James is not a book I will read just once. It not only stands alone as something great, it has completely altered how I see Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I have rereads and deep reads of James already planned. In the future, I want to excavate all the examples of irony; study the conversations James has in dreams with famous writers like Voltaire and Locke (that reminded me so much of Monk Ellison’s imagined conversations between artists in Erasure); explore the motif of fire; and lookup all the literary allusions. James needs to be reread and reread, studied and studied. I’m ready to see the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn shelved because the new classic worth hundreds of years of study is here.
As Percival Everett said in an interview with Double Day books, James is not a retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He said it is something brand new:
“To say that it’s a retelling is not precise. To say that it’s a reimagining is not quite correct. It’s finally an opportunity for Jim to be present in the story.” 1
While reading James, I kept the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn open next to me, annotating the times when the two stories clearly intersected. Percival Everett’s words rang in my ears constantly, and, as I compared the two books, examples of what he said leapt off the page.
A Spoiler Free Example:
In Chapter XXII of Huck Finn, Jim inexplicably disappears from a major episode in the narrative. Mark Twain offers readers frustratingly little details. He sends the Duke, The King, and Huck off on an adventure in ”They Loafed Around Town” and says only this about Jim:
“..and all of us but Jim took the canoe…”
That’s it. A principal character, Jim, is left on the riverbank with no upfront explanation (and no backstory later). So often, there was no story of Jim to reimagine. There was no telling to retell.
So, in James, Percival Everett either starts from scratch or morphs the paltry details from Huck Finn into whole chapters. A Huck Finn moment like “all of us but Jim,” for example, becomes the storyline that takes off in Part 1: Chapter 25 of James.
All this to say, I am loudly joining the chorus of readers who have been saying, “Preorder this book!”
- “This quote is from a @doubledaybooks reel shared on Instagram February 17, 2024. ↩︎
Many thanks to the publisher and Net Galley for an e-arc of James in exchange for an honest review.
Annotate With Sara 