I’ve had difficult interviews before. I’ve interviewed Lou Reed, who may be the most notoriously difficult interview subject of the past half century. (It went badly.) I once walked out of an interview with John Cusack because he seemed pointlessly combative and I was poorly prepared. I’ve had pleasant conversationalists who call minutes before deadline to claim everything just said is off the record. (“Off the record” does not work like that.) David Mamet once answered my questions with shrugs and mumbles, and when I said the story would appear in the newspaper soon, he responded, his voice as flat as a two-by-four: “Oh goodie gumdrops for me. Oh goodie gumdrops on the gumdrop tree.”
But I have never had an interview subject tell me, up front, he was hard to talk to.
Percival Everrett said this when I met him the other day at the Fine Arts Building. He was not a jerk — far from it. He was just being honest. He doesn’t do much press, and probably one of the reasons is that he has no urge to explain his work or what it means.
You probably wouldn’t want to either if you were Percival Everett.
He’s spent decades as a literary secret. His first novel came out 41 years ago. He’s since written two dozen more, six books of poetry, four volumes of short stories and a children’s book. He’s unclassifiable, though like other Black authors, he spent decades watching his work shelved to one side, in Black Authors sections. If you know the name Percival Everett, it’s likely because, his breakthrough, “Erasure,” published 23 years ago, told the story of a writer sorta like Everett who is frustrated by how the industry sees Black authors and writes an outlandishly pandering “realistic urban novel” (“We’s Lives in Da’ Ghetto”) that accidentally turns into a smash. “American Fiction,” the recent Jeffrey Wright film, was the director Cord Jefferson’s Oscar-winning adaptation of “Erasure,” and to date, it’s the closest Everett has come to a household name.
It also capped a remarkable run of very acclaimed, often very funny novels — “I Am Not Sidney Poitier,” the Pulitzer finalist “Telephone,” the Booker finalist “The Trees,” the National Book Award finalist “Dr. No” — that’s about to soar with “James,” his latest, which revisits Jim, the runaway slave from “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and, a year out, already feels like a 2025 Pulitzer contender. It feels destined to push Everett into that rare American class — famous literary figure. But as Jefferson recently told the New Yorker about Everett: “I’ve never met somebody who gives less of a (expletive).”
Everett, in person, feels like Dylan that way. He’s not playful or caustic, but isn’t eager to satisfy anyone’s assumptions about himself or his books. He will not be pinned up on your wall. He teaches writing at the University of Southern California, but also trains horses and works as an accomplished abstract painter, and as a jazz guitarist, and, in interviews, will just as likely refer to himself as a working cowboy as a working author.
“I don’t take for granted when people are interested in my books,” he said to me, “but I am not the most outgoing person. They tell me I am one of those ‘difficult’ interviews.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I don’t know much. I wrote ‘James’ but I don’t have a lot to say about what it means.”
“You ‘don’t know much’?”
“I have two teenagers, call them right now, they’ll tell you.”
“Do people feel frustrated talking to you?”
“Maybe an indication of my difficulty is I don’t pay much attention to how they feel.”
Why agree to talk to the press then, I asked.
“I like my publicist, and my editor. The attention doesn’t make my work different. It’s like winning prizes. It would be nice to win every week but it doesn’t change the work, right? I can’t tell anybody what this means because readers know better what a book means, and who cares about the writing! What’s there to say of my writing? I use punctuation.”
Everett is 67, with gray tendrils poking beneath a baseball cap. He seemed to wince his words. “James,” he said before it could be asked — despite the formality of a name known for a century as Jim — is no reworking of Mark Twain, or redressing of literary wrongs. Characters in several of Everett’s books reclaim a bit of culture: At the end of “The Trees,” thousands of lynched men rise from the dirt to march across the South; in an early short story, Black people begin adopting Confederate flag pins, which leads to the State Capitol of South Carolina (where Everett grew up) removing Confederate flags.
“I think people assume because I am revisiting Twain, I am correcting. I love Twain’s novel. It doesn’t arise from dissatisfaction. If anything, I am flattering myself thinking I am in conversation with Twain. No, I read it 15 times in a row before writing this! I finished, then started again at page one, right away, again and again. I wanted to inhabit that world, not the text. I didn’t want to just repeat the novel. So I read it until it became nonsensical to me — and then never looked at it again when I was writing. Everything you are reading is a memory of that world. The flow of the writing worked best that way.”
“James,” rather, refocuses Twain, shifting the plot line from Huck Finn to James, who is no simple slave now, taking care of Huck and speaking in a dialect. Everett’s James, who has an internal ticker now and a soul and a mission, is an ace code switcher. He reaches for his “slave filter,” lending everyday thoughts a gullibility and naiveté just long enough not to raise the suspicions of white people, who expect him docile and childlike. The book should come packaged with Twain’s 1884 novel, but you don’t need to know Twain yourself to appreciate the humor, and the adventure, and the release of Everett.
I noted Hemingway’s famous line, that all of American literature stems from “Huck Finn.”
“That’s reductive and not completely true,” Everett said, “and yet, yes, Huck Finn, the character, he does represent an adolescent America, moving through the landscape, trying to reconcile himself with his friend, who is both property and a human being. The use of vernacular is remarkable in the book. It’s also a comfortable telling of that story. It’s also flawed. (Twain) stopped in the middle of writing and put it aside and came back later and you can feel the demarcation. With the reintroduction of Tom Sawyer to the story, it becomes much more of an adventure novel and veers away from its real lives.
“To say it is important is not to say it is perfect. No important work of art is perfect.”
“Would you ever revisit another classic?” I asked.
“I can’t imagine,” Everett said.
“‘Moby-Dick’?”
“It would have to be ‘Richard.’’”
He thought a moment. “I have had one to-do list book most of my career. I want to make an abstract novel. Unfortunately, I don’t know what an abstract novel looks like.”
That could be a line in a Percival Everett novel — so deadpan ironic, it reads like a joke.
“What do you mean by abstract?” I asked.
“I wish I could tell you.”
“‘Finnegans Wake’?”
“As much as I like ‘Finnegans Wake,’ you can’t read it. You read at it, you decipher.”
“What’s the difference between ‘Finnegans Wake’ and an abstract novel?”
“I am a fan of James Joyce, but would argue, for all its layers, it is not a novel.”
Everett has written Westerns and thrillers and heist novels and books about Greek myths and books about baby geniuses. He wrote a book about a professor who teaches the study of nothing, and “I Am Not Sidney Poitier,” which tells the story of a character named Not Sidney Poitier who meets a character named Percival Everett and gets adopted by Ted Turner and Jane Fonda. If you giggled, you’d love Everett. He soaks in language, with great invention, but without ever leaving the ground. He’s fun to read. When I asked him to name his favorite books, he mentioned the realism of Chester Himes, but also Dr. Seuss, Laurence Sterne’s famous difficult 18th-century satire “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,” but also Louis Sachar’s “Wayside School” children series. In “James,” as in many of his books, another book somehow slips into the book you’re reading. James takes the notebook of real-life figure Daniel Decatur Emmett, who is credited with both founding the first blackface minstrel troupe and as the songwriter of “Dixie.” But James, who plans to use the notebook to write his own biography, doesn’t remove Emmett’s songs to make room. He decides that “They were necessary to my story.”
Everett is dismissive of his own work.
“Well, I have no affection for it,” he told me. “When I am done, it’s gone. I don’t judge it one way or another. It’s not mine now. I can’t control what it means once it goes out.”
So you don’t walk away disappointed that it didn’t live up to what you hoped?
“I never read it again! I never feel comfortable. I feel like a fraud, is what I feel like. I am still trying to figure out how to do this. I am a different person after I finish, and I will be a different person tomorrow. Who can say if I’m good or bad? That question is for history.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
