James by Percival Everett Review

James is Percival Everett’s retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of N-word Jim. My review’s full of spoiler-y stuff so if you’re planning to read this book and that sorta thing bothers you, stop reading the review now. But if you’re simply after a TL/DR version of this review: Everett’s novel is unnecessary, adds little - worse, detracts even - to the original source material and Twain’s novel remains the better book to read of the two, yes, including the “problematic” language and racial stereotypes.

If you’ve not read Huck Finn before, the story is set in pre-civil war America, in Missouri, one of the slave states, where Huck Finn, a young white roustabout, and a runaway slave, Jim, go on the run together along the Mississippi River - adventures ensue. In Twain’s novel, the two are separated and Huck becomes hostage to a couple of con artists before being reunited with Jim for the final act of the story.

Everett retells Twain’s story and then adds his own material once Huck and James are separated. His contribution is that James and a white-passing black man called Norman hatch upon a scheme to sell James, then James runs away once Norman pockets the cash, and they repeat this until James has enough money to buy his family from slavery and head north. There’s also a very corny Hollywood-esque ending that’s more uplifting for James than the one in Twain’s novel, and Everett reveals that Huck is James’ son - this last detail is probably the most controversial.

Did we need a retelling of Huck Finn? No. Everett’s story is not compelling enough. It more realistically details the horrors of slavery (the sequence with James, Norman and a teenage slave called Sammy is particularly harrowing) and does what I think it sets out to do, namely portray James as a real person and not a racist cartoon. In this novel, the slaves pretend to speak in a cartoonish slave’s voice, as they did in Twain’s novel (and other media from yesteryear) but really speak normal English when not around white ears, in many cases better than the white characters themselves. James strives for dignity and equity in a time and place where both were unheard of for black people and so he’s very easily a sympathetic character.

The story as Twain told it was originally interesting, but re-reading it in Everett’s hands is less so as there’s not much added to it. James encounters more horrors that we’ve seen him encounter and it’s repetitive and grim for the sake of grimness.

Does anyone read Huck Finn today and think black people are the racist cartoons that appeared in the narrative? I don’t think so. Though I also don’t think it’s unfair to say that there were some black people who were like this back then either hence why Twain chose to write them like that - there was no ulterior agenda at play for him. Twain’s portrayal of black characters may be racial stereotypes but they’re not enduring ones, and the novel itself, including Huck, are so anti-racist and progressive, especially for its time, that it’s amazing so many people are willing to condemn Twain and his novel because he used the n-word liberally without considering anything else about the book’s contents.

And what was the point of making Huck James’ son? On one level it felt like petty points-scoring against a long-dead author who can’t object - like Everett was claiming this iconic American literary character as “one of theirs” and, not as the white establishment believes, “theirs” - nyah nyah nyah nyaaah! It’s also not his character to change so dramatically.

Part of the beauty of Twain’s character is that Huck sees the injustice of slavery and decides for himself that it’s wrong - at a time when he’s literally told that if he helps a slave it’s a “sin”. Huck isn’t being progressive for fashionable reasons, he’s doing it because he’s a humanitarian. He isn’t choosing to treat Jim as an equal because he’s half-black himself but because that’s how he sees Jim and all black people - he recognises their common humanity.

It’s important that Huck is white because he represents the future society, the better society, that Twain wanted to hold up to his audience, at a time when Jim Crow was in full swing, and point to as an example of what we should aspire to be, and he wanted that audience - primarily white - to see themselves in Huck and replicate his behaviour, to make that vision a reality.

Huck and Jim’s relationship is one of the great literary friendships in part because they’re two individuals who bond over their shared humanity and experiences, not because they’re related. It feels like Everett’s revision of Huck diminishes the character’s obvious qualities that makes him such a unique literary creation for no good reason whatsoever.

I can understand wanting to give James a better ending than the one he got in Huck Finn but the ending of this novel is down there with the trashiest fan-fic - it’s pure Hollywood cheese. A bad ending to a bad novel.

Percival Everett’s James provides greater, more realistic detail of the antebellum south than you get in Twain’s Huck Finn, though any decent history book will do the same, so that hardly makes Everett’s novel a necessary companion piece to Twain’s. It’s also well-written, as all of Everett’s novels are. But Twain’s Huck Finn remains the only novel of this story worth reading - James is ultimately a pointless addition that’s little more than reactionary fan fiction, as much a product of our time as Twain’s novel was of his.