This Book Will Win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
…and deserves to
The Year of Percival Everett
If I could wager money on the Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction this year (I can’t, no bookie would ever cater to such a tiny market) I would place substantial money on James by Percival Everett. Everett has been publishing steadily since 1983 and has written an astonishing 23 novels, four collections of short stories, six collections of poetry, and one children’s book before publishing his latest James earlier this year. For most of his career Everett has worked on the fringe, publishing experimental, challenging novels with the highly-regarded, small independent press Graywolf. He wrote Telephone in 2020, a novel that has three slightly different published versions floating around in the world, each with a different ending and slightly altered story throughout. He co-wrote a novel that tells African American history from the perspective of Strom Thurmond. He’s a metafictional wizard who has always been loved by critics (Telephone was nominated for a Pulitzer the year Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman won) but, quite understandably I would argue, has struggled to find huge commercial success for almost 40 years.
Everett’s fortunes changed precipitously last year when his novel Erasure, which was published way back in 2001, was adapted into the Oscar-winning film American Fiction. Both the novel and the film are great, but the film in particular brought out the most commercial elements in Everett’s work — namely his world-class humor — and introduced him to a bigger audience. Then, as seems to be the case in book publishing more and more these days, success bred more success for Everett. Exactly 41 years after publishing his debut with Viking Everett returned to big publishing and signed a major deal with Doubleday for James, a retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of Jim.
Why James will Win the Pulitzer
Major awards—the Grammys, the Oscars, the Pulitzers, the Tonys—are about developing the best narrative about what deserves to be crowned “the best” of that year. More than aesthetic judgement, awards involve the even more subjective nature of what is “important.” Many jokes over the years have popped up around the Oscars for their propensity to fall into certain tropes of what’s considered important despite the quality of the film or the performance. For example, playing a real-life figure or having a physical transformation have often guaranteed actor nominations and wins (Oppenheimer, Churchill, Freddie Mercury, Judy Garland, Tammy Faye). Historical dramas and movies about Hollywood always get nominated. More insidiously, in the aughts and late 90s playing someone mentally ill was a surefire way to try to grab an award. And there is a long history of the Academy Awards awarding Black actors and directors for films that center on slavery.
Looking back at the history of the Pulitzer you can trace a pretty clear line of what has been similarly considered important and it’s actually not that far off from the Oscars. Just last year Barbara Kingsolver took home gold for her retelling of a Charles Dickens novel set during the modern-day opioid crisis in Demon Copperhead. Colson Whitehead won two Pulitzers, for a speculative novelty about slavery and for a historical novel set in Jim-Crow Florida. Louise Erdrich won for her historical novel about Native Americans resisting the American government’s termination polices. And that’s why James will ultimately take the award home— not only has Everett built momentum around being one of American’s great literary treasures and hit the New York Times bestseller list, but he has written a book that screams American Historical Importance. Everett for the first time in his career (possibly—I cannot claim to have read all of his 23 novels, but I am making an educated guess) wrote something that is accessible and a down-the-line historical novel using one of the most significant American works of literature as its underpinning. In other words: pure Pulitzer bait. From the story, to the subject, to the success of the book, everything has lined up perfectly.
The Good News
James will likely follow in a long-heralded tradition of big awards rewarding the right people for the wrong reasons. Everett is a writer that has been tackling racism in his work for a long, long time in ways that are just as, if not more provocative than in James. But James is the package that is widely appealing enough to cross the finish line— a certain irony if he does end up winning for a man who clearly luxuriates in pushing back on conventional appeal and novel structure. The good news is that right reasons or not, James deserves to win the Pulitzer Prize. It’s a masterpiece and even reading it with the considerable hype in the back of my mind it did not disappoint. If I’m right about the prize many longer and more finely detailed critical and literary analyses will be written about James. So, I’ll stick to a few observations (no spoilers) about the choices and execution that make it brilliant and incredibly deserving of all the honors it already has and will continue to receive.
Observation #1: Riff on the Original
No, you don’t really need to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn before opening Everett’s novel. Vague memories of reading it as a young person or even just a cultural understanding of the novel will suffice. Also Everett read it so many times so that you don’t have to— part of the award-winning narrative of the book's publication is that he read Twain’s Huckleberry Finn 15 times back-to-back in order to absorb and ultimately discard the original text for his own version.
It becomes apparent quickly which new layers are Everett’s, and what remains of Twain’s. The “fun” adventures and juvenile in Twain’s version were played for lighthearted laughs without having to cross check your references. Like Huck and Tom playing a prank on Jim and mocking him while (they think) he’s asleep in the opening scene, or Huck and Jim’s “goofy” high jinks as they float down river (stealing boats etc.). By putting us in Jim’s perspective—with all of his interiority given back to him—it’s quite evident which pieces of the novel are the Twain side of the story and which pieces are the Everett side of the story. This is what makes it a deadly good retelling— Everett’s being faithful to the text in many ways while lifting up the curtain to reveal a whole backstage that was never seen in the original text.
Observation #2: Code Switching
A main conceit of the novel is a radical one. Everett’s mission is to reclaim Jim’s interior life and make him human, with a family, with fears and motivations, but also to reclaim his intelligence. James pushes back hard at generations of dehumanizing slaves in historical fiction, film, and art. Everett does this not by offering a wholly alternative version (although it is that too) but by offering a parallel one. The running theme throughout the book is that Jim speaks one way to white people and another way to Black people— or the historical equivalent of The White Voice. There are rules and reasons governing this as James — Jim’s proper name another nod at this duality — outlines:
“White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them…The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say ‘when they don’t feel superior.’”
James lays down some rules for his children to benefit their survival: don’t make eye contact; never speak first; always let the whites be the ones who name the trouble; they need to know everything so they need to name everything; be hard to understand and let them correct you. Novels are built on internal logic and this logic Everett introduces is one that haunts Jim as he navigates the white world for the rest of the novel. Everett plots a tidy encapsulation of this doublespeak that runs through the novel early on:
“Do I have to eat it?” Lizze Asked
“No, you don’t,” Sadie said.
“But what are you going to say when she asks you about it?” I asked.
Lizzie cleared her throat. “Miss Watson, dat sum conebread lak I neva before et.”
“Try ‘dat be,” I said. “That would be the correct incorrect grammar.”
Everett opens up a parallel world in historical fiction, one that breaks free of the cliché and often racist, flat portrayals of slaves as James reclaims language, his intelligence, and his agency.
Observation #3: Never Didactic
What makes Everett’s choice and follow-through a masterstroke of fiction writing is that he works within the bounds of historical fiction and realism. What can often happen in a modern interpretation of an old work is that the modern writer brings modern morals, modern setting, modern language, modern emotion into the equation in a way that throws the story off. Modernizing is a valid choice, but also one that can quickly become didactic and break the magical spell that makes a fictional world feel authentic. It would be hard to remain in the space of Huck Finn if James’ busted out the phrase “police state violence.” Or if Everett had, like in Tarantino’s Django Unchained, used Jim’s new agency to create a modern fantasy about slaves being able to transcend the massive, violent structure oppressing them and by sheer pluck gain the upper hand to take revenge.
James and his story exist in Twain’s time period, with all the horrors and fears of slavery at his back. This adherence to time period goes down to the intellectual works James has access to, throughout the novel as he contends with the philosophies of Voltaire, Thoreau, and Kierkegaard, considering his plight within the intellectual ideas of his time. Everett gives the reins of the story to Jim fully and not just in a conceptual sense. He does what great novelists often do: make you forget entirely the author is there. James never feels like a work of an author’s opinion, but a work of art.
Observation #4: The Hard Shift
All of Everett’s choices pay off in the hard shift away from Mark Twain’s original novel. Slavery was horrific and barbaric, not a playful game of cat and mouse. While both Twain’s and Everett’s versions are in some ways satires criticizing racists, it is the unseriousness of Twain’s novel that is its fundamental difference to Everett’s. The same plot points in Everett’s hands become legitimately terrifying, because by having access to James’ full humanity these little episodes sure don’t feel like “adventures.” Plenty of scathing and critical essays have been written about Huckleberry Finn to this effect, but Everett, maybe sensing the enormity of Twain’s influence took on the more difficult task and wrote an entire rebuttal by way of showing not telling.
Observation #5: Not Just an Exercise
One point that you could make about Everett’s previous work is that you could feel that part of his motivation to write was to give himself an elaborate technical exercise to overcome. He created exciting work pushing these boundaries, especially inspiring to a small subset of readers deeply entrenched in literature and writing. However, even for great appreciators of his work, experimentation and feeling the author winking at you can often disconnect you as a reader from the overall emotional effect. James feels like Everett’s crowning achievement because he has spent a lifetime breaking the rules down so that he could master them when he decided to paint inside the lines. Make no mistake, there are absolutely brilliant technical flourishes in James that few writers would pull off, let alone attempt, but perhaps the fuel of rebutting an iconic literary work hews Everett’s work down to a point. For all of the intellectual pyrotechnics, it is the driving, relentless, electric force of one character and his story that make James a great novel and worthy of the highest honor in literature.