→ March 19, 2025
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So Much Blue.

So Much Blue may be one of Perceval Everett’s lesser-known novels, as it hasn’t received a film adaptation or any major awards, but I suspect also because it doesn’t have any of the speculative or fantastical elements of his more famous or popular works. His prose and characterization translate beautifully to the realist mode, which isn’t surprising, and in this pensive work about a middle-aged painter dealing with the weight of memories and past failings Everett gives the deepest exploration of a character I’ve seen in the four of his novels I’ve read.

Kevin Pace is a painter, married with two kids, living what would appear from the outside to be a comfortable upper-middle-class life with the usual problems you’d expect to find in a story about a suburban family. Everett intertwines that present-day narrative, which includes a secret painting that Pace won’t show anybody, not even his wife or his best friend, with two narratives from the past: one from 1979 where he joins his best friend on a dangerous trip to El Salvador to try to find and rescue the best friend’s ne’er-do-well brother, and one from ten years before the present day where Kevin had an affair with a French painter about twenty years his junior.

The 1979 narrative is by far the most compelling of the three, as it’s part thriller, part buddy comedy, and is driven by the uncertainty of how it’s going to turn out beyond knowing that Kevin and his best friend survived. Yet the depiction of the affair is the most interesting because Everett avoids the two typical ways of writing about that topic: he doesn’t judge Kevin’s actions, and he certainly doesn’t condone them, but lets the character’s words and behaviors speak for him and the reader to do the judging. Kevin knows he’s doing something terrible, but he does it anyway and has to live with the consequences.

Those consequences are the real theme of the novel – what happened in 1979, where a ridiculous, foolhardy endeavor that starts with good intentions and eccentric characters ends in violence, and what happened in Paris both weigh tremendously on Kevin, with their impact threatening to unravel his marriage and family and to stall his career. The present-day narrative also has a significant event that forces Kevin to make a choice, and he makes the wrong one, again, even though in that case it seems like the right decision at the time, after which he has several chances to set things right and can’t bring himself to do it, a subplot that especially resonated with me.

Everett’s development of Kevin as a character across three time periods, each of which sees him change and grow in some sense (even if it’s not always positive), shows a level of craft I at least hadn’t seen in the other three novels of his I’ve read. There’s a depth of understanding of Kevin as a person, as a man, as a middle-aged man, and as a very flawed man who is still reeling from events that happened thirty years earlier, that rivals the character development in just about any contemporary novel I can recall. Whether you agree with Kevin’s choices, including the decisions he makes to keep things secret, or his own assessment of those choices, Everett’s depiction of all of Kevin shows incredible insight into the character and how people think and feel about complex situations.

As you might expect from the title, color is a recurring motif and symbol in So Much Blue, with that particular color coming up repeatedly, as the secret painting in Kevin’s shed contains various shades of blue, and he refers more than once to the fact that traditional Chinese had just one word for blue and for green. Blue itself can carry multiple meanings in art, from the  most obvious one, depression (is Kevin depressed? Is he hiding his depression from his family?), to the way painters use blue to represent distance, using more blue to show that buildings or other objects are farther from the viewer. Blue is also the color we associate with the unattainable; the sky is blue from the ground, but when we ascend a mountain or a building, we don’t get any closer to the blue, as it remains beyond our reach. The ocean is blue from a distance, but when we’re in the water, it’s clear. Kevin expresses an ambivalent relationship with the color even as he fills his hidden painting with it; is that a representation of his unfulfilled desires, a depression he wants to keep locked away, or his attempt to create distance between himself and the things he doesn’t want to remember?

Everett is approaching Ann Patchett as my favorite living American writer. She crafts incredible stories with beautiful, lyrical prose, filling the pages with believable and three-dimensional characters, while he ranges from the wildly inventive to biting satire to compassionate character study. It’s hard to believe all four of the books of his I’ve read all came from the same mind. He’s some sort of wizard.

Next up: I just finished Cho Nam-ju’s Saha and started Antonio Padilla’s Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Journey to the End of Physics.

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→ February 26, 2025
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James.

Percival Everett has been writing novels for over twenty years, but he’s having a moment right now: his 2001 novel Erasure was adapted into the film American Fiction, which won its screenwriter Cord Jefferson an Academy Award; and his latest novel, James, won the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize for Fiction while making the Booker Prize shortlist. (It should have won that too, but lost to Samantha Harvey’s Orbital.) James retells the story of Jim, the escaped slave who accompanies Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain’s novel, from Jim’s perspective, completely reimagining the character and most of the narrative, in a book that is far more of an adventure than the novel that inspired it while also giving its protagonist far more humanity than his creator ever did.

James narrates Everett’s novel, and does so in an erudite voice that, of course, has nothing to do with the slave dialect the character uses in Twain’s work. In this novel’s universe, slaves know how to speak as well as or better than their white tormentors, but they feign all manner of ignorance to make the whites feel better about themselves and thus try to improve their own odds of survival. The plot starts out on the same track as in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with Huck faking his own death to escape his abusive father while James runs away to avoid being sold and separated from his wife Sadie and daughter Lizzie. (Twain mentioned Jim’s wife, but didn’t name her; Everett is following the convention of other writers who’ve used these characters.) The two flee upriver, with James seeing the corpse of Huck’s father but not telling the boy, Huck witnessing the murderous feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons, and the two encountering the con men who call themselves the King and the Duke and who eventually sell James to a local slave owner.

Everett fills in the blanks in Twain’s novel by following James rather than Huck, giving James’ dialogue with other slaves – all in proper English, generally more proper than what the white characters use – and his own inner monologue on his life and on philosophy. He’s visited in dreams by Locke and (I think) Rousseau, reads Voltaire and John Stuart Mill, and eventually gets a hold of a pencil at great cost so he can begin to write some of his thoughts on paper. James’s narrative diverges from the original when the King and Duke briefly leave him with a third man, who sells him to a traveling minstrel group, where James meets a man named Norman and escapes with him while looking for Huck, who’s still with the two bandits. This arc returns James to their home in the end, without an appearance from Tom Sawyer, and leads to a conclusion that is far more satisfying than Twain’s, if less realistic.

James, or Jim in Twain’s work, is just not a well-developed character in the original stories, even as Twain wrote him in a far more sympathetic manner than just about any of his contemporaries did when writing of slaves or even of Black people in general. Everett’s James is intelligent, sure, but the difference is that he is whole: he has fully-developed thoughts and ideas, values, a sense of justice, empathy for others, and a desire for even a little agency over his own life. It stands above nearly every other continuation or adaptation of a famous novel I’ve ever encountered, with the possible exception of Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s similar retelling of Jane Eyre from the perspective of the madwoman in the attic – but Everett’s novel is angrier and wittier and much better paced than Rhys’s.

Everett also mimics Twain’s use of the picaresque format both for its thrilling elements and its satirical ones, although here the satire is subtler than it is in some of Everett’s other works, like the absurdist Dr. No or the violent fantasy of The Trees, the other two of his novels I’ve read so far. James reads like Everett was trying to stay authentic to Twain’s work as much as possible until he veered away from the plot in the last third of his own novel – and it works, because of the familiarity of the original (one of the few novels I’ve read twice, and the only one I had to read in high school and in college) and because of how well-structured it was in the first place. Everett is brilliant and wildly imaginative, so his restraint here isn’t just impressive, but makes the whole work more powerful in the end. I have read very few works of great literature with this sort of haste, because the story and the character are so compelling I never wanted to put the book down.

Next up: Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day, winner of the 2020 Nebula Award for Best Novel.

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→ April 9, 2023
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The Trees.

Percival Everett has been publishing novels since the mid-1980s, but the 66-year-old author has come into much greater critical acclaim with his three most recent works, becoming a Pulitzer finalist for 2021’s Telephone, a Booker finalist for 2022’s The Trees, and, so far, already a finalist for the NBCC Fiction award for Dr. No. I’d never read any of his work before The Trees, which I read on my flight to Phoenix and enjoyed so much that I went to Changing Hands that same day and bought Dr. No. The Trees is a massive fake-out of a novel, starting out as a bawdy, neo-noir sort of detective novel, before taking a sudden turn into more serious and philosophical territory, resolving the question of the crime in the least satisfying way possible – because that was never the point.

A couple of white men are found brutally murdered in the minuscule, backwards town of Money, Mississippi, a town only known for being the site of the murder of Emmett Till. In each case, they’ve been castrated, with their genitalia in the fist of a Black man’s corpse found in the same room. And each time, it’s the same Black man’s corpse. It goes from the morgue to the next murder scene, making a mockery of the local authorities, who did not need the help. Two Black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigations show up to try to solve the murders, which doesn’t go over well with the white cops in Money or even the victims’ families, although the assistance the two receive from some of the Black residents is only slightly better. The victims turn out to have a surprising connection, and just as the MBI agents and the FBI agent assigned to help them have started to put this together, reports come in of nearly identical crimes in Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere.

The Trees is part dark comedy, part revenge fantasy, part detective story (at least at the start), but it is entirely a story about the weight of history. The systemic racism that pervades the entire history of the United States is reflected in the murders, the authorities, the investigation, almost every aspect of The Trees. It’s in the banter – much of it very, very funny – between the two MBI agents, who absolutely could have stepped out of The Wire. It’s in the diner where Gertrude, a fair-skinned woman who lives in Money, works as a waitress, often serving white people who conveniently forget that she’s Black. It’s practically woven into the pages of the book.

While the novel doesn’t have the same psychological horror element as Get Out, it mines very similar thematic territory, combining it with the sort of over-the-top humor that made Paul Beatty’s The Sellout such a critical success. There’s a seething rage beneath the surface here that Everett holds in check with the various layers of humor, especially with the MBI agents Jim Davis and Ed Morgan, who combine the “old married couple” vibe of McNulty and Bunk with wry commentary on the dangers of their situation as two Black feds in a town that has is still debating whether to acknowledge the advent of Reconstruction. (These two characters could have their own TV series, although doing so would strip out the theme of historical racism that underlies the novel, and I think the novel is unfilmable given its somewhat ambiguous ending.) It’s a delicate balance to strike, and Everett never seems to waver, mixing in humor highbrow and low, even throwing in some ridiculous character names like Cad Fondle or Herberta Hind, to allow him to escalate the extent and violence of the crimes at the narrative’s heart without turning the reader away.

Where The Trees ends may frustrate you if you need a firm conclusion that wraps up all of a novel’s loose ends, as Everett does very little of that. You’ll know who’s responsible for the murders, but beyond that, he offers little resolution and far more doubt than is conventional for any novel, let alone one that at least draws on the traditions of the detective genre. It’s in service of the book’s larger themes of historical racism and the double-edged sword of vengeance. Your mileage may vary, of course. I found myself so drawn in by the humor and the tight prose that I was willing to follow The Trees wherever it led me.

Next up: Elizabeth McCracken’s The Hero of this Book.

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