It would be easy to call Percival Everett’s newest novel, James, a rewriting of Mark Twain’s classic, but it would also be incorrect.
It would be easy to call Percival Everett’s newest novel, James, a rewriting of Mark Twain’s classic, but it would also be incorrect. By telling the story from the perspective of Huckleberry Finn’s enslaved companion—one of the most controversial figures in American literature—Everett doesn’t revise the original story; he deepens it, diving into the horror, the humor, and the humanity that was always right there beneath the book’s surface, just out of view of both Huck and his inventor.