{"id":10782,"date":"2025-05-05T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-05T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10782"},"modified":"2025-05-04T22:26:28","modified_gmt":"2025-05-05T02:26:28","slug":"telephone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/05\/telephone\/","title":{"rendered":"Telephone."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Percival Everett\u2019s <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/2960\/9781644450222\">Telephone<\/a><\/em> is the most serious of the six of his novels I\u2019ve read so far, with the only humorous elements some of the smartass dialogue coming from his main character. A finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (which it lost to the inferior <em>The Night Watchman<\/em>), <em>Telephone<\/em> finds Everett exploring how people respond to grief and the search for meaning in a world that appears to have none at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Zach Wells, another author surrogate for Everett, is a geologist and college professor who lives with his wife and their one child, a daughter named Sarah, who is the apple of Zach\u2019s eye like Bonnie Blue was in Rhett Butler\u2019s. Sarah starts to have absence seizures and reports some other neurological symptoms, and when Zach and his wife take her to the doctor, they learn that she has a fatal neurodegenerative disorder called Batten disease that will kill her in a few years, and on her way to dying, she\u2019ll lose her faculties and won\u2019t even recognize her parents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Meanwhile, Zach orders a piece of clothing off the internet and finds a note that just says \u201cay\u00fadame\u201d (\u201chelp me\u201d) in one of its pockets. He orders another item from the same place, and gets a similar note. He\u2019s stymied, but eventually decides he has to do something to figure out if there is someone in trouble wherever these garments are made or repackaged. And at work, he has a younger colleague who procrastinated for years on publishing her work and now may not get tenure as a result, but Zach finds that her work is good enough and embarks on a late push to save her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<script src=https:\/\/bookshop.org\/widgets.js data-type=\"book\" data-affiliate-id=\"2960\" data-sku=\"9781644450222\"><\/script>\n\n\n\n<p>In just about all of Everett\u2019s books, at least the ones I\u2019ve read, he\u2019s asking important questions and only hints at the answers. Here, Zach is a tragic figure from the start \u2013 his father killed himself, his marriage has stalled, he doesn\u2019t seem to particularly like his work \u2013 and the one facet of his life that seems to give him real joy is going to be taken from him in the cruelest possible fashion. When you can\u2019t save the most important person in the world, do you turn to try to save someone else? A colleague you respect, not even a friend, just someone who you think deserves more than she\u2019s getting? A complete stranger, or more than one, who may not even exist, and if they do it\u2019s in another country and maybe you\u2019ll get killed trying to do it? Would any of this matter in the grand scheme? Would it help you save yourself?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Where <em>Telephone<\/em> ends up was something of a surprise, as I\u2019m used to Everett concluding his novels in uncertain fashion \u2013 at least three of the other five lacked concrete resolutions to their plots. Wells gets an ending in fact where the ambiguity is interior to his character. Has anything changed? When he goes back to his regular life, will he be altered by the experiences, or has he just pushed away the grief that will be waiting for him at his front door?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Wells is an Everett stand-in in the same vein as Kevin Pace, the protagonist of <em><a href=\"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/19\/so-much-blue\/\">So Much Blue<\/a><\/em>, as middle-aged men facing some kind of emotional crisis, although Pace\u2019s was more of his own making and Wells\u2019s definitely is not. They\u2019re well-developed, flawed, and very realistic. They make mistakes, especially in their marriages. They do not talk easily or openly about their feelings. And they are ill-equipped for what hits them, a combination in both cases of how they were raised and the choices they\u2019ve made as adults. <em>Telephone<\/em> is just another piece of evidence in the case for Everett as our greatest living novelist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Next up: <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/2960\/9780253031907\">Congo Inc.: Bismarck\u2019s Testament<\/a><\/em>, a satirical novel by In Koli Jean Bofane, who appeared in the documentary <em><a href=\"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/24\/soundtrack-to-a-coup-detat\/\">Soundtrack to a Coup d\u2019Etat<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Percival Everett\u2019s Telephone is the most serious of the six of his novels I\u2019ve read so far, with the only humorous elements some of the smartass dialogue coming from his main character. A finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (which it lost to the inferior The Night Watchman), Telephone finds Everett exploring how [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1186,31,36,1358,161,1453],"class_list":["post-10782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2020-novels","tag-african-american-literature","tag-american-literature","tag-american-novels","tag-highly-recommended","tag-percival-everett","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10782"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10783,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10782\/revisions\/10783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}