Summary: Retelling of Huck Finn from the perspective of Jim.
I have hosted an online book club for about six years now. James was the first fiction book we have read and it was very well received. When we started most of the group had read Huck Finn, but no one had read Huck Finn within 20 or 30 years. (I had not read Huck Finn when the group started reading James.) As we read both myself and another person read Huck Finn. And as much as I did not like Huck Finn, I do think I understood James better because I read Huck Finn.
I am not going to repeat my previous post on James, but I am going to repeat that the act of discussing a book in a group will cause you to understand it more than reading it alone. (My one negative is that I pretty consistently have found that I love a book that I have read on my own, that I often like it less after reading it with a group.)
While much of the book is constrained by the framing of the original Huck Finn story, I was surprised by how much was different. In both Huck Finn and James, I kept being irritated by how naive Huck was portrayed in one scene and then how mature he was in another scene. I do think there is a sense of truth in that because teens can be both mature and childish. But I also think that this was a bit of a crutch because the a lot of racism was hidden in that naiveté.
I am pretty convinced that Everett is referencing James Baldwin at several points and that tone of love and anger carries the awakening of Jim toward James. I won’t give away any of the twists of the story that are not in Huck Finn, but it is those differences that matter. I also think that the Mississippi River changes character in the shift between the two tellings. It is a character in both, but the type of character is different.
I do think that Everrett has the far better book. Yes Huck Finn is a classic. But I don’t think it is as good of a classic as many others. It was really creating a new genre and I think it ends up being beloved for being a classic young adult novel more than it being beloved for being a classic novel. The role of nostalgia in people remembering something that they read long ago is playing a role here.
And while I do not support the wide use of the N word here (nearly 300 uses) I suspect that it is one of the reasons that the book has held on to its cultural place in a perverse way that allows it to be transgressive.
James by Percival Everett Purchase Links: Hardcover, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook