Twist: American author Percival Everett’s latest novel James revisits Mark Twain’s classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Photo: G L Askew II/Getty Images
We human beings thrive on expectation. Since our distant ancestors chose to forego the uncertainty and danger of a hunter-gatherer society and transition to agriculture, our entire world has functioned on expectation.
The ability to predict, with any kind of certainty, the seasons, the behaviour of our domesticated animals and, to whatever extent, our own behaviour, became key to our survival.
Over time, this gave rise to almost all of our scientific disciplines. What is science, after all, other than our attempt to bring certainty and predictability to an uncertain, unpredictable world?
It also gave rise to laws and systems of government, which arose from attempts to instil predictability in that most unpredictable of things, our own behaviour.
And we grew accustomed to knowing, within fairly wide boundaries, more or less what would happen in most given situations.
This became the case to such an extent that our behavioural patterns changed in response to it.
Even in things not key to our survival we, as a species, elect to travel the well-trodden path over everything else. It’s why we have Starbucks and McDonald’s.
It’s why we have Mills & Boon and Wilbur Smith novels. It’s why we have romantic comedies and action franchises in the cinema. It’s why we have generic pop and Dad Rock on the radio.
It’s so key to the underlying ticking of our brains that subverting expectation is good business, too. We have entire industries dedicated to providing dopamine and adrenaline to our thrill-starved, hunter-gatherer brains and many of these thrive on the subversion of expectation.
The obvious one is horror. Besides that which would threaten our own safety or the safety of our loved ones, nothing scares the bejeebers out of us more than the unexpected.
But people queue up in their multitudes to be frightened into oblivion by unexpected jump scares in horror movies. So many horror movies that they, in turn, have become predictable in their own right.
A less obvious one is humour. Human beings first developed laughter as a reflex to signal to others that all is fine, despite an unexpected occurrence. As in, “Ha, ha, ha — don’t worry, that tiger didn’t actually eat me!”
As we became more sophisticated, we found more sophisticated things to laugh at. Humour itself is the subversion of expectation, and the harder the punchline twists away from what the setup of the joke has led us to believe it would be, the more we laugh.
And we become attached to, and fond of, the things that make us laugh, which is why a sense of humour is considered attractive in a romantic partner.
I mention all of this because American novelist Percival Everett’s latest offering James is a masterpiece in the art of subversion.
The concept of the novel itself is subversive. James is a retelling of the beloved Mark Twain story Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, related to us from the point of view of Jim, Huck Finn’s companion, for much of the story.
And, in its delightful way, the novel is a subversion of a subversion. Twain initially wrote the Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn books as a humorous critique of the Antebellum South, a subversion of the popular stories glorifying a rather un-glorifiable part of American history.
Full disclosure — I have not read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
I considered doing so because it would contribute to my understanding of James, but between Everett’s excellent recounting of the core elements of the story, and what I was able to dig up on the internet, I had enough context of the story to pick up what Everett was putting down, so to speak. I’m not sure if this helped or hindered my enjoyment of the novel but it’s the approach I took.
James also plays with subversion in other ways. In the original novels, Jim — often referred to by an epithet I can only describe here as “N-word Jim” — is portrayed as something of a superstitious simpleton, despite being benevolent and wise to the ways of the world.
Though Twain was opposed to slavery and segregation, and was extraordinarily progressive for his time, it seems as though he was not above stooping to the use of stereotypes in order to get his point across.
But Everett describes Jim as literate and intelligent, often having philosophical arguments with himself during the course of the novel, because there is no one else intelligent enough to have them with.
And, despite terrific abuse endured at the hands of his captors, Jim has elected to not become callous and hardened but to retain his essential humanity. Jim is, in short, the man his captors aspire to be.
Everett also subverts some of the elements of the original novels, either by viewing them from a different vantage point, or by simply spinning them in a completely different direction. Jim is unaccounted for in large parts of the original story, and Everett uses these gaps to spin a positively Orphean tale of Jim’s adventures, which is still completely rooted in its reality.
But, in the novel’s truly mile-a-minute third act, many revelations and occurrences are so unexpected that I honest to goodness had to put the book down and take a few minutes. I had settled into a rhythm with the book and Everett chose to subvert even that. Wonderful.
Everett is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Southern California, and it shows in this book. His command of language is profound, and his ability to evoke pathos not only for Jim, but for the delightfully clueless Huck Finn, is truly something to behold.
There is a fair amount of awards buzz around this book and it is well deserved. Few are the times where one can put a book this steeped in philosophical musings on what Robert Burns called man’s inhumanity to man and think to oneself: “I really, really enjoyed that.”
In summary, James is an intelligent, original retelling of a beloved tale that encourages thought and emotion in equal measure. A highly, highly recommended read.
James is published by Mantle Books.