{"id":10851,"date":"2025-06-12T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-12T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10851"},"modified":"2025-06-11T22:32:08","modified_gmt":"2025-06-12T02:32:08","slug":"american-desert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/12\/american-desert\/","title":{"rendered":"American Desert."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I guess it was inevitable that I\u2019d eventually find a Percival Everett novel I didn\u2019t love. I wouldn\u2019t say I hated or even disliked American Desert<\/a><\/em>, but it is my least favorite of the nine Everett novels I\u2019ve read so far, primarily because what happens between the shocking opening and the superb conclusion is so disjointed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ted Street is a professor at USC who is married with two kids, often unfaithful, and about to be denied tenure. On his way to walk into the ocean to kill himself, his car is hit by a UPS driver, and he is decapitated. In the middle of his funeral, three days later, he sits up in his coffin \u2013 his head reattached by a clumsy mortician \u2013 and starts talking. Chaos ensues, Ted becomes a media sensation, and he finds himself stalked by religious nuts and government operatives. He also begins to see his own life with much greater clarity, and discovers that by touching someone he can see into their memories, which becomes one of the main ways he navigates his way out of trouble \u2026 which is how he spends most of the novel, as he\u2019s hounded by all of those groups and just wants to get back to his family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The premise of American Desert<\/em> isn\u2019t entirely new, but it\u2019s still a strong start: If someone appears to truly come back from the dead three days later, there\u2019s going to be a huge public reaction to it, from fascination to terror, from religious fervor to scientific inquiry, and media there to try to make a buck off it. It opens up questions about mind-body dualism, life after death, the meaning (or lack thereof) of life, and more. You\u2019d get people claiming he was the Second Coming<\/a>, and probably people trying to kill him, and every scientist and crackpot in the world would want a look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everett hits all of those points, more or less, with varying degrees of success. The main problem with American Desert<\/em> is that his focus on sending up his targets in religion, science, and the government subsumes and ultimately overwhelms Ted, who becomes more of a pawn within the story than he should be. His character is inherently interesting, but the story doesn\u2019t get very deep into his character, particularly the question of what, if anything, this second chance at life means for him. He recognizes that his first life was a series of screw-ups, and now he has not just a fresh (okay, perhaps a poor choice of words for an animated corpse) start, but he also sees the world, including his own life, very differently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n