of the makeshift morgue, I thought that if that body in the chest was Not Sidney Poitier, then I was not Not Sidney Poitier and that by all I knew of double negatives, I was therefore Sidney Poitier.
Corpses are omnipresent in Everett’s fiction, their disruptive energies catalyzing important revelations. In his comic novels, they often fall prey to cultists, body snatchers, and creepy morticians, serving as carnivalesque reminders of the self’s plasticity. In his thrillers, mostly set in the American West, they become traces of atrocities that might otherwise remain invisible: torture, toxic pollution, massacres, femicide. Novels such as“Watershed” (1996), “Wounded” (2005), “The Water Cure” (2007), and “Assumption” (2011) feature loners whose rugged isolation—usually involving a lot of fly-fishing—is interrupted by encounters with the dead, who lure them into deeper currents of violence.
The deaths of children loom large, especially in Everett’s previous two novels, both of which make the shock of mortality the basis of formal experiments. “So Much Blue” (2017), a painter’s story, unfolds in three parallel time lines centered on nested secrets: an extramarital affair, an immense blue masterpiece locked in a barn, and the traumatic memory of a little girl’s death in war-torn El Salvador. “Telephone” (2020), which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, is split even more dramatically. The story of a middle-aged geologist’s struggle with his teen-age daughter’s terminal genetic disorder, it was issued in three nearly indistinguishable editions with separate endings. The novel’s epigraph, from Søren Kierkegaard, suggests the world’s bleakest choose-your-own-adventure: “Do it or do not do it—you will regret both.” But the geologist’s inevitable loss is also strangely freeing; with nothing left to fear, he attempts a mad act of heroism in the rural Southwest, drawn by an anonymous note that reads “Please Help Us.”
Death issues a more terrifying summons in Everett’s gripping “The Body of Martin Aguilera” (1997), a compact work set in the canyons of northern New Mexico. A retired professor discovers his neighbor dead at home. Soon after he reports the apparent killing, the body vanishes—only to reappear, seemingly drowned, in a nearby river. The professor suspects foul play, and his investigation reveals a vast ecological crime. Everything depends on his ability to overcome fear and repulsion as he fights to secure the body. In a pivotal scene, he attends a clandestine funeral where members of a lay Catholic brotherhood, the Penitentes, scourge themselves as they process around a putrefying dead man. In a violent culture afraid of mortality, the willingness to be intimate with death can be a form of vigilance.
“The Trees,” Everett’s longest book yet, synthesizes many of these abiding preoccupations: race and media, symbols and appropriation, and, especially, the unsettling power of corpses to shock and reorient the living. The novel can be read as a grisly fable about whose murder counts in the public imagination—reprising the question that Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, confronted in 1955: How do you make America notice Black death?
The lynched body originally functioned as a weapon of white-supremacist terror. Strung up from trees or bridges and photographed for macabre postcards, victims were transformed into banners for the cause that had taken their lives. But in 1955 Till-Mobley made the historic decision to hold an open-casket viewing of her maimed son, galvanizing millions against segregation and lynching. She reappropriated her son’s death from his killers, who had intended it as an act of intimidation, and turned it into an act of defiance, inviting press photographers and crowds of strangers to, in her words, “let the world see what I’ve seen.”
Less well known than the funeral is Till-Mobley’s struggle to recover her son’s body. Mississippi authorities were rushing to bury it when news of his death reached her, in Chicago. After they finally agreed to surrender the body, they sent it in a sealed casket, with instructions that it never be opened. Later, Till-Mobley had to fight for her son’s body in court, where his killers’ attorneys argued that it was too decomposed for reliable identification. Till was probably still alive, they suggested, conspiratorially speculating that the N.A.A.C.P. had staged the lynching.
In “The Trees,” this bad-faith defense returns with vengeful irony, as staged Black cadavers appear at the scene of each murder in Money. What in 1955 was a calculated blindness about lynching becomes not a proof of power but a sign of weakness: the body that Mississippi once refused to recognize comes back as a terror its citizens cannot understand. Everett envisages the town as stalked by sinister allusions, shadows of the pervasive past. Billboards encourage visitors to “pull a catfish out of the Little Tallahatchie! They’s good eating!” (It was a boy checking catfish nets in the river who discovered Till’s body.) When Charlene Bryant is asked if she can identify the man at the scene of her husband’s murder, she replies, “His own Black mama couldn’t have knowed him.”
The slip is characteristic of a novel that uses humor less to provoke laughter than to eviscerate false innocence—funny, yes, but mostly in the maddening way that it was funny when the cops who arrested Dylann Roof treated him to Burger King. Everett’s scathing portrayal of Money’s self-protective amnesia has an affinity with the artist Kerry James Marshall’s “Heirlooms and Accessories,” a triptych of prints depicting lockets that contain black-and-white photographs of different smiling white women. Though each may be someone’s beloved grandmother, the portraits are excerpted from a 1930 photograph of a lynching; every individual is an “accessory” to murder. The killings in “The Trees” represent an even more striking attempt to return focus to the culprits. One suspect in the murders explains, “If that Griffin book had been Lynched Like Me, America might have looked up from dinner or baseball.”
There’s a certain self-referential exhaustion to the novel’s killings, which can be understood as a kind of despairing joke: for the country to really care about dead Black people, they’d have to be found next to white ones. And even if the repressed violence of American history did erupt, few would recognize it for what it was. Everett’s townspeople concoct copious theories about the killings—mass delusion, a race war, satanic assassins capable of faking death—but hardly anyone draws the connection to Emmett Till. When the killings reach the White House, a Trump-like President cowers under the Resolute desk and wonders if Ben Carson might be to blame.
The satire’s ultimate target is America’s inability to make cultural sense of atrocities that it has never fully acknowledged, much less atoned for. Its persistent flights from the obvious evoke the evasions of our era, as the unprecedented visibility of racist killings gives rise to new strains of misdirection, exploitation, and apathy. In one memorable scene, Jim tracks the vanishing corpses to a warehouse in Chicago, the aptly named Acme Cadaver Company. The bathetic tableau recalls the video for Childish Gambino’s “This Is America,” a vision of mass entertainment laundering mass death:
It was like a cleaner’s facility, except instead of shirts, blouses, and jackets, corpses, women and men, slid by on suspended rails. Farther away, through the center of the room, naked cadavers glided along, head to toe, on a conveyer belt. The music of the Jackson Five blared. A-B-C. One two three. Chicago Bears and Bulls banners hung from the ceiling some twenty feet above them. . . . The music changed to Marvin Gaye. What was going on?
“The Trees” is an almost disconcertingly smooth narrative, the short chapters dealt as quickly as cards. Gruesome scenes and hardboiled detective banter alternate with comic vignettes (F.B.I. antics, an online white-supremacist meeting) and stark meditations on what one character describes as the slow “genocide” of American lynching. The mystery itself is tightly constructed and suspensefully paced—until, as in Everett’s other novels, a chasm opens between form and content. The tension, in this case, lies between the open-and-shut conventions of the crime novel and the immensity of Everett’s subject.
Nobody feels this more keenly than the trio of detectives, who are constantly stymied by being “Black and blue.” The white residents of Money hate them out of prejudice; the Black ones distrust them as cops. “You’re from the F.B.I.,” Mama Z tells Herberta when questioned about her archives. Herberta says, “I’m also a Black woman.” Mama Z replies, “So you see my problem.” The discomfort between the two mirrors the divisions of last summer’s uprising, when many protesters found themselves on the other side of cordons and curfews enforced by Black officers and mayors. In one uncanny moment, the detectives arrive at a bar in Money’s Black neighborhood just as a young woman with a Mohawk begins a haunting performance of “Strange Fruit.” The scene quietly undercuts any presumption of racial solidarity, as the watching officers realize that they’ve been shut out of a community secret.
Everett’s novel seems to look askance even at itself. When Damon Thruff, a young Black professor specializing in the history of lynching, arrives in Money to assist Mama Z, she tells him that she’s read his work and finds it unfeeling: “You were able to construct three hundred and seven pages on such a topic without an ounce of outrage.” The figure is curiously close to the number of pages in “The Trees,” implicitly questioning not only Damon’s sang-froid but Everett’s. Novels about the legacy of racist violence often strive to voice buried emotion. Bernice L. McFadden’s “Gathering of Waters” (2012), another novel about Emmett Till, is elegiacally narrated by the collective consciousness of Money. Jesmyn Ward’s “Sing, Unburied, Sing” (2017), also set in Mississippi, grieves for victims of the state’s Parchman Farm penitentiary through the lyrical narration of ghosts.
“The Trees,” by contrast, is as cold and matter-of-fact as Mama Z’s lynching archive, where the drawers are “like those in a morgue.” Uncharacteristically for Everett, who is known for cerebral narrators, the novel surveys a wide cast from an indifferent third-person remove. Sometimes Everett appears reluctant to commit his attention, or to decide between drawing caricatures and fleshing out human quandaries. Is this the story of Granny C’s agonized comeuppance? Mama Z’s patient revenge? The alienation of Jim, Ed, and Herberta, as they pursue vigilantes with whom they quietly sympathize? No character is allowed quite enough presence to say. But denying readers a surrogate is also a strategy, turning the moral crisis back onto us, unresolved.
To make art about lynching is an increasingly fraught endeavor. Since Mamie Till-Mobley’s decision to “let the world see,” the pendulum has swung back to a suspicion that many representations of anti-Black violence risk offering up their subjects to a mob’s eyes. When the artist Dana Schutz, who is white, exhibited her painting of Emmett Till’s mangled face in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, protesters demanded its removal and encouraged her to destroy it. At the time, the debate was largely about who should be entitled to such an image, and whether that line ought to be drawn on the basis of race. Schutz’s defenders frequently pointed out that Henry Taylor, a Black artist, had a painting of Philando Castile’s killing in the same show.
Now, though, scrutiny has fallen on such representations regardless of who creates them. The bereaved relatives of police-killing victims have begun to challenge Black artists and activists for adapting, and even profiting from, images of their dead loved ones. Many writers, especially of the Afropessimist school, argue that Black trauma has been hijacked by narratives of redemption, as names like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor cease to refer to individuals and become—by a kind of necromancy—avatars of others’ political ideals. “Dead is the new Black,” as one of Everett’s suspects quips.
“The Trees,” in its rigorous denial of sentiment, shuts down such catharsis—as if to say that funeral oratory is inappropriate when so many victims have yet to be counted. As Damon, the scholar, begins working in Mama Z’s archives, he is most disturbed by lynching’s effacement of individuality:
The crime, the practice, the religion of it, was becoming more pernicious as he realized that the similarity of their deaths had caused these men and women to be at once erased and coalesced like one piece, like one body. They were all number and no number at all, many and one, a symptom, a sign.
Suddenly, he feels compelled to write down each victim’s name in pencil and erase it. From Emmett Till to Alton Sterling, the list occupies an entire chapter.
The focus shifts from Everett’s characters to the phenomenon of lynching in all its geographic breadth, intangible influence, and individual particularity. Beyond the South, there are revenge killings in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where dozens of Chinese miners were massacred, in 1885; in Carbon County, Utah, where a Black coal miner was hanged from a cottonwood tree, in 1925; and in Duluth, Minnesota, where an unemployed man fondly reflects on his grandfather’s role in the town’s lynching of three Black men, in 1920. (He wishes someone would do the same to the “fucking Hispanics” who took his job.) The novel makes good on its title’s promise, as the trees of a particular mystery recede into the forest of an ongoing crime. ♦
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Julian Lucas is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His writing for the magazine includes an exploration of slavery reënactments, as well as profiles of artists and writers such as El Anatsui and Ishmael Reed. Previously, he was an associate editor at Cabinet and a contributing editor at The Point. His writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Magazine, Art in America, and the New York Times Book Review, where he was a contributing writer.
http://bombmagazine.org/article/2666/percival-everett
Audio: Listen to this article. To hear more, download
Audm for iPhone or Android
Percival Everett has one of the best poker faces in contemporary American literature. The author of twenty-two novels, he excels at the unblinking execution of extraordinary conceits. “If I can make you believe it, then it’s fair game,” he once said of his books, which range from elliptical thriller to genre-shattering farce; their narrators include a vengeful romance novelist (“The Water Cure”), a hyperliterate baby (“Glyph”), and a suicidal English professor risen from the dead (“American Desert”). Everett, sixty-four, is so consistently surprising that his agent once begged him to try repeating himself—advice he’s studiously ignored. “I’ve been called a Southern writer, a Western writer, an experimental writer, a mystery writer, and I find it all kind of silly,” he said earlier this year. “I write fiction.”
Beneath his work’s ever-changing surface lies an obsession with the instability of meaning, and with unpredictable shifts of identity. In his short story “The Appropriation of Cultures,” from 1996, a Black guitarist playing at a joint near the University of South Carolina is asked by a group of white fraternity brothers to sing “Dixie.” He obliges with a rendition so genuine that the secessionist anthem becomes his own, shaming the pranksters and eliciting an ovation. Later, he buys a used truck with a Confederate-flag decal, sparking a trend that turns the hateful symbol into an emblem of Black pride. The story ends with the flag’s removal from the state capitol: “There was no ceremony, no notice. One day, it was not there. Look away, look away, look away . . .”
Such commitment to the bit is exemplary of Everett’s fiction. Yet nothing he has written could be sufficient preparation for his latest book, “The Trees” (Graywolf), a murder mystery set in the town of Money, Mississippi. The novel begins, stealthily enough, as a mordant hillbilly comedy, Flannery O’Connor transposed to the age of QAnon. We are introduced to Wheat Bryant, an ex-trucker who lost his job in a viral drunk-driving incident; his faithless wife, Charlene; his cousin Junior Junior Milam; and his mother, Granny C, who zones out on a motorized shopping cart while the family bickers about hogs. The old woman appears to be having a stroke but is actually reflecting on “something I wished I hadn’t done. About the lie I told all them years back on that nigger boy”:
“Oh Lawd,” Charlene said. “We on that again.”
“I wronged that little pickaninny. Like it say in the good book, what goes around comes around.”
“What good book is that?” Charlene asked. “Guns and Ammo?”
Granny C, it turns out, is a fictionalized Carolyn Bryant Donham, whose accusation that Emmett Till had whistled at and grabbed her, at the country store in Money where she worked, instigated the twentieth century’s most notorious lynching. On August 28, 1955, Donham’s husband, Roy Bryant, and her brother-in-law J. W. Milam kidnapped, tortured, and killed the fourteen-year-old boy for violating the color line. The case drew condemnation throughout the world but ended in Bryant and Milam’s acquittal by an all-white jury. (They later confessed to a reporter in exchange for three thousand dollars.) Donham, alleged by some witnesses to have participated in the abduction, went on to live in peaceful anonymity—until 2017, when, in an interview with the historian Timothy Tyson, she admitted to fabricating details of her encounter with Till. The octogenarian “felt tender sorrow” over Till’s fate but offered no apology. Her longevity renewed outrage about the half-century-old crime: Till died at fourteen; his accuser lived to finish her memoirs, which are due to be made public in 2036.
“The Trees” is not much interested in anyone’s tender sorrow. In the opening chapters, Wheat and Junior Junior—invented sons of Till’s killers—are found castrated, and with barbed wire around their necks. Beside each white victim lies a dead Black man in a suit, disfigured as Till was and clutching the white man’s severed testicles like a trophy. Later, Granny C is found dead of shock beside an identical besuited corpse. Similar murders occur elsewhere in the area, and, each time, a spectral body appears, stirring terrified rumors of a “walking dead Negro man.” The killings spread throughout the country; in several Western states, the vanishing corpse seems to be that of an Asian man. Is it the handiwork of a serial killer? A cadre of vigilante assassins? A swarm of vengeful ghosts?
Into this maelstrom Everett hurls three Black detectives: Ed Morgan, a gentle giant with a young family; Jim Davis, a wisecracking bachelor; and Herberta Hind, a misanthropic professional who joined the F.B.I. to spite her radical parents. (Jim and Ed work for the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, often to their embarrassment: “That’s some crazy shit to yell out. MBI! Fucking ridiculous.”) Received with fear and prejudice by the town’s white citizens, the trio feels distinctly ambivalent about the case, which they initially treat as a dark joke. “Maybe it’s some kind of Black ninja,” Jim says. “Jamal Lee swinging lengths of barbed wire in Money, Mississippi.”
The detectives zero in on what seems like a conspiracy involving a soul-food restaurant (with a secret dojo) and a centenarian root doctor, Mama Z, who keeps records of every lynching in America. The stage is set for a Black-cop ex machina à la “In the Heat of the Night,” “BlacKkKlansman,” or the 2021 New York mayoral election. But the detectives quickly find themselves in the wrong genre of justice. What begins as a macabre sendup of the unreconstructed South culminates in a more unsettling and possibly supernatural wave of vengeance, as the killings assume the dimensions of an Old Testament plague:
Some called it a throng. A reporter on the scene used the word horde. A minister of an AME church in Jefferson County, Mississippi, called it a congregation . . . and like a tornado it would destroy one life and leave the one beside it unscathed. It made a noise. A moan that filled the air. Rise, it said, Rise. It left towns torn apart. Families grieved. Families assessed their histories. It was weather. Rise. It was a cloud. It was a front, a front of dead air.
The unresolved legacy of lynching might seem like a surprising choice of theme for the cool, analytic, and resolutely idiosyncratic Percival Everett. Brought up in a family of doctors and dentists, in Columbia, South Carolina, he studied the philosophy of language in graduate school, drifting from the dissection of invented dialogue into full-blown fiction organically. He wrote his début novel, “Suder” (1983)—the story of a baseball player’s madcap odyssey after a humiliating slump—as a master’s student in creative writing at Brown, where he met the great literary trickster Robert Coover. Everett, too, established himself as an author of terse and wily postmodern fiction, drawing on such influences as Lewis Carroll, Chester Himes, Zora Neale Hurston, and, especially, Laurence Sterne, whose “Tristram Shandy” remains a model for his playfully withholding work.
A character named Percival Everett makes opaque cameos in several of his novels but offers few keys to his creator’s life. Publicity-avoidant—he told audiences on his one book tour, for his twelfth novel, “Erasure” (2001), that he was there only because he needed money for a new roof—Everett likes to downplay his literary vocation. He routinely describes fiction as a sideline to hands-on pursuits like fly-fishing, wood carving, ranching, and training animals, especially horses, whom he credits with teaching him to write. Everett himself teaches English at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, Danzy Senna, a novelist and a fellow U.S.C. faculty member. Yet he’s reluctant to admit that he has anything to teach. He speaks of writing fiction as a Zen-like process of unlearning, each novel leaving him more aware of his ignorance than the last. As he once said, “My goal is to know nothing, and my friends tell me I’m well on my way.”
His protagonists, too, are buffeted by destabilizing revelations—crises of identity that double as crises of genre. In “American Desert” (2004), the jolt of being resurrected forces Ted Street to reëvaluate a broken marriage, even as Christian fundamentalists try to conscript him into millenarian schemes. Baby Ralph, the narrator of “Glyph” (2014), terrifies adults with his mastery of language—especially his father, an insecure post-structuralist academic—upending several disciplines by writing prodigiously yet refusing to speak. (“I was a baby fat with words, but I made no sound,” he reflects.) The novel is a characteristically Everett mixture of deadpan wit, slapstick accident, and serious philosophical inquiry, often conducted by famous figures cribbed from reality: Hurston, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and an inexplicably heterosexual Roland Barthes.
An Oprah Winfrey stand-in makes an appearance in “Erasure,” Everett’s best-known work, which ridicules the pressure on Black writers to publish “authentic” testimonials of urban poverty. Thelonious Ellison, a frustrated author of rarefied experimental fiction, is caring for his Alzheimer’s-stricken mother when he learns about “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto,” a runaway best-seller by a Black Oberlin graduate. Ellison is so enraged that he writes a pseudonymous parody, titled “My Pafology” (later simply “Fuck”), which is included as a novel within the novel. To his astonishment, it becomes a best-seller—an irony compounded by the breakout success of “Erasure.”
Another cat-and-mouse game with stereotypes unfolds in Everett’s hilarious “I Am Not Sidney Poitier” (2009), a picaresque story of a wealthy Black orphan with a fatefully strange name. Not Sidney Poitier, as he is called, is raised by servants on the estate of Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, because his late mother made a generous investment in a predecessor of the network. Unencumbered by family, necessity, or identity, he sets off on a series of adventures that riff on his eponym’s films. The actor’s cipher-like versatility—a dignified emissary of Black America in every role—provides endless material for parody: Not Sidney escapes from prison shackled to another inmate (“The Defiant Ones”), dates a light-skinned girl from a colorist family (“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”), and fixes a roof for a commune of religious women (“Lilies of the Field”). Yet a darker theme of self-surrender runs throughout. During an extended allusion to “In the Heat of the Night,” Not Sidney is asked to examine what appears to be his own dead body at an Alabama police station:
As we stepped out of the makeshift morgue, I thought that if that body in the chest was Not Sidney Poitier, then I was not Not Sidney Poitier and that by all I knew of double negatives, I was therefore Sidney Poitier.
Corpses are omnipresent in Everett’s fiction, their disruptive energies catalyzing important revelations. In his comic novels, they often fall prey to cultists, body snatchers, and creepy morticians, serving as carnivalesque reminders of the self’s plasticity. In his thrillers, mostly set in the American West, they become traces of atrocities that might otherwise remain invisible: torture, toxic pollution, massacres, femicide. Novels such as“Watershed” (1996), “Wounded” (2005), “The Water Cure” (2007), and “Assumption” (2011) feature loners whose rugged isolation—usually involving a lot of fly-fishing—is interrupted by encounters with the dead, who lure them into deeper currents of violence.
The deaths of children loom large, especially in Everett’s previous two novels, both of which make the shock of mortality the basis of formal experiments. “So Much Blue” (2017), a painter’s story, unfolds in three parallel time lines centered on nested secrets: an extramarital affair, an immense blue masterpiece locked in a barn, and the traumatic memory of a little girl’s death in war-torn El Salvador. “Telephone” (2020), which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, is split even more dramatically. The story of a middle-aged geologist’s struggle with his teen-age daughter’s terminal genetic disorder, it was issued in three nearly indistinguishable editions with separate endings. The novel’s epigraph, from Søren Kierkegaard, suggests the world’s bleakest choose-your-own-adventure: “Do it or do not do it—you will regret both.” But the geologist’s inevitable loss is also strangely freeing; with nothing left to fear, he attempts a mad act of heroism in the rural Southwest, drawn by an anonymous note that reads “Please Help Us.”
Death issues a more terrifying summons in Everett’s gripping “The Body of Martin Aguilera” (1997), a compact work set in the canyons of northern New Mexico. A retired professor discovers his neighbor dead at home. Soon after he reports the apparent killing, the body vanishes—only to reappear, seemingly drowned, in a nearby river. The professor suspects foul play, and his investigation reveals a vast ecological crime. Everything depends on his ability to overcome fear and repulsion as he fights to secure the body. In a pivotal scene, he attends a clandestine funeral where members of a lay Catholic brotherhood, the Penitentes, scourge themselves as they process around a putrefying dead man. In a violent culture afraid of mortality, the willingness to be intimate with death can be a form of vigilance.
“The Trees,” Everett’s longest book yet, synthesizes many of these abiding preoccupations: race and media, symbols and appropriation, and, especially, the unsettling power of corpses to shock and reorient the living. The novel can be read as a grisly fable about whose murder counts in the public imagination—reprising the question that Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, confronted in 1955: How do you make America notice Black death?
The lynched body originally functioned as a weapon of white-supremacist terror. Strung up from trees or bridges and photographed for macabre postcards, victims were transformed into banners for the cause that had taken their lives. But in 1955 Till-Mobley made the historic decision to hold an open-casket viewing of her maimed son, galvanizing millions against segregation and lynching. She reappropriated her son’s death from his killers, who had intended it as an act of intimidation, and turned it into an act of defiance, inviting press photographers and crowds of strangers to, in her words, “let the world see what I’ve seen.”
Less well known than the funeral is Till-Mobley’s struggle to recover her son’s body. Mississippi authorities were rushing to bury it when news of his death reached her, in Chicago. After they finally agreed to surrender the body, they sent it in a sealed casket, with instructions that it never be opened. Later, Till-Mobley had to fight for her son’s body in court, where his killers’ attorneys argued that it was too decomposed for reliable identification. Till was probably still alive, they suggested, conspiratorially speculating that the N.A.A.C.P. had staged the lynching.
In “The Trees,” this bad-faith defense returns with vengeful irony, as staged Black cadavers appear at the scene of each murder in Money. What in 1955 was a calculated blindness about lynching becomes not a proof of power but a sign of weakness: the body that Mississippi once refused to recognize comes back as a terror its citizens cannot understand. Everett envisages the town as stalked by sinister allusions, shadows of the pervasive past. Billboards encourage visitors to “pull a catfish out of the Little Tallahatchie! They’s good eating!” (It was a boy checking catfish nets in the river who discovered Till’s body.) When Charlene Bryant is asked if she can identify the man at the scene of her husband’s murder, she replies, “His own Black mama couldn’t have knowed him.”
The slip is characteristic of a novel that uses humor less to provoke laughter than to eviscerate false innocence—funny, yes, but mostly in the maddening way that it was funny when the cops who arrested Dylann Roof treated him to Burger King. Everett’s scathing portrayal of Money’s self-protective amnesia has an affinity with the artist Kerry James Marshall’s “Heirlooms and Accessories,” a triptych of prints depicting lockets that contain black-and-white photographs of different smiling white women. Though each may be someone’s beloved grandmother, the portraits are excerpted from a 1930 photograph of a lynching; every individual is an “accessory” to murder. The killings in “The Trees” represent an even more striking attempt to return focus to the culprits. One suspect in the murders explains, “If that Griffin book had been Lynched Like Me, America might have looked up from dinner or baseball.”
There’s a certain self-referential exhaustion to the novel’s killings, which can be understood as a kind of despairing joke: for the country to really care about dead Black people, they’d have to be found next to white ones. And even if the repressed violence of American history did erupt, few would recognize it for what it was. Everett’s townspeople concoct copious theories about the killings—mass delusion, a race war, satanic assassins capable of faking death—but hardly anyone draws the connection to Emmett Till. When the killings reach the White House, a Trump-like President cowers under the Resolute desk and wonders if Ben Carson might be to blame.
The satire’s ultimate target is America’s inability to make cultural sense of atrocities that it has never fully acknowledged, much less atoned for. Its persistent flights from the obvious evoke the evasions of our era, as the unprecedented visibility of racist killings gives rise to new strains of misdirection, exploitation, and apathy. In one memorable scene, Jim tracks the vanishing corpses to a warehouse in Chicago, the aptly named Acme Cadaver Company. The bathetic tableau recalls the video for Childish Gambino’s “This Is America,” a vision of mass entertainment laundering mass death:
It was like a cleaner’s facility, except instead of shirts, blouses, and jackets, corpses, women and men, slid by on suspended rails. Farther away, through the center of the room, naked cadavers glided along, head to toe, on a conveyer belt. The music of the Jackson Five blared. A-B-C. One two three. Chicago Bears and Bulls banners hung from the ceiling some twenty feet above them. . . . The music changed to Marvin Gaye. What was going on?
“The Trees” is an almost disconcertingly smooth narrative, the short chapters dealt as quickly as cards. Gruesome scenes and hardboiled detective banter alternate with comic vignettes (F.B.I. antics, an online white-supremacist meeting) and stark meditations on what one character describes as the slow “genocide” of American lynching. The mystery itself is tightly constructed and suspensefully paced—until, as in Everett’s other novels, a chasm opens between form and content. The tension, in this case, lies between the open-and-shut conventions of the crime novel and the immensity of Everett’s subject.
Nobody feels this more keenly than the trio of detectives, who are constantly stymied by being “Black and blue.” The white residents of Money hate them out of prejudice; the Black ones distrust them as cops. “You’re from the F.B.I.,” Mama Z tells Herberta when questioned about her archives. Herberta says, “I’m also a Black woman.” Mama Z replies, “So you see my problem.” The discomfort between the two mirrors the divisions of last summer’s uprising, when many protesters found themselves on the other side of cordons and curfews enforced by Black officers and mayors. In one uncanny moment, the detectives arrive at a bar in Money’s Black neighborhood just as a young woman with a Mohawk begins a haunting performance of “Strange Fruit.” The scene quietly undercuts any presumption of racial solidarity, as the watching officers realize that they’ve been shut out of a community secret.
Everett’s novel seems to look askance even at itself. When Damon Thruff, a young Black professor specializing in the history of lynching, arrives in Money to assist Mama Z, she tells him that she’s read his work and finds it unfeeling: “You were able to construct three hundred and seven pages on such a topic without an ounce of outrage.” The figure is curiously close to the number of pages in “The Trees,” implicitly questioning not only Damon’s sang-froid but Everett’s. Novels about the legacy of racist violence often strive to voice buried emotion. Bernice L. McFadden’s “Gathering of Waters” (2012), another novel about Emmett Till, is elegiacally narrated by the collective consciousness of Money. Jesmyn Ward’s “Sing, Unburied, Sing” (2017), also set in Mississippi, grieves for victims of the state’s Parchman Farm penitentiary through the lyrical narration of ghosts.
“The Trees,” by contrast, is as cold and matter-of-fact as Mama Z’s lynching archive, where the drawers are “like those in a morgue.” Uncharacteristically for Everett, who is known for cerebral narrators, the novel surveys a wide cast from an indifferent third-person remove. Sometimes Everett appears reluctant to commit his attention, or to decide between drawing caricatures and fleshing out human quandaries. Is this the story of Granny C’s agonized comeuppance? Mama Z’s patient revenge? The alienation of Jim, Ed, and Herberta, as they pursue vigilantes with whom they quietly sympathize? No character is allowed quite enough presence to say. But denying readers a surrogate is also a strategy, turning the moral crisis back onto us, unresolved.
To make art about lynching is an increasingly fraught endeavor. Since Mamie Till-Mobley’s decision to “let the world see,” the pendulum has swung back to a suspicion that many representations of anti-Black violence risk offering up their subjects to a mob’s eyes. When the artist Dana Schutz, who is white, exhibited her painting of Emmett Till’s mangled face in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, protesters demanded its removal and encouraged her to destroy it. At the time, the debate was largely about who should be entitled to such an image, and whether that line ought to be drawn on the basis of race. Schutz’s defenders frequently pointed out that Henry Taylor, a Black artist, had a painting of Philando Castile’s killing in the same show.
Now, though, scrutiny has fallen on such representations regardless of who creates them. The bereaved relatives of police-killing victims have begun to challenge Black artists and activists for adapting, and even profiting from, images of their dead loved ones. Many writers, especially of the Afropessimist school, argue that Black trauma has been hijacked by narratives of redemption, as names like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor cease to refer to individuals and become—by a kind of necromancy—avatars of others’ political ideals. “Dead is the new Black,” as one of Everett’s suspects quips.
“The Trees,” in its rigorous denial of sentiment, shuts down such catharsis—as if to say that funeral oratory is inappropriate when so many victims have yet to be counted. As Damon, the scholar, begins working in Mama Z’s archives, he is most disturbed by lynching’s effacement of individuality:
The crime, the practice, the religion of it, was becoming more pernicious as he realized that the similarity of their deaths had caused these men and women to be at once erased and coalesced like one piece, like one body. They were all number and no number at all, many and one, a symptom, a sign.
Suddenly, he feels compelled to write down each victim’s name in pencil and erase it. From Emmett Till to Alton Sterling, the list occupies an entire chapter.
The focus shifts from Everett’s characters to the phenomenon of lynching in all its geographic breadth, intangible influence, and individual particularity. Beyond the South, there are revenge killings in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where dozens of Chinese miners were massacred, in 1885; in Carbon County, Utah, where a Black coal miner was hanged from a cottonwood tree, in 1925; and in Duluth, Minnesota, where an unemployed man fondly reflects on his grandfather’s role in the town’s lynching of three Black men, in 1920. (He wishes someone would do the same to the “fucking Hispanics” who took his job.) The novel makes good on its title’s promise, as the trees of a particular mystery recede into the forest of an ongoing crime. ♦
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Julian Lucas is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His writing for the magazine includes an exploration of slavery reënactments, as well as profiles of artists and writers such as El Anatsui and Ishmael Reed. Previously, he was an associate editor at Cabinet and a contributing editor at The Point. His writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Magazine, Art in America, and the New York Times Book Review, where he was a contributing writer.
http://bombmagazine.org/article/2666/percival-everett
Literature
All images courtesy of Percival Everett.
The novelist on what it means to be “absolutely human” and how American Idol is an “argument against democracy.”
I sat down to talk with novelist Percival Everett on the pretext of discussing his new epistolary novel, A History of the African American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond as Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid , but truth be told, I was looking for any old reason. You see, Everett has three (that’s right, three) books slated for release this year: the aforementioned History (Akashic), a co-authored satire about the American obsession with celebrity and our political system—and yes, the two grow closer every day—as well as the sycophantic industry that is book publishing; the recently released American Desert (Hyperion), which concerns the misadventures of a college professor who is accidentally killed on his way to commit suicide, and the chaos that ensues after he sits up at his funeral, for all definitive purposes, alive; and a collection of stories, Damned If I Do (Graywolf), probably written just to complete the hat trick. In all, I desperately wanted to have a conversation with Percival that would be recorded for posterity, mainly because Percival Everett is a friggin’ genius. But don’t consider it odd if you’ve never heard of him, for although he’s by no means antisocial (on the contrary, he’s actually quite gregarious and generous with his time, teaching at the University of Southern California during the academic year and at various writing workshops during the summer), Everett actively shies away from the PR machinations and media attention that most other writers seek. And although he has published more than 15 works of well-received fiction (mostly with small presses, for reasons revealed in our conversation), his books are so stylistically varied that attempts to summarize his interests or creative oeuvre prove extremely difficult. In almost every one of his works you peel away one layer of references and meaning only to find another, only to then discover another, only to come upon another, until—well, you get the idea. Welcome, then, to an interview about everything, because in many ways the meaning of everything is the only subject Everett really writes about.
Rone Shavers Would you consider yourself an avant-garde or experimental writer?
Percival Everett I don’t know what avant-garde or experimental means. Every novel is experimental.
RS What do you think you’re bringing to the table in terms of American Arts and Letters? Do you see a purpose to your fiction?
PE Do you see a purpose to art? Of course there is a purpose to art, but do I see a function in my fiction? No. Is it going to feed anybody? No. Hopefully, the world is richer for more art being put into it. That’s what I care about.
RS Do you consider yourself a satirist? I say satire because of such works as A History of the African-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond and Erasure, as well as Glyph. All three books poke fun at one aspect of American society or another. Is it important for you to have humor in your novels?
PE Humor is an interesting thing. It’s hard to do, but it allows you certain strategic advantages. If you can get someone laughing, then you can make them feel like shit a lot more easily. I’m not interested in sentimental stuff; I’m a little too self-conscious to pull it off.
RS I have this theory that Americans can only deal with serious work if it’s funny.
PE Aristophanes gets out a lot of great stuff because he’s funny, whereas you can only read Aeschylus in so many ways. His tragedies are beautiful but they’re limited. Likewise, if you read Kafka and don’t think it’s funny, you’re not reading Kafka very well. (laughter)
RS How do you categorize yourself as a writer? Do you work within the constraints of a particular fiction category? Your works are so all over the map.
PE No, whatever the particular work is, that’s what it is. I don’t put myself in a camp. I want to write what works for the story at hand. I serve the story, basically. I don’t think that as the author I’m terribly important, and I don’t want to be. I want to disappear. If anybody’s thinking about me when they’re reading my work I’ve failed as a writer. The work is supposed to stand by itself. I’m teaching you to fly. When you have to go solo, hey, I’m not there.
RS Does theory influence your work at all?
PE Only insofar as it’s a source. Anytime anybody goes through that much trouble to come up with something nonsensical you have to have fun with it. It’s hilarious stuff. It's not important that it means anything that takes us somewhere, because its not going to. But the fact that anybody wants to think it is, that’s fascinating.
RS Yet Glyph is influenced by semiotic theory and post-structuralism.
PE Well, I’m making fun of post-structuralism.
RS Even Erasure takes the piss out of theoretical positions, notably Gayatri Spivak’s idea of strategic essentialism. I am wondering if you yourself have a theoretical position that you’re working out.
PE If anybody thinks they’re actually going to delineate the necessary and sufficient conditions for any literary work of art, then they’re greatly mistaken and would probably be better served picking up some other line of work, like computer maintenance. But if you’re out to play with ideas and have some fun with them and admit that that’s what you’re doing, and don’t tell the regents at a university that . . . . It’s important to watch how ideas work and how they can be manipulated. That’s probably the most important question to me in the world. What can you do with thinking? But to take it seriously, I mean, that’s why the French, Derrida and Barthes, are so much fun. The fucking Americans get so earnest about this stuff that it stops being fun.
RS Well, what about the New Critics and their idea about the absolute autonomy of a work?
PE Oh, they need to take a pill. (laughter) Just chill.
RS But you do have that New Critical approach, especially if you say that the work is the work and that’s all there is.
PE Well I suppose, but I just don’t give a shit about the artist anyway. Why should I? If I find a painting a hundred years from now, and I can’t appreciate it until I find out something about the person who made it, it’s not much of a painting.
RS What would you describe as your aesthetic point of view? Do you have one?
PE What do I like? I like stuff that’s smart, stuff that challenges me and makes me think differently, that introduces me to things I didn’t know before.
RS Give me some examples.
PE Tristram Shandy is probably the best novel ever written. It takes every form of literary discourse of its time and exploits it. Huck Finn is fantastic. Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go is a very sneaky book. And oddly anticipates so much of Invisible Man that it’s frightening.
RS I have a couple of questions about your style.
PE Style schmyle.
RS Your style, or lack thereof. (laughter) Do you have a predominant style?
PE Style is a tool. The work will dictate the style.
RS So you write in a manner that suits the work.
PE The only reason I would want a particular style is so that people could identify every work of mine as mine. There’s nothing at stake for me in having people recognize the work because of stylistic consistency.
RS You tend to blend styles a lot.
PE Well, I play with styles. I think they’re amusing. I think that anybody who thinks they have a style—it’s like watching punk rockers get ready to go out. It must take you two hours to get that look. How many safety pins do you need? To me there’s a wonderful irony in that. To work so hard to dress your work. Send the work out there naked.
RS What’s also interesting to me is the way you use history. Much of your work is dependent on historical events, but then the events tend to be jumbled; it’s not literal history, it’s mixed up. For instance, in Watershed, there is an infamous event from the American Indian Movement, but the novel is set in contemporary times.
PE I create a circumstance that’s similar to the siege at Wounded Knee. It’s interesting that you call it infamous. It’s a little like the American insistence on calling its attacks battles and the enemies’ attacks ambushes or massacres. History is like memories: it is constantly being reconstructed. History doesn’t exist without the lies. We believe in some way that history makes sense, but history is an amorphous, very strange creature that’s constantly changing.
RS Why do you rely on the historical so much?
PE Well, we live in a world. We define ourselves by the times through which we live. Everything is historical. If you read any philosophy now, you can’t help but be historical.
RS Why? I mean, I don’t read philosophy.
PE Can you understand any theory about the narrative of film if you don’t know Aristotle? The answer is no. Everything’s dependent on the work that’s come before it. Our understanding of philosophy is necessarily historical, because otherwise we wouldn’t be addressing anything. The problems of philosophy are historical: What is beautiful? What is a promise? How do we perceive?
RS Perception, and misperception, is a central issue in your work. Take Ralph, for example, the baby genius from Glyph. He’s so brilliant that he refuses to speak. The attempt to understand how people construct meaning leaves him flummoxed. And then there’s Thelonious, the writer in Erasure. He’s the victim of misperception after misperception, until he no longer recognizes himself. And then, of course, there’s Strom Thurmond, from the latest book. He actually becomes convinced he’s the best person capable of writing the history of black people in America.
PE Let me just say that I wish I could’ve made Thurmond up and that he didn’t exist. But sadly, he did exist. I’ve written a lot of books. Some of them are going to be that way, others are all based in contemporary story and don’t do that. I don’t think anyone living in any time cannot be interested in the past and its manipulation.
RS What if someone accused you of trying, in not necessarily a bad way, maybe a clever way, to rewrite African American history?
PE What the hell’s wrong with that? You can write anything you want to. If anybody takes anything they read, history or fiction, as some gospel, then fuck ’em anyway, who cares? The point is, take it and then play with it.
RS Would you say that your work is corrective?
PE I’m not correcting anything. That would mean I know enough to correct. I’m just a dumb writer.
RS Well then, what about a personal history?
PE I don’t write anything autobiographical. I’m private, and I hate this nonfiction shit that’s out in the world. These memoirs. Oh my God! I do not care! I’m sorry you’re dying, but I don’t care.
RS Or that your mom beat you with a two-by-four.
PE And really, if you’re writing memoirs, she ought to beat you with a two-by-four.
RS (laughter) Actually, reading your work, I could begin to trace certain commonalities, especially in terms of family. You don’t want your personal life to be the basis of a novel, but do you think that there are experiences or bits of your history, your family, that inadvertently slip out?
PE Well, I don’t know if it inadvertently slips out. I understand some things, like that of the relationship between the father and Monk in Erasure is a lot like the relationship between this old woman and the main character, David Larson, who ends up living on her ranch in my early novel, Walk Me to the Distance. But Monk’s relationship with his mother in Erasure is nothing like the relationship Suder has with his mother in my first novel. The father in Erasure is a combination of several people.
RS There are certain generalities in your work, to the point where you could say, “Well, maybe it’s drawn from personal experience.”
PE Like what?
RS Let’s just say that the mother figures are not exactly the most stable. (laughter) Like in Suder the mom is—
PE Well, she’s nuts. But she’s the only one who has sense enough to be nuts in the world in which she lives. And in Erasure the mother just has Alzheimer’s.
RS But also, in terms of personal experience coming through, generally your characters are of a particular class. They’re professionals: doctors, hydrologists, baseball players, fiction writers.
PE That’s the world I know. I know artists and I grew up with doctors. My grandfather, father, and uncles were doctors. My sister is a doctor. And I spend a lot of my time with ranchers, hydrologists, and veterinarians. Occasionally someone will say. “That’s not the Black Experience.” And I laugh and say. “I’m black, and that’s my experience.” I know a lot of black people whose experience is that, but it’s not what people want to think is the black experience—they want their black experience to be inner-city and rural south.
RS All that is the preamble to my next question, which is: How important is class to you, especially given that class tends to be conflated with race?
PE I’m a card-carrying member of the ACLU, and I go to the ballet, and I train mules and I write fiction for a living.
RS What does that mean?
PE That’s my point—it means absolutely nothing. People live in the worlds they live in, and they’re interested in the things that interest them. That’s what makes this world fascinating. I really don’t think about class. Everybody should read fiction. I think everybody should read Joyce and Ellison. I don’t think serious fiction is written for a few people. I think we live in a stupid culture that won’t educate its people to read these things. It would be a much more interesting place if it would. And it’s not just that mechanics and plumbers don’t read literary fiction, it’s that doctors and lawyers don’t read literary fiction. It has nothing to do with class, it has to do with an anti-intellectual culture that doesn’t trust art.
RS But are you sure that class doesn’t play a part? I mean, in a lot of your novels there’s a particular break where a character will come out and say. “Oh yeah, by the way, I’m black.”
PE That has nothing to do with class.
RS That’s why I brought up the intersection of race and class. That tension’s always there in your novels. Most of your main characters are black professionals to one degree or another, and there’s always that break in the work, as though to say, “What? I can’t be a professional and African American?” You relate a typical black experience, the black experience that isn’t rural or ghettoized.
PE I don’t think I’m saying that. I don’t understand it. But I guess it’s not typical.
RS Speak on that a bit more.
PE When I grew up, there were three black people on TV, and they were all porters. And so all that talk about the positive black role model that everyone wanted to see made sense because there was no other. In fiction as well. You had the inner-city novel, and the “yessir, boss” role model, and it was not the experience that anybody I knew had. I grew up where the Civil War started, in South Carolina, and I have never in my life heard someone say, “Where fo’ you be going?” (laughter) So Alice Walker can kiss my ass.
RS What does Alice Walker say about the whole thing?
PE One thing she says is that she doesn’t write for people who can read. At least, somebody said she said that, so that might be a big lie, but I would believe it given what I have read.
RS What do you think about the whole Oprah thing?
PE Oprah should stay the fuck out of literature and stop pretending she knows anything about it, in the same way that people should stop giving any credence to book reviews on Amazon.com. And people should get educated so they can read all sorts of things and have their lives and society become richer. Walt Whitman in By Blue Ontario’s Shore writes, “Produce great Persons, the rest follows.” You produce better people by having smarter people.
RS What if someone accused you of being anti-democratic? In the sense of art reaching a mass audience?
PE Give me a fucking break. Art is not democratic. Why should everybody think they can write a novel? Everybody can’t play violin. That doesn’t mean people don’t aspire to do it. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a violin and try to play it. But to think that everybody is going to be good at it, just because they want to—that’s complete idiocy! That’s why George Bush is president. Democracy has its failings, and one of them is that it allows the existence of capitalist rapists like Dick and Dubya. If you want an argument against democracy watch American Idol.
RS I asked you earlier if you consider yourself avant-garde. Have you read William Gass’s essay “The Vicissitudes of the Avant-Garde”?
PE No.
RS He lays out three types of avant-garde: the leftist, which ends up being conservative, the rightist, which ends up being reactionary, and a third type that always bites the hand that feeds it. I can see your work fitting in that last category.
PE Anybody who succeeds in this capitalistic culture making serious art isn’t necessarily biting the hand that feeds him. I mean, my God, look at Guernica. That’s a great protest work, a beautiful painting. But it takes its meaning from the ugliness that allows its creation. It achieves its power because it’s produced in a world full of ugliness. That’s the nature of protest. It’s wonderfully ironic, wonderfully weird and finally, absolutely human.
RS What is absolutely human?
PE The fact that the very thing that allows our expression of something is the thing that we hate. But we love the expression of it, so we get something from it. There are some people who wouldn’t be happy if they couldn’t complain. This world is made for them. Social injustice is not going to go away, so if you hate social injustice and love complaining about it, then this is the world for you.
RS (laughter) Do you think your work protests in any way?
PE Well, that’s not for me to say. Of course I have a feeling about it, but the work is out there. If there’s a protest in there that you can find, that’s great.
RS Erasure is a big protest.
PE Oh? (laughter)
RS Yeah, I mean, come on.
PE Glyph is almost a bigger protest than Erasure. Erasure is like describing a rattlesnake’s bite. Am I protesting rattlesnakes?
RS True, although most people would not see the protest in Glyph or commit to that protest.
PE People rally around easy things.
RS And there are some easy things to pick up on in Erasure. Isn’t satire a kind of protest?
PE Not necessarily. I’m making fun of satire as well as satirizing social policies. I mean, I shouldn’t even say this, but I write about satire.
RS So you’re satirizing satire.
PE I hate hearing it back, but in some way, yes, I’m exploiting the form.
RS Gotcha. So then there is a sort of form, or thematic, or style—
PE I’m interested in all sorts of things, and form is one of them. I don’t think meaning exists without form, and certainly form does not exist without meaning. Meaning and story come first. Story is the most important part of fiction. Without it, what’s the point? If all you care about is form, become a critic.
Percival Everett. Courtesy of Percival Everett, unless otherwise noted.
RS Let’s change tracks a little bit. You’re working on your twentieth novel now?
PE It’s around there. I can’t remember.
RS You’ve probably got two more in the hopper. Why are you so damn prolific?
PE It’s my job. I mean, if I were a plumber and I only fixed two toilets a year…(laughter)
RS Has being prolific helped or hindered you?
PE I don’t give a shit as long as I can write what I want to write. I’m not trying to get rich doing this. and I don’t care about how it’s received—I just make novels, that’s my job, that’s what I want to do, that’s what I love to do. I want to train mules, I want to fish and I want to write novels.
RS Earlier we were talking about the two-fisted writer, someone who works on one book while researching another. Do you work on two at a time?
PE I work on several things at once. I don’t sleep a lot.
RS Are you one of those guys who gets an idea, goes to a typewriter and pumps it out?
PE No, I think a long time before I put anything down on paper. I write many drafts and I try to cut as much as I can.
RS Being prolific brings a sense of urgency to your work. For those of us who move rather glacially, is that part of the whole thing? I mean, is there an urgency?
PE No, it just comes when it comes. I live on a ranch, so I have stuff to do all the time. I’m always fixing and building, and I teach. So I sit down when I’m at home, 10 or 15 minutes every couple of hours over the course of the day, and slowly pages accumulate. And I look at what I have and I do it again. I do it over and over.
RS Wow, that’s interesting. So you don’t have a set time. Would you say that you’re disciplined?
PE I can say that I’m disciplined because I do complete works. But if my wife says, “Lets go to the beach,” I’m in the car. It’s never, “No, I have to do this.”
RS I see. I totally had you pegged as one of those, “I have to write for four hours every day.”
PE Oh, no. I’d go crazy. I’ve never done that in my life.
RS The book that you’re working on now, on philosophy—
PE Oh, that’s so unformed I can’t really say anything about that.
RS Do you have anything else coming up?
PE Well, I just finished a naturalistic novel that—
RS See, that’s what I’m talking about, you work too much. This novel is the one starring Percival Everett, more or less, right?
PE I just show up in it. The working title is Wounded. It’s a really naturalistic novel. My interest is in the form of a realistic novel. You have to love the form you’re working in, but I’m seeing what I can do.
RS To tweak it?
PE No. I wouldn’t say that. Like I said before. I don’t believe there’s any such thing as the experimental novel, because all novels are experimental. I mean that to say any time I start a work, I have no idea how to write a novel. My students say, “Can you teach me to write a novel?” and I say, “No. I can talk to you about how novels have been written and what you might do to write your novel, but I cannot tell you how to write a novel.” In that way it is an experiment every time. You can’t show me three novels that you think are great literary works that look alike. Poetry is a lot more formal than fiction; you can talk about a villanelle, a sonnet, a sestina. But if you talk about what a short story is, there are no rules. But we all know. And that makes it very difficult.
RS What is it that we all know? Because I don’t know.
PE That’s the point. We can’t talk about it. But if I gave you some works for a workshop, you might read one and say. “Well, this isn’t a story.” And you’d probably be right, but you’d be hard pressed to explain to me why it’s not.
RS I couldn’t pick a story out of a police lineup.
PE No one could. It’s like Dave Chappelle says: Why do black people like menthol cigarettes? No one knows. (laughter)
RS ‘Cause they good, Percy, they good. (laughter) ’Cause you can get ’em loose. All right, you said you can’t pick out three similar works of fiction—
PE You can’t draw me an archetypal picture of a novel and then go find three great books and have them all look like that picture. I can tell you what makes a romance novel a romance novel, but I can’t tell you what makes Finnegan’s Wake and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the same thing.
RS What if we bring genre fiction into it?
PE Detective novels fit a certain group of rules. If they don’t, then they’re not detective novels. Literary novels don’t have those kinds of rules. That’s not to say one is better than the other, but one does have a set of criteria.
RS Then define literary for me.
PE I can’t. That’s the point. The only way to define literary is that it doesn’t fit into a genre. But I’ll give you the difference between art and commercial work, and this is it: you will never return to a paragraph of John Grisham’s just to read that paragraph. You will return to Moby Dick because you love the language, because there was an experience reading the book that means something. And what makes it that way? It’s art, and you can’t explain it. Something happens to you. The first time you actually see a Jackson Pollock, you will remember that. You see the real thing and you’re like—
RS Wow.
PE That’s experiencing the work.
RS You’re talking about the concept of the sublime. Methinks you’re a damn modernist. There’s a sublime moment in a lot of your works: something happens and the character will either have that sublime moment or turn away from it or die or something. What are your ideas on endings?
PE Things don’t end on bombast. You go to war, and it doesn’t end with huge explosions—it ends when you die or when you get to go home. And that’s a quiet personal thing, not something with bands playing and the world being right.
RS Or with you shooting the bad guy.
PE That’s right. It just ends. Every story can keep going. So might as well just stop in an open-ended way.
RS You pull the emergency brake when you end a book.
PE I hope it feels that way, because if you’re really into a world then you don’t want it to stop and anyplace it ends, it has to, in that way. You have to get off at some station. But I want to make novels as short as I can.
RS Why?
PE I love the economy. It’s so easy for me to go on and on, but I don’t like extraneous words. I really believe every word does work. And I don’t want to duplicate effort. I hate repeating myself. I take a certain amount of pride in having the work lean.
RS But you’re tackling really complex stuff in your work. You don’t think you’re giving your ideas short shrift?
PE You know, you don’t have to fill a gallon jug when you give a urine sample. Occam’s Razor is pretty sharp, and it cuts with both edges. The simplest explanation is usually the best, but I don’t seek to explain anything, and I’m not smart enough to have a full discussion. As a fiction writer, I just want to illuminate the fact that there is something to discuss. I’m not a superhero. I’m just the writer.
RS But there are certain books whose length is appropriate. Like Gravity’s Rainbow.
PE If the story that you have is that long, that’s the story you have. Write your story. You don’t start thinking, “I’m going to write a long novel.” You write a novel and it turns out that it’s long.
RS Who are your peers? I don’t mean your contemporaries, but throughout the ages, who would you like to have been your peers? Who would you like to be compared with?
PE Well, I would love people to talk about my work with Sterne and Twain. Cervantes.
RS Who do you like?
PE I like such disparate writers. Gaddis. I love Howard Norman. Madison Bell. I like John Wideman. I’m interested in the boundaries between fiction and fact that he explores and seldom successfully handles, really—but the experiment of it is marvelous.
RS You tend to do a lot of that, too, in certain places.
PE I don’t do the autobiographical deal. I mean, I show up in the Strom Thurmond book, but that’s just a different sort of work.
RS All your stuff is kind of unreliable in that way.
PE Well, the world is unreliable. I’m just trying to give you the real thing.
RS Why do you publish most of your stuff with small presses?
PE I like small presses. They keep you in print longer, they treat you better and they talk about literature instead of money. I don’t need money, so I go with places where literature is important. Plus I love my editor at Graywolf. I’ve been with Fiona McCrae for six books and she’s a terrific editor and I like my relationship with her. I try to keep something with Graywolf even though my next novel and the last two novels didn’t go with them. They’re doing a book of my stories in November. Erasure did well with the University Press of New England, which took a chance with it.
RS It was hilarious seeing your book among titles about reconstructing womanhood in eighteenth-century New Hampshire.
PE I loved it, it’s terrific. All the other houses ran away from it because they were afraid of some backlash. It turned out there was no backlash; everybody got in line. I really wanted to piss somebody off.
RS Well, I think you pissed off Oprah!
PE You can’t piss off illiterate people with a book. And so then the same people who had been afraid of it lined up to see the paperback run. It was stupid.
RS You have the most interesting relationship to publishing of any writer I know. Just in the sense that it all seems to bounce off you.
PE I really don’t care. As long as I’m dealing with people I think are serious, I’m happy.
Tags: Satire American culture Race Novels Writing process Literary style Cultural critique Democracy
PE It’s around there. I can’t remember.
RS You’ve probably got two more in the hopper. Why are you so damn prolific?
PE It’s my job. I mean, if I were a plumber and I only fixed two toilets a year…(laughter)
RS Has being prolific helped or hindered you?
PE I don’t give a shit as long as I can write what I want to write. I’m not trying to get rich doing this. and I don’t care about how it’s received—I just make novels, that’s my job, that’s what I want to do, that’s what I love to do. I want to train mules, I want to fish and I want to write novels.
RS Earlier we were talking about the two-fisted writer, someone who works on one book while researching another. Do you work on two at a time?
PE I work on several things at once. I don’t sleep a lot.
RS Are you one of those guys who gets an idea, goes to a typewriter and pumps it out?
PE No, I think a long time before I put anything down on paper. I write many drafts and I try to cut as much as I can.
RS Being prolific brings a sense of urgency to your work. For those of us who move rather glacially, is that part of the whole thing? I mean, is there an urgency?
PE No, it just comes when it comes. I live on a ranch, so I have stuff to do all the time. I’m always fixing and building, and I teach. So I sit down when I’m at home, 10 or 15 minutes every couple of hours over the course of the day, and slowly pages accumulate. And I look at what I have and I do it again. I do it over and over.
RS Wow, that’s interesting. So you don’t have a set time. Would you say that you’re disciplined?
PE I can say that I’m disciplined because I do complete works. But if my wife says, “Lets go to the beach,” I’m in the car. It’s never, “No, I have to do this.”
RS I see. I totally had you pegged as one of those, “I have to write for four hours every day.”
PE Oh, no. I’d go crazy. I’ve never done that in my life.
RS The book that you’re working on now, on philosophy—
PE Oh, that’s so unformed I can’t really say anything about that.
RS Do you have anything else coming up?
PE Well, I just finished a naturalistic novel that—
RS See, that’s what I’m talking about, you work too much. This novel is the one starring Percival Everett, more or less, right?
PE I just show up in it. The working title is Wounded. It’s a really naturalistic novel. My interest is in the form of a realistic novel. You have to love the form you’re working in, but I’m seeing what I can do.
RS To tweak it?
PE No. I wouldn’t say that. Like I said before. I don’t believe there’s any such thing as the experimental novel, because all novels are experimental. I mean that to say any time I start a work, I have no idea how to write a novel. My students say, “Can you teach me to write a novel?” and I say, “No. I can talk to you about how novels have been written and what you might do to write your novel, but I cannot tell you how to write a novel.” In that way it is an experiment every time. You can’t show me three novels that you think are great literary works that look alike. Poetry is a lot more formal than fiction; you can talk about a villanelle, a sonnet, a sestina. But if you talk about what a short story is, there are no rules. But we all know. And that makes it very difficult.
RS What is it that we all know? Because I don’t know.
PE That’s the point. We can’t talk about it. But if I gave you some works for a workshop, you might read one and say. “Well, this isn’t a story.” And you’d probably be right, but you’d be hard pressed to explain to me why it’s not.
RS I couldn’t pick a story out of a police lineup.
PE No one could. It’s like Dave Chappelle says: Why do black people like menthol cigarettes? No one knows. (laughter)
RS ‘Cause they good, Percy, they good. (laughter) ’Cause you can get ’em loose. All right, you said you can’t pick out three similar works of fiction—
PE You can’t draw me an archetypal picture of a novel and then go find three great books and have them all look like that picture. I can tell you what makes a romance novel a romance novel, but I can’t tell you what makes Finnegan’s Wake and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the same thing.
RS What if we bring genre fiction into it?
PE Detective novels fit a certain group of rules. If they don’t, then they’re not detective novels. Literary novels don’t have those kinds of rules. That’s not to say one is better than the other, but one does have a set of criteria.
RS Then define literary for me.
PE I can’t. That’s the point. The only way to define literary is that it doesn’t fit into a genre. But I’ll give you the difference between art and commercial work, and this is it: you will never return to a paragraph of John Grisham’s just to read that paragraph. You will return to Moby Dick because you love the language, because there was an experience reading the book that means something. And what makes it that way? It’s art, and you can’t explain it. Something happens to you. The first time you actually see a Jackson Pollock, you will remember that. You see the real thing and you’re like—
RS Wow.
PE That’s experiencing the work.
RS You’re talking about the concept of the sublime. Methinks you’re a damn modernist. There’s a sublime moment in a lot of your works: something happens and the character will either have that sublime moment or turn away from it or die or something. What are your ideas on endings?
PE Things don’t end on bombast. You go to war, and it doesn’t end with huge explosions—it ends when you die or when you get to go home. And that’s a quiet personal thing, not something with bands playing and the world being right.
RS Or with you shooting the bad guy.
PE That’s right. It just ends. Every story can keep going. So might as well just stop in an open-ended way.
RS You pull the emergency brake when you end a book.
PE I hope it feels that way, because if you’re really into a world then you don’t want it to stop and anyplace it ends, it has to, in that way. You have to get off at some station. But I want to make novels as short as I can.
RS Why?
PE I love the economy. It’s so easy for me to go on and on, but I don’t like extraneous words. I really believe every word does work. And I don’t want to duplicate effort. I hate repeating myself. I take a certain amount of pride in having the work lean.
RS But you’re tackling really complex stuff in your work. You don’t think you’re giving your ideas short shrift?
PE You know, you don’t have to fill a gallon jug when you give a urine sample. Occam’s Razor is pretty sharp, and it cuts with both edges. The simplest explanation is usually the best, but I don’t seek to explain anything, and I’m not smart enough to have a full discussion. As a fiction writer, I just want to illuminate the fact that there is something to discuss. I’m not a superhero. I’m just the writer.
RS But there are certain books whose length is appropriate. Like Gravity’s Rainbow.
PE If the story that you have is that long, that’s the story you have. Write your story. You don’t start thinking, “I’m going to write a long novel.” You write a novel and it turns out that it’s long.
RS Who are your peers? I don’t mean your contemporaries, but throughout the ages, who would you like to have been your peers? Who would you like to be compared with?
PE Well, I would love people to talk about my work with Sterne and Twain. Cervantes.
RS Who do you like?
PE I like such disparate writers. Gaddis. I love Howard Norman. Madison Bell. I like John Wideman. I’m interested in the boundaries between fiction and fact that he explores and seldom successfully handles, really—but the experiment of it is marvelous.
RS You tend to do a lot of that, too, in certain places.
PE I don’t do the autobiographical deal. I mean, I show up in the Strom Thurmond book, but that’s just a different sort of work.
RS All your stuff is kind of unreliable in that way.
PE Well, the world is unreliable. I’m just trying to give you the real thing.
RS Why do you publish most of your stuff with small presses?
PE I like small presses. They keep you in print longer, they treat you better and they talk about literature instead of money. I don’t need money, so I go with places where literature is important. Plus I love my editor at Graywolf. I’ve been with Fiona McCrae for six books and she’s a terrific editor and I like my relationship with her. I try to keep something with Graywolf even though my next novel and the last two novels didn’t go with them. They’re doing a book of my stories in November. Erasure did well with the University Press of New England, which took a chance with it.
RS It was hilarious seeing your book among titles about reconstructing womanhood in eighteenth-century New Hampshire.
PE I loved it, it’s terrific. All the other houses ran away from it because they were afraid of some backlash. It turned out there was no backlash; everybody got in line. I really wanted to piss somebody off.
RS Well, I think you pissed off Oprah!
PE You can’t piss off illiterate people with a book. And so then the same people who had been afraid of it lined up to see the paperback run. It was stupid.
RS You have the most interesting relationship to publishing of any writer I know. Just in the sense that it all seems to bounce off you.
PE I really don’t care. As long as I’m dealing with people I think are serious, I’m happy.
Tags: Satire American culture Race Novels Writing process Literary style Cultural critique Democracy
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/16/books/review/percival-everett-by-the-book-interview.html
By the Book
The Classic Novel That Makes Percival Everett Cringe
Credit: Rebecca Clarke
December 16, 2021
New York Times
“‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ has had much attention and, one could argue, influence on our culture, but I find the novel poorly written,” says Percival Everett, author of “The Trees” and many other novels. “Sentence to sentence I fairly hate it.”
What books are on your night stand?
There are too many books on my night stand. This could mean that I read a lot or that I don’t read as much as I should. On the table are the memoirs of Shostakovich. I am not usually interested in memoir and I have to say that I am using this one as a sleep-aid. “South to Freedom,” by Alice L. Baumgartner, a well-written book about slavery that does cover something new. “Six Easy Pieces,” by Richard Feynman. I daydream of being as smart as Richard Feynman. In my nightly dreaming I remain essentially myself. “The Ethics of Ambiguity,” by Simone de Beauvoir, and some others. I have been going back to Husserl and Sartre and Camus. I have rediscovered Merleau-Ponty and Karl Jaspers. Jaspers’s “Phenomenology of Perception” is on the night stand as well and occasionally I can understand a paragraph.
What’s the last great book you read?
I recently enjoyed Sarah Bakewell’s “At the Existentialist Café.” This book fell into my hands just as I was returning to the existentialists and fit perfectly with my interest. It added a human dimension to the period and helped me make better sense of it all.
I found great pleasure in Greil Marcus’s “Under the Red, White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchanment and the Stubborn Myth of the Great Gatsby,” about the idea of the American dream, its allure, the exploitation of it. I wish I had written this book, but I couldn’t have.
Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?
Either I don’t know what you mean by “classic,” or I do. Either avenue is a poor entrance to a consideration of literature. Not to be prickly, but I can’t bring myself to participate in the intrinsically sexist, racist and classist endeavor of canon formation.
Can a great book be badly written? What other criteria can overcome bad prose?
If bad prose is employed with the knowledge it is bad prose and that it will affect the construction of meaning, then yes. If not, then no. There is a, not so subtle, distinction to made between stories that might simply be important and literary art. Some important lessons come to us from stories that don’t pretend or portend to be art. And there are some examples of literary art where the meaning resides mainly in the writing. When these two come together you’ve got something.
“To Kill a Mockingbird” has had much attention and, one could argue, influence on our culture, but I find the novel poorly written. Sentence to sentence I fairly hate it. Joyce’s “Ulysses” has probably had no impact on the way anyone sees the world or thinks about the world, but I find joy in reading it.
Some so-called commercial novels can offer a great, exciting reading experience, but I will never return to them, will only reread them if I forget everything in them. However, I might pick up Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God” or “Moby-Dick” and read a random paragraph and feel satisfied.
Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).
I don’t know. A warm afternoon, stream side, after a morning of fly fishing. Right now, I would be reading Jean Stafford’s “The Mountain Lion.” Today. Tomorrow, Chester Himes’s “If He Hollers Let Him Go,” on a train.
I love reading best when I’m alone. It is, after all, one of the most subversive acts we can do. At the same time, there are many moments when reading when you look around because you’ve found some words you’d really like to share. I also enjoy reading books that I don’t understand, which amounts to most books. There is a wonderful back and forth that happens. Once I believe I understand something it is revealed to me that I didn’t understand something else, so I return to that thing only to have the same thing happen. There is often a vicious circularity that is at once frustrating and exhilarating.
I miss the experience of reading to my children. I not only learned how great kids’ books are, but how much smarter kids are than me. Especially when they were very young, their joy at seemingly simple situations, and the play with language and sound. I once used a Sandra Boynton text during a reading of mine at Bread Loaf many years ago; it made me feel like I was in good company.
What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?
I don’t know what no one else has heard of. I’m not the most culturally plugged-in member of my household.
I love Melvin Kelley’s “Dem.” Beauvoir’s “The Woman Destroyed” is a great piece of applied existentialism, if there is such a thing. There are many forgotten novels, but that’s sort of the beauty of this, isn’t it. Our work remains after we’re gone, to be rediscovered, reinterpreted, perhaps even renamed, by one, a few or many. If the work does something then, with no one there to push it or defend it, then it’s art. Until then, they’re just books.
I love Butler’s “The Way of All Flesh.” No one else talks about it, so I will take that to mean they haven’t read it. Once I read it, I never stopped talking about it.
I don’t like the idea of unfinished novels being published, but Chester Himes’s posthumous “Plan B” is a nice piece of work. Still, as an artist I don’t think that works a writer did not release into the world should be loose in the world. But I suppose it doesn’t matter much to Mr. Himes, given his current condition.
Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.
A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 19, 2021, Page 7 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Percival Everett. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
See more on: Percival Everett
Percival Everett
From Wikipedia
From Wikipedia
Percival Everett
Everett in 2024
Everett in 2024
Born: December 22, 1956 (age 68)
Fort Gordon, Georgia, U.S.
Occupation(s): Novelist, Short story writer, Poet, Professor
Education:
University of Miami (BA)
Brown University (MA)
Period:
Contemporary
Notable works:
Erasure (2001); I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009); The Trees (2021); James (2024)
Notable awards
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction, 2023; National Book Award for Fiction, 2024
Spouse
Danzy Senna
Children
2
Percival Leonard Everett II (born December 22, 1956)[1] is an American writer[2] and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He has described himself as "pathologically ironic"[3] and has played around with numerous genres such as western fiction, mysteries, thrillers, satire and philosophical fiction.[4] His books are often satirical, aimed at exploring race and identity issues in the United States.
He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. His 2024 novel James, also a finalist for the Booker Prize, won the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction.
Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.
Personal life and education
Percival L. Everett, named after his father, was born in Fort Gordon, Georgia, where his father, Percival Leonard Everett, was a sergeant in the U.S. Army. His mother was Dorothy (née Stinson) Everett. When the younger Everett was still an infant, the family moved to Columbia, South Carolina, where he lived through high school. He has a sister, Denise Everett, a physician in Raleigh, NC.[5] His father became a dentist and his parents continued to live in South Carolina. The younger Everett eventually moved to the American West.[5]
Everett earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of Miami.[6] He studied a broad variety of topics including biochemistry and mathematical logic.[7] In 1982, he earned a master's degree in fiction from Brown University.[8]
Everett now lives in Los Angeles, California, with his wife, the novelist Danzy Senna, and their two children.[9][10]
Everett's great-grandmother was at one point enslaved.[11]
Fort Gordon, Georgia, U.S.
Occupation(s): Novelist, Short story writer, Poet, Professor
Education:
University of Miami (BA)
Brown University (MA)
Period:
Contemporary
Notable works:
Erasure (2001); I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009); The Trees (2021); James (2024)
Notable awards
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction, 2023; National Book Award for Fiction, 2024
Spouse
Danzy Senna
Children
2
Percival Leonard Everett II (born December 22, 1956)[1] is an American writer[2] and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He has described himself as "pathologically ironic"[3] and has played around with numerous genres such as western fiction, mysteries, thrillers, satire and philosophical fiction.[4] His books are often satirical, aimed at exploring race and identity issues in the United States.
He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. His 2024 novel James, also a finalist for the Booker Prize, won the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction.
Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.
Personal life and education
Percival L. Everett, named after his father, was born in Fort Gordon, Georgia, where his father, Percival Leonard Everett, was a sergeant in the U.S. Army. His mother was Dorothy (née Stinson) Everett. When the younger Everett was still an infant, the family moved to Columbia, South Carolina, where he lived through high school. He has a sister, Denise Everett, a physician in Raleigh, NC.[5] His father became a dentist and his parents continued to live in South Carolina. The younger Everett eventually moved to the American West.[5]
Everett earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of Miami.[6] He studied a broad variety of topics including biochemistry and mathematical logic.[7] In 1982, he earned a master's degree in fiction from Brown University.[8]
Everett now lives in Los Angeles, California, with his wife, the novelist Danzy Senna, and their two children.[9][10]
Everett's great-grandmother was at one point enslaved.[11]
Literary career
While completing his M.A., Everett wrote his first novel, Suder (1983). His lead character was Craig Suder, a Seattle Mariners third baseman in a major league slump, both on and off the field.[12]
Everett's second novel, Walk Me to the Distance (1985), features veteran David Larson after his return from Vietnam. Larson becomes involved in a search for the developmentally disabled son of a sheep rancher in Slut's Whole, Wyoming. The novel was later adapted, with an altered plot, as an ABC-TV movie titled Follow Your Heart.[12][13] Everett disowned this adaptation, stating "I never saw it. I read the script, and I didn’t like it. The changes that they made were so grotesque, there was no way to embrace that at all."[14]
Cutting Lisa (1986; re-issued 2000) begins with John Livesey meeting a man who has performed a Caesarean section. This prompts the protagonist to evaluate his relationships.[15]
In 1987, Everett published The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair: Stories, a collection of short stories set mostly in the contemporary western United States.
In 1990, Everett published two books: Zulus, which combines the grotesque and the apocalypse; and For Her Dark Skin, a new version of Medea by the Greek playwright Euripides.[12]
Switching genres, Everett next wrote a children's book, The One That Got Away (1992). This illustrated book for young readers follows three cowboys as they attempt to corral "ones", the mischievous numerals.[16]
Returning to novels, Everett published his first book-length western, God's Country, in 1994. In this novel, Curt Marder and his black tracker Bubba search "God's country" for Marder's wife, who has been kidnapped by bandits. Marder is not sure whether he wants to find her. The book is a parody of westerns and the politics of race and gender. It includes a cross-dressing George Armstrong Custer.[12]
In 1996, Everett published two books: Watershed has a contemporary western setting, in which the loner hydrologist Robert Hawkes meets a Native American "small person", who helps him come to terms with the inter-relation of people. That year, Everett also published his second collection of stories, Big Picture.[12]
In Frenzy (1997), Everett returned to Greek mythology. Vlepo, Dionysos's assistant, is forced to undergo a "frenzy" of odd activities, including becoming lice and bedroom curtains at different times during the story, which he narrates. These events occur so that he can explain these experiences to Dionysos, the demi-god.[12]
Glyph (1999) is the story within a story of Ralph, a baby who chooses not to speak but has extraordinary muscle control and an IQ nearing 500. He writes notes to his mother on a variety of literary topics based on books she supplies. Ralph is kidnapped several times by parties trying to exploit his special skills. His odyssey (as "written" by four-year-old Ralph) teaches him more about love than intellect.[17]
Grand Canyon, Inc. (2001) is Everett's first novella. In it, Rhino Tanner attempts to tame Mother Nature with a commercialization of the Grand Canyon.
In 2001, Everett also published his satirical novel Erasure, in which he portrays how the publishing industry pigeon-holes African-American writers. The novel, a metafictional piece, revolves around the main character's decision to write an outrageous novella, based among the urban poor and dissolute, titled My Pafology. The writer renames it as Fuck, wanting to push the edge of acceptability and influenced by what he calls ghetto fiction, such as Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) and Sapphire's novel Push (1996).[18]
A History of the African-American People (proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid (2004), is an epistolary novel that chronicles the characters Percival Everett and James Kincaid as they work with US Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC) (occasionally) and his aide's crazy assistant, Barton Wilkes. The latter orders the authors around even as he stalks them.[19]
Also in 2004, Everett released a third collection of short stories, Damned If I Do: Stories,[20] as well as the novel American Desert. In American Desert, Ted Street plans to drown himself in the ocean but is killed in a traffic accident on the way there. Three days later, Street suddenly sits up in his casket at the funeral, although his head is severed and he lacks a beating heart. Throughout the rest of the novel, Street undergoes an odyssey of self-discovery about what being alive really means, exploring religion, revelation, faith, zealotry, love, family, media sensationalism, and death.[21]
Wounded: A Novel (2005) tells the story of John Hunt, a horse trainer confronted with hate crimes against a homosexual and a Native American. Hunt avoids getting mixed up in the political nature of these crimes, taking action only when he is forced to do so.[22]
Everett's 2006 collection of poetry, re:f (gesture), features one of his paintings on the front cover. His 2010 poetry book, Swimming Swimmers Swimming, was published by Red Hen Press.
The Water Cure (2007) is a novel about Ishmael Kidder, who has had a successful career as a romance novelist until the death of his daughter, when his life takes a dark turn. In a remote cabin in New Mexico, Kidder has imprisoned a man he believes to be his daughter's killer. The book's title refers to one of the torture techniques Kidder uses on the man, namely waterboarding.[23]
In 2009, Graywolf Press released I Am Not Sidney Poitier. The protagonist, named Not Sidney Poitier, referencing a physical resemblance to the famous actor, meets challenges relating to identity and racial segregation across North America. He faces similar challenges in identity construction in relation to his adopted white father, Ted Turner.[24]
Assumption: A Novel (2011) is a triptych of stories with some characters who have been in earlier Everett stories. The story "Big" returns to the character of Ogden Walker, deputy sheriff of a small New Mexico town. He is on the trail of an old woman's murderer. But at the crime scene, his are the only footprints leading up to and away from her door. As other cases pile up, Ogden gives chase and soon finds himself on the seamier side of Denver, in a hippie commune.
In 2013, Graywolf Press published Percival Everett by Virgil Russell: A Novel,[25] a novel in which a man visits his father in a nursing home, where his father appears to be writing a novel from the point of view of his son. Eight years later, the same press published The Trees, a satirical novel about historic and contemporary lynchings in Mississippi, the South and across the US. (It was published in the UK by Influx Press). It won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize.[26]
Dr. No, published by Graywolf Press in 2022, won the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and was named a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics award for fiction.[27]
Everett received a 2023 Windham Campbell Prize for fiction.[28]
In 2023, the film American Fiction was released, with a screenplay adapted by its director Cord Jefferson from Everett's 2001 novel Erasure. Among other awards, American Fiction won Best Adapted Screenplay at the 96th Academy Awards.[29]
Everett accepting the National Book Award for Fiction in 2024
James,[30] published by Doubleday in 2024, is a re-imagining of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the runaway slave character Jim.[31] Everett humanizes the character, who goes by James, re-inventing him as a wise and literate man, who has conversations with enlightenment philosophers in his dreams and teaches other enslaved people to read. James and the other black characters in the book purposefully hide their literacy and wisdom from the white characters who will undoubtedly feel threatened by educated blacks and further punish them. Although opposed to book banning, Everett commented that he hoped his re-imagined version would get banned "only because I like irritating those people who do not think and read".[3] James was longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize[32] and chosen for the Booker Prize shortlist.[33] The novel won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction[34] and the National Book Award for Fiction.[35]
Bibliography
Novels:
Suder (Viking Books, 1983)
Walk Me to the Distance (Clarion Books, 1985)
Cutting Lisa (Ticknor & Fields, 1986)
Zulus (The Permanent Press, 1990)
For Her Dark Skin (Owl Creek Press, 1990)
God's Country (Faber & Faber, 1994)
Watershed (Graywolf Press, 1996)
The Body of Martin Aguilera (Owl Creek Press, 1997)
Frenzy (Graywolf Press, 1997)
Glyph (Graywolf Press, 1999)
Grand Canyon, Inc. (Versus Press, 2001)
Erasure (University Press of New England, 2001)
A History of the African-American People (proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid (with James Kincaid) (Akashic Books, 2004)
American Desert (Hyperion Books, 2004)
Wounded (Graywolf Press, 2005)
The Water Cure (Graywolf Press, 2007)
I Am Not Sidney Poitier (Graywolf Press, 2009)
Assumption (Graywolf Press, 2011)
Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (Graywolf Press, 2013)
So Much Blue (Graywolf Press, 2017)
Telephone (Graywolf Press, 2020)
The Trees (Graywolf Press, 2021; UK: Influx Press)
Dr. No (Graywolf Press, 2022)
James (Doubleday Publishers, 2024)
Short stories
The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair: Stories (August House Publishers, Inc., 1987)
Big Picture: Stories (Graywolf Press, 1996)
Damned If I Do: Stories (Graywolf Press, 2004)
Half an Inch of Water (Graywolf Press, 2015)
Poetry
re:f (gesture) (Red Hen Press, 2006), a collection of poetry
Abstraktion und Einfühlung (with Chris Abani) (Akashic Books, 2008), a collection of poetry
Swimming Swimmers Swimming (Red Hen Press, 2010), a collection of poetry
There Are No Names for Red (a collaboration with Chris Abani; paintings by Percival Everett) (Red Hen Press, 2010), a collection of poetry
Trout's Lie (Red Hen Press, 2015), a collection of poetry
The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843: Annotated From the Library of John C. Calhoun (Red Hen Press, 2019)
Sonnets for a Missing Key (Red Hen Press, 2024), a collection of poetry
Children's literature
The One That Got Away (with Dirk Zimmer) (Clarion Books, 1992), a children's book
Contributions
My California: Journeys by Great Writers (Angel City Press, 2004)
Everett's introduction was added to the 2004 paperback edition of The Jefferson Bible.
As guest editor
Ploughshares, Fall 2014 (vol. 40, nos 2 & 3)
Awards and honors
Everett's stories have been included in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and Best American Short Stories.
Everett received an honorary doctorate from the College of Santa Fe in 2008. In 2015, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction, as well as the Phi Kappa Phi Presidential Medallion from the University of Southern California.
In 2016, Everett was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,[36] and in 2023 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.[37]
Year
Title
Award
Result
Ref.
1990
Zulus
New American Writing Award
1997
Big Picture
PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award
Winner
[38]
2001
Erasure
Academy Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters
2002
Erasure
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction
Winner
[39]
2006
Wounded
PEN Center USA Award for Fiction
Winner
[40]
2010
Dos Passos Prize
Winner
I Am Not Sidney Poitier
Believer Book Award
Winner
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction
Winner
[39][41][42]
Wounded (Ferito)
Premio Gregor von Rezzori
Winner
[43]
"Confluence" (story)
Charles Angoff Award in Fiction from The Literary Review
Winner
[44]
2016
Creative Capital Award
Winner
2018
So Much Blue
PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award
Winner
[38]
2019
Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award
Winner
[38]
2021
Telephone
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction
Winner
[39]
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Finalist
2022
Dr. No
National Book Critics Circle Award
Shortlist
[26]
The Trees
Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction
Winner
[45]
Booker Prize
Shortlist
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award
Winner
[46]
2023
Los Angeles Review of Books/UCR Lifetime Achievement Award
Winner
Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction
Winner
[47]
Dr. No
PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Winner
[48]
The Trees
PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Finalist
[49][50]
2024
James
Booker Prize
Shortlist
[33]
Kirkus Prize for Fiction
Winner
[34]
National Book Award for Fiction
Winner
[35]
2025
James
International Dublin Literary Award
Longlist
[51]
Further reading:
Lucas, Julian (September 27, 2021). "Dead reckoning". The Critics. A Critic at Large. The New Yorker. 97 (30): 79–84.[a]
Maus, Derek C., Jesting in Earnest: Percival Everett and Menippean Satire (University of South Carolina Press; 2019)
Miceli, Barbara, "Della triste impermanenza di ogni cosa: recensione di Telefono di Percival Everett", in L'Indice dei libri del mese (December 2022)
Stewart, Anthony, Approximate Gestures: Infinite Spaces in the Fiction of Percival Everett (Louisiana State University Press; 2020)
Footnotes:
The online version is titled "Percival Everett's deadly serious comedy".
Interviews
Percival Everett by Rone Shavers, BOMB 88, Summer 2004. Archived January 10, 2016, at the Wayback Machine.
Shashank Bengali, "The Wicked Wit of Percival Everett", USC Trojan Family Magazine, Winter 2005.
"Percival Everett interview: 'I hope that I have written the novel that Twain did not'". The Booker Prizes, August 15, 2024.
External links
Wikiquote has quotations related to Percival Everett.
Biography portalBlue Flower Arts one of Everett's official websites
Everett's USC Homepage. (Retrieved December 2, 2017.)
IdentityTheory.com interview with Everett (2003)
"A Percival Everett Chronology, 1956-2014", percivaleverettsociety.com.
topolivres video interview with Everett (2008)
Percival Everett on the myth of race. Video interview, Austin Community College Arts & Humanities, 2 March 2011. (Retrieved December 2, 2017.)
"By the Book | The Classic Novel That Makes Percival Everett Cringe", The New York Times, December 16, 2021
