Julian Lucas
Appearances
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer
And it's another to actually try to rewrite their most famous book. And I wonder, was there like a particular moment in the book that you realized Jim had more to say than Twain lets him? Or was it more, you know, this would be a great way to sneak onto the high school English syllabi?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer
Something I've always found so ironic about Huckleberry Finn is it's recurrently targeted by well-meaning anti-racists to either be redacted, to remove the N-word from it, or to cut it from syllabi entirely. And yet, there are few novels that have been more championed by the greatest African-American writers. It was so huge for Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison and...
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer
To read Percival Everett is always to grapple with the prejudices and the assumptions and the acts of imagination that we have to make in communicating with one another through fiction and through art. And so when I saw that he was rewriting Huckleberry Finn...
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer
Ishmael Reed recently wrote an essay, which is just a kind of...
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer
rousing defense of the book and uh and of of twain's insight uh what do you make of this discrepancy in in the way that it's been both condemned and and celebrated well it's condemned by people who don't read the book um and and have a um a reaction to and and actually it's an excuse for them that they um you know it's you've got to be against something i suppose and and and
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer
I knew that it would be an opportunity not just to read a great narrative, but also to read along with him one of the foundational stories in the American narrative.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer
I have so much to say on this subject.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer
So I love how this novel begins. I mean, first of all, the title, because in Twain, we know this character as Jim, or, you know, sometimes as more derogatory epithets, but immediately he's announced as James. And the reframing you do is just so clear in the very first sentence. And I wonder if you could read for us the first page of the novel. Okay. See if I can get close here.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer
What I love about this is you take a scene that in Twain is a kind of fun prank played by these two boys. And you immediately make us see it from the bitter, exhausted perspective of a grown man who has to play along with these children's games essentially because he's a slave. And you hear it immediately in those little bastards. How did you arrive at this voice for Jim?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer
I love that. It's almost a river-like reading experience. You keep going back to the beginning. And I know you have a very high opinion of nonsense and have written essays on it. Did you stop enjoying it after a while? I was sick of it. Did it affect your... Yes, I was sick of it. I wanted to be sick of it. How many readings did it take to get sick of it?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer
Do you feel like it's a voice that you found in the book? I mean, you know, when Jim talks to Huck in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he's usually calling him Child and Honey and all these sweet affectionate names. Was there a kernel of the character you created sort of hidden in Twain's character, or did you kind of have to invent him whole cloth?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer
One of the themes you've been most interested in throughout your career is language miscommunication. You studied the philosophy of language as a graduate student.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer
um so many of your novels are interested in these kinds of misunderstandings and and failures of of language what interests you about the way slavery shaped communication um i can preface that with a with a with a complaint about a film and that's uh 12 years a slave um
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer
I'm glad you brought up humor because your work is really known for finding humor in unexpected places. Your novel, The Trees, is a very dark satire about the legacy of lynching in the U.S. And did you want this book to be funny? Did you want it to be funny in the way that Twain's work is funny?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer
In your story, James isn't just running to freedom. He's also reading and writing about it. And throughout the book, he hallucinates these very funny debates with philosophers like Voltaire and John Locke. And you put them in the middle of these really dramatic moments when he's been bitten by a rattlesnake and he's hallucinating or he's trying to catch a fish with his bare hands.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer
I wonder if you would read one of these moments for us from page 48.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer
To me, there's a kind of kismet in the fact that James, your appropriation of Twain is coming out at the same time as American fiction. Cord Jefferson's adaptation of your novel Erasure. For our listeners, it stars Jeffrey Wright as a very literary black novelist who is so fed up with stereotyping in the publishing industry that he writes a street novel under a pseudonym of
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer
As an elaborate literary prank. So you wrote it in 2001 at the height of the vogue for urban lit. Do you think the story still has the same resonance in our post Black Lives Matter era when at least for a moment a lot more attention was given to African American literature?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer
You know, I was rereading Huck Finn for this, and it just struck me how wildly contemporary it still feels. You know, like Huck's abusive father sounds like a MAGA voter. He's so angry that he saw a rich black man voting that he wants to overthrow the government. And I wonder if it was...
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer
Whether it's his novel, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, about a character who ends up stuck in the plot of basically every Sidney Poitier movie, or Erasure, about a black novelist so frustrated by the pigeonholing in the publishing industry that he writes an elaborate literary prank under a pseudonym.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer
Anything in what's going on in this country today that brought you back to the text and got you thinking about a story from Jim's perspective?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer
Exactly. And Huck's flight from home, his own kind of search for adventure is the emphasis in Twain. And yet there's a much higher stakes story going on for Jim because this runaway, it's a matter of life and death for him, even though it's more a matter of death. adventure and hijinks for Huck. So it's one thing to really love a writer as you love Twain.