Over the years, I’ve been reading through my list of 20Something books, a sly way to indicate which books have been unread on my shelves for more than twenty years. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) was one of the most stubborn residents, resisted all the more because, even in childhood, the plot points were familiar from adaptations and films.
This year I’ve kept a classic in my stack all year, because mostly I read newer books, and I have found it too hard to shift into classics periodically. Just a few chapters of Tom Sawyer weekly acclimated me to old-fashioned prose, and wanting to read Percival Everett’s James was a solid incentive, even when I wearied of the boys’ shenanigans.
Anyhow, Tom Sawyer ends abruptly. Because it’s “strictly a history of a boy” and, so, it must: “the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man.” Novels about grown people. Twain writes, must end with a marriage, but since a boy can’t marry, the author “must stop where he best can” which is exactly what happens.
At the end, Twain assures readers that most of the characters in the book “still live, and are prosperous and happy” and he acknowledges that one day it might “seem worth while to take up the story of the younger ones again” and that’s what happens with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). It probably would have lingered unread for just as long, on my bookshelf, but was assigned reading in the twelfth grade. (Fun Fact: December 10th is the anniversary of its publication.)
Mind you, Huck was always more interesting to me than Tom. Mainly because he didn’t have a typical home life, and I related to that, even though I wasn’t brave enough to explore caves or even skip school. And I was too quick to believe other people, so I related to Huck’s disappointment when he continued to trust Tom, despite his unreliability:
“I got an old tin lamp and an iron ring, and went out in the woods and rubbed and rubbed till I sweat like an Injun, calculating to build a palace and sell it; but it warn’t no use, none of the genies come. So then I judged that all that stuff was only just one of Tom Sawyer’s lies.”
But the other part of Twain’s promise at the end of Tom Sawyer only vaguely comes to pass in Huck Finn, that readers might yet “see what sort of men and women they turned out to be”. Because both boys remain boys there too. And although I remain #TeamHuck, Huck’s fondness for Tom does rub off on me a little:
“What a head for just a boy to have! If I had Tom Sawyer’s head I wouldn’t trade it off to be a duke, nor mate of a steamboat, nor clown in a circus, nor nothing I can think of. I went to thinking out a plan, but only just to be doing something; I knowed very well where the right plan was going to come from.”
The right plan, however, is solidly underscored in Percival Everett’s James (2024) which has, by now, won all the literary awards across tarnation, so you’ve probably heard of it. Therein, the characters are the same ages as they are in Twain’s original narratives, but Everett undertakes to tell The Adventures of Jim or, properly, James.
As an idea, this is fascinating from the start, for readers who love books that play with perspective, readers who appreciate that fiction creates a space for untold histories, readers who long for the kind of credibility that arises when an author (or, authors) work with cross-over characters making fictional places all-the-more-real.
As a reality, it’s fascinating to compare how Everett’s readings of Twain’s classic accumulated and inspired another view of the events that Twain imagined. (‘Recounted’ might be more accurate than ‘imagined’, as some believe Twain was reframing a cultural story himself, much as Shakespeare had before him).
Consider this passage from Twain’s Huck Finn, where Huck aims to trick Jim into thinking some strange events were actually just a dream:
“Well, den, I reck’n I did dream it, Huck; but dog my cats ef it ain’t de powerfullest dream I ever see. En I hain’t ever had no dream b’fo’ dat’s tired me like dis one.”
“Oh, well, that’s all right, because a dream does tire a body like everything sometimes. But this one was a staving dream; tell me all about it, Jim.”
So Jim went to work and told me the whole thing right through, just as it happened, only he painted it up considerable.
With this from Everett’s James:
“You dreamed all that,” the boy said.
Having me on was giving the boy much pleasure. “Sho nuff seemed real. Dem people on dat boat, dey wasn’t real?”
It’s dizzying, all the layers of pretense and the manners of speaking.
In Twain’s version, readers inhabit Huck’s perspective, and we accept Huck’s belief that he has successfully convinced Jim that that strange moment in reality was just a dream.
In Everett’s version, readers see that Jim has not been fooled, but he is willing to afford Huck the capacity to believe that he’s successfully fooled him, because he’s having so much fun with it. In other words, Jim tricks Huck into thinking Huck has tricked him.
In the first, Huck sees Jim as “painting it up considerable” and in the second, Jim sees Huck “[h]aving me on”. And, of course, the reality is that both these books are fiction, made-up stories by definition. But these fictions are wrestling with egregious true-to-life injustices and both authors, in different centuries and in different ways, confront racial and socio-economic disparities boldly. And it took reading them together, for me to finally understand something about Huck I’d previously overlooked.
I don’t want to spoil any of the aspects of James that I found so rich with possibility for discussion (especially the language), but by focussing solely on these passages, you can catch a glimpse.
In the first, there is only one voice. In the second, Jim’s accounting of events and his inner thoughts appear in the King’s English, but when he speaks to Huck he sounds like Twain’s/Huck’s voice in the original. (Twain has both characters speak in a dialect, but Huck’s is only an occasional dropped letter. Everett makes deliberate decisions about when and how to have Jim/James speak, depending on circumstance and audience.)
Everett has great fun with the idea of how we tell other people about ourselves, what we reveal and what we keep private, and the power that resides in telling stories about other people, whether they’re true or not.
Back in 2017’s So Much Blue, Everett’s narrator says his lie felt good because I had taken control of the narrative around me”. And in 2021’s The Trees, Mama Z says: “You should know I consider police shootings to be lynchings. No offense.”
Everett’s not afraid to reshape a familiar narrative, not afraid to name names and define terms.
James is both a gut-punch and a kiss-on-the-cheek.
NOTE: There are some spoilers in the comments below, although not-so-much about James as about issues that have risen historically in discussions about Twain’s Huck Finn.
Oh my, what a discussion you had with Reese. If it were closer to my reading of the book, I would love to engage, but I’m away from my copy and I can’t recollect the detail. I will say though that probability tends to be a minor issue for me. That is, I’m good at suspending disbelief in books like this. I wrote in my post that I wasn’t sure whether James is typical of slaves of the time. I don’t think he was but I didn’t see that as the point. It don’t really see this as a realist novel but one intending to convey the reality of slavery and what it did to people. I was more than happy to engage with James.
The nitty-gritty convo’s about books can be so much fun, when the timing works out perfectly (or nearly so). That whole probability/likelihood thing has lingered in my mind because of something Reese also mentioned about The Blind Assassin, about whether someone would be likely to pursue publication of a manuscript on the behalf of the author and after the author’s death; I thought “not very” and she thought “rather” and because there weren’t many clues in the actual narrative, that comes down to a single reader’s experiences and reminds us just how subjective it is.
Ironic, isn’t it. That there is so much open invention in Everett’s take (on Twain’s take) and, yet, the novel still seems to prioritse realism. It’s wonderful that all the acclaim for this title has taken James all the way to the other side of the world.
I have not heard of James!!! I’m so out of the loop hahah
Also, in other shocking bookish news, I’ve never read a Mark Twain book in my life. I don’t think it’s often assigned in Canadian schools but I could be wrong about that.
Then, welcome to the loop, Anne! /cheering Lately I feel a lot of my choices aren’t to your taste, but I think you’d like this.
It might have been unusual even when it was assigned to me, but, then, we also had Shakespeare every year and some other traditional choices.
I loved James so much as a retelling. I never really cared for Mark Twain’s stories as a child because they felt off to me. I feel like Everett put into words in this novel why I felt that way about the original stories. I hope to read more of Everett’s books going forward. His writing style is memorable to me.
Thanks for making me feel better about having ignored TS for so long! Although I did love the idea behind The Prince and the Pauper (which I read in something abridged) because there weren’t many books about paupers around, hehe, few mentions of anyone having less money than anyone else. So, are you suggesting a Percival Everett project? That’s what IIiii heard. hee hee
I’ve been a fan of Everett’s writing for decades – not so easy to get his books in the UK until he was shortlisted for the Booker a few years ago. I so admire his ability to address serious themes with apparently slapstick humour, often bring you up short. A very effective technique.
You are an Everett superfan, particularly having added the difficulty of sourcing from across the ocean (being that he published with indie presses until very recently, it has not been especially easy to find him even in North America); you have read some that I haven’t: Telephone and Erasure I think?)
I read the pair Huck Finn & James early this year–I didn’t get around to blogging about them. But James was so good. I didn’t even think about rereading Tom Sawyer, which is fun, but not in the same league. It was the fourth or fifth time for Huck Finn, with the first one in high school. (I wonder if it’s still commonly assigned? I suspect not, which is a shame, because it is a great novel, despite the N word.)
It hadn’t occurred to me until I read Everett’s, but of course James is putting up with Huck’s pranks, both because he likes Huck (and also doesn’t feel like he can afford offending any white person). That made complete sense. Making him actually quite educated was a fun twist, though of course improbable. Some of the books James had read I had to wonder if even a white person could read them in a small Missouri town, but Everett did address that by giving Judge Thatcher a pretty good library.
The one thing I didn’t like in Everett was the final twist–why it may be that James especially likes Huck. (Are spoilers allowed in comments? Well, I’ll be discreet.) But I think it makes a stronger statement in the Twain version, that Huck and Jim have just become friends and Huck is willing to go to hell, than that the connection is as outlined in Everett.
Ahhh, so it wasn’t just me; I was pleased to have finally read TS because my copy had been unfinished for so long, but that was it; I enjoyed the Robert Louis Stevenson I read later in the year more. When I was playing on the Broadview Press site last week, I noticed there’s a third edition of Huck Finn there (with their delicious commentary sections) so someone must still be assigning it, but maybe not until college/university?
Yeah, speaking of simply taking a narrator’s word for it (referring to our chatter about Atwood’s Blind Assassin): I also hadn’t questioned Huck’s self-satisfied accounting of successfully deceiving Jim. Even though I often do suspect a child narrator of being indulged when they report deceiving adults. Still, I did view Jim as a wise and compassionate guide, even without that bit.
In the broader context, maybe it was improbable; but when one considers it in the context of narratives published by enslaved-but-escaped/freed writers, the odds would increase. (I’ve recently finished Harriet Jacobs’ memoir and she does teach others how to read and write but they must conceal that knowledge…she herself was taught by her young mistress before the Nat Turner years, when the danger was less pressing.)
That’s the thing I was so surprised by, that I didn’t name! And I didn’t realise that it was A Thing, an ongoing debate! Also, I had completely forgotten about Jim finding the body of Huck’s father; so I figured I could have overlooked the other detail too. Why include that at all, if fatherhood wasn’t meant to be entertained as a possibility. (I’ve added a spoiler warning to the comments, so feel free to elaborate.)
I’m glad there are still annotated editions of Huck Finn available. What’s canon does and should change over the years, but still Huck Finn’s both great & pretty foundational in US literature.
I did remember the bit about Jim being unwilling to tell Huck that the dead man they found was Pappy. Was that the right decision on Jim’s part? Well, Pappy was a drunk and an SOB who had tried to steal the reward money Huck got at the end of Tom Sawyer (there was a reason to read Tom Sawyer!) so Huck might have been better off knowing Pappy was dead. But it’s also completely understandable that Jim didn’t want Huck to look at his dead father who had drowned and was probably gross looking. I didn’t think of that as any sort of indication James was Huck’s father.
Literacy among slaves was rare, but that part didn’t put me off at all–Frederick Douglass became literate while he was a slave & had to hide it. I had no problem with James becoming literate. And dialect is always a little odd in a novel; we hear somebody talking in what sounds to us like dialect, but the speakers themselves don’t hear it. They think they’re talking standard English. I mean of course I speak perfect standard English and not dialect, but to somebody I do. (People with a good ear know that I’m from the US, but most don’t.) What I speak just sounds like standard English to me. But where did James get access to those books? I don’t have James here anymore, but he’s reading Candide & Persian Letters, in French, right? Who would even have that in Podunk, Missouri? But Everett did address that by giving Judge Thatcher a substantial library. I don’t remember that from Tom Sawyer–Judge Thatcher is barely there in Huck Finn–but maybe? Another reason to reread Tom Sawyer! But anyway I accepted Everett on this, and he clearly saw that it did require some justification.
I’m not sure how much discussion there has been about the Thing, though some I’m sure. I just went and read the New Yorker and New York Review Books reviews–both magazines we subscribe to, but I don’t think I read the reviews before because they came out before I read the book. The New Yorker alludes to the Thing, but doesn’t specify it, and the New York Review doesn’t mention it at all. Do you know of any discussion? It’s kind of a big deal, of course, but it is pretty spoilerific to talk about it.
I suppose it’s like anything else bookish, once you start looking more closely at a single well-established text, you start to take more notice of how often and how deeply others are also looking at it? Which only makes you want to keep looking.
How did I miss that Pappy died?! Thinking about it now, I can see how that scene and that decision could be viewed as a key component to understanding “Jim’s” (or James’s) sense of responsibility for a young boy who seemingly had so much more privilege, even as a child, socio-politically, than Jim/James. There is a surprising amount of material online on one interpretation, if you search for the keyword I’m not saying, and the word ‘figure’ (with Twain and Huck). But some of it seems to be on a sort of nomenclature basis, as much as a literal basis.
I can’t recall if you ever read graphic novels, but I found this one interesting to read as well (this NPR interview doesn’t spoil the story, but it does reveal their decisions about language and tone).
Ohhhh, I should do that too. I sometimes read those reviews if I haven’t read the books, but I knew that I wanted to read James from the start, so I was very careful not to read those. Even with Whispering Gums’ recent review, I trod carefully, and I know she routinely avoids spoilers. Speaking of lit/culture mags, I have fallen SO behind; I’m going to have to come up with a plan for early 2026 or else I’ve told myself I have to unsubscribe, whereas there are actually a couple of others I would like to ADD to my list. Are you still keeping up with yours, I know you’d kind of caught up at one point?
As to cultural magazines, I’m behind, of course, but I’ve gotten to a place where my behind-ness is now relatively consistent…;-) There’s roughly the same number of magazines in the to-read pile as always. Good thing the NYRoB has fewer issues at times. I sometimes think, ooh, I’d also like to subscribe to the Walrus, the LRB, the TLS, but that way madness lies…
I didn’t know about that retelling of Huck and Jim–it does look interesting. I don’t read a lot of graphic novels, but some. I see TPL has it, I’ll order it up in the new year. Thanks!
I know exactly what you mean; actually, that was my goal a few months ago, to not clear the stack but keep pace, and that didn’t happen either. S’ok, what to choose to read less of, that’s my question, isn’t it. /sigh
I couldn’t think of your having read one, and I’m not sure I’d suggest this as an exception to such a (albeit flexible) rule; it’s only that the pair does introduce one other aspect of possible interpretations that I also wasn’t aware of, in a way that both fits and challenges (kinda) the Everett slant.
I can remember us taking turns to read Tom Sawyer aloud in Year 9 and of course reading ahead and losing where the others were up to. I read Huck Finn around the same time and have read it again in the last few years. I have no intention of reading someone else’s reading of it, nor of any other classic.
We were always clearly instructed to keep the pace with the rest of the class, and of course I ignored that instruction too!
If you were to break your rule, I think this would be an excellent instance, particularly with your interest in speech-on-the-page. I could have written just as much about only that. But you already have countless books on your TBR, so I understand that you can’t go breaking alllllll the rules!
My husband read this recently and loved it. Now it’s on my TBR pile awaiting my attention.
It’s a fast read, too: typical Everett with endless “just one more chapter” extensions!