{"id":10836,"date":"2025-06-04T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-04T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10836"},"modified":"2025-06-03T22:05:26","modified_gmt":"2025-06-04T02:05:26","slug":"assumption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/04\/assumption\/","title":{"rendered":"Assumption."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Percival Everett\u2019s Assumption<\/a><\/em> is a triptych of a novel, three neo-noir detective stories featuring the same character, Ogden Walker, a deputy in a small town in New Mexico who\u2019s confronted with three murders in fairly short succession, each of which seems to revolve around at least one person who isn\u2019t who they claim to be. The first two proceed almost traditionally, although Everett is still playing around within the confines of the genre; the third, however, slides into a hallucinatory haze where Walker\u2019s reality is suddenly open to question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Walker is a Black man in a town that\u2019s largely not Black, with its share of white racists, but also plenty of Latino and indigenous residents, and as you might expect in a small-town mystery or detective story, he kind of knows everyone and has his usual haunts where everyone knows him. He\u2019s got good enough relationships with his boss and his co-workers, even though it becomes clear that Walker is a reluctant cop, and is close to his mother, who lives in the same town and whose house he visits several times in each story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first case starts when the possibly-racist Mrs. Bickers turns up dead just a few minutes after Walker visits her to take away her gun, turning into a larger mystery when her estranged daughter shows up unannounced. The second involves a couple of sex workers who end up dead in not-so-rapid succession, again tapping into a bigger story as Walker investigates it. The third starts out innocuously enough, as Walker stumbles on a field & game warden catching a poacher, with Walker taking the poacher\u2019s nephew \u2013 maybe \u2013 to try to find the kid\u2019s home while the warden takes in the poacher. The warden turns up dead and the kid disappears, making Walker a suspect and causing him to question everything around him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everett can\u2019t help but allude to some of the masters of the form, with a line about \u201cthe postman ringing only once,\u201d paying homage to the greats even as he upends and inverts the very genre he\u2019s mimicking. The first two stories read like great works from Cain, Chandler, and Thompson, with the same stoic tone and grim imagery, right down to the matter-of-fact descriptions of corpses and gunfights. The third is where Everett gets imaginative, as the story quickly turns into a fever dream of sorts, with Walker trying to solve the crime to keep himself out of jail, while a second strand follows the cops investigating him, and the two stories seem to diverge in impossible ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n