{"id":10949,"date":"2025-09-11T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10949"},"modified":"2025-09-10T12:26:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T16:26:10","slug":"glyph","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/11\/glyph\/","title":{"rendered":"Glyph."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/2960\/9781555976675\">Glyph<\/a> <\/em>was Percival Everett\u2019s tenth novel, published in 1999, at a point when Everett was earning critical acclaim but not much commercial attention. It\u2019s a much more academic work than any of his later novels I\u2019ve read, satirizing post-structuralism and some of its leading lights, but you can see more than a few glimpses of Everett\u2019s humor, foreshadowing his more broadly successful later work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Glyph<\/em> 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 \u2013 whom he calls Inflato (father) and Mo (Mother) \u2013 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\u2019t 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 \u2013 which works until the government shows up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The plot itself takes up maybe half of the book, with the remainder split between Ralph\u2019s 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 \u2013 and thus a prime target for Everett\u2019s 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\u2019s never read Inflato\u2019s work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<script src=https:\/\/bookshop.org\/widgets.js data-type=\"book\" data-affiliate-id=\"2960\" data-sku=\"9781555976675\"><\/script>\n\n\n\n<p>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 20<sup>th<\/sup> 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 \u2013 not least because he has said many times since that Ralph is the closest of all of his protagonists to his own character.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Glyph<\/em> also has plenty of lowbrow humor, including a slew of potty \u2013 well, first diaper, then potty \u2013 jokes, bad puns, and <em>Airplane!<\/em>-esque gags, which softens some of the more abstruse material here for readers who, like me, don\u2019t 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\u2019d 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\u2019t read books in that way at all. If a book doesn\u2019t grab me with its plot, or its protagonist, or its prose, I\u2019m not going to like it or appreciate it. <em>Glyph<\/em> 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\u2019s acerbic wit, and a ridiculous plot that just barely holds together for the novel\u2019s 200 pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Related: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2024\/03\/18\/percival-everett-profile\">This 2024 profile of Everett<\/a> in the <em>New Yorker<\/em>, written by Maya Binyam, is outstanding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Glyph was Percival Everett\u2019s tenth novel, published in 1999, at a point when Everett was earning critical acclaim but not much commercial attention. It\u2019s a much more academic work than any of his later novels I\u2019ve read, satirizing post-structuralism and some of its leading lights, but you can see more than a few glimpses of [&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":[31,1358,161,193,1453,267],"class_list":["post-10949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-african-american-literature","tag-american-novels","tag-highly-recommended","tag-literary-criticism","tag-percival-everett","tag-satire","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10949","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=10949"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10950,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10949\/revisions\/10950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}