Glyph was Percival Everett’s tenth novel, published in 1999, at a point when Everett was earning critical acclaim but not much commercial attention. It’s a much more academic work than any of his later novels I’ve read, satirizing post-structuralism and some of its leading lights, but you can see more than a few glimpses of Everett’s humor, foreshadowing his more broadly successful later work.
Glyph is narrated by Ralph, a very precocious baby who is able to read and write at the level of a graduate student before he turns one, shocking his parents – whom he calls Inflato (father) and Mo (Mother) – and eventually leading to unfortunate interest from a series of would-be evildoers who plan to use him for their own nefarious purposes. Ralph communicates via written notes, which, of course, people don’t believe he wrote at first, but after his parents accept that Ralph is indeed a genius, they take him to a psychologist for evaluation, only for the psychologist to decide that Ralph is her ticket to research fame and to kidnap him – which works until the government shows up.
The plot itself takes up maybe half of the book, with the remainder split between Ralph’s musings and various interstitials, like imagined conversations between important personages from history, including literary theorist Roland Barthes, one of the major figures of structuralism and post-structuralism – and thus a prime target for Everett’s satire. Inflato is a failing professor of literary theory, and at one point he has Barthes over for dinner, only for the French philosopher to leer at Mo and eventually admit he’s never read Inflato’s work.
Other literary theorists and thinkers in related fields like semiotics and philosophy come in for further satire or just outright mockery, whether directly in the text or in any of the many asides, like constructed dialogues between two such figures from different times in history. Every chapter is divided further with subheadings that almost seem drawn from a hat filled with terms from lit-crit movements of the latter half of the 20th century, including structuralism and post-structuralism, deconstruction, and post-modernism. Everett wrote the book while he was a professor of creative writing at UC Riverside, but had moved on to become chair of the English department at USC by the time it was published, which at least makes me wonder if he was mocking some of his by then former colleagues at UCR for their adherence to these philosophies – not least because he has said many times since that Ralph is the closest of all of his protagonists to his own character.
Glyph also has plenty of lowbrow humor, including a slew of potty – well, first diaper, then potty – jokes, bad puns, and Airplane!-esque gags, which softens some of the more abstruse material here for readers who, like me, don’t care for these distinctly anti-literary schools of thought. Yes, academics can certainly spend their time on textual analysis or examining the relationship between a work and its broader context. I’d probably do just that if I were a professor of literature somewhere, or if my livelihood otherwise depended on it. I read for pleasure, however, and I can’t read books in that way at all. If a book doesn’t grab me with its plot, or its protagonist, or its prose, I’m not going to like it or appreciate it. Glyph skewers some of the same ideas I disdain for their desire to strip literature down to the studs and ignore the trappings of great fiction, but it also does so with a strong and funny central character, Everett’s acerbic wit, and a ridiculous plot that just barely holds together for the novel’s 200 pages.
Related: This 2024 profile of Everett in the New Yorker, written by Maya Binyam, is outstanding.