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A review by moonpix
James by Percival Everett
5.0
Like Erasure, I really responded to the surrealism here, as well as how the layers of meaning and frames to the narrative are wryly pointed out to the reader by the narrator himself. But the relationship between James and Huck here is singular: it's one of the most compelling I've ever come across in a novel. The inevitability of their closeness against the massive societal pulls of their distance speaks to why Everett is one of the few contemporary novelists (especially of those with a satirical/"funny" bend to their writing) that I wholeheartedly love, for he is the most aware of all the contractions being alive, not to mention the contradictions of representation and the written word.
"At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn't even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive."
"At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn't even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive."