The narrator’s point of view is critical in any novel. We see the story unfold through their eyes. What we are learning may be the truth, if only a slice of it. In the case of the unreliable narrator the reader is being pulled along by lies and misdirection. What we often miss in most novels is the point of view of those who appear to have little agency in the story and in this world. Those who are poor, trapped, or at the mercy of others. Narrators—and the author—generally are content to tell us what those with less agency are thinking.

Sometimes a book comes along that reimagines something we thought we knew, however, and suddenly the world opens up to the reader in a completely new way.

James: A Novel (2024) by Percival Everett is a brilliant reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of Huck’s enslaved sidekick Jim. The first part of the book follows Twain’s general outline, but when Huck and Jim are separated Everett takes James down different paths. A masterful writer, Everett works through tales and scenes that move between gripping terror and laugh-out-loud humor, all while putting forth observations from his protagonist that cut to the bone. James is depicted with intelligence, compassion, and agency in a way seldom seen in American literature about slavery.

Early in the book we learn that James—the name he chooses although his enslavers and Huck call him Jim—has taught himself to read and write during afternoons in Judge Thatcher’s library while the judge was out at work or hunting ducks. He has also taught other slaves to read, and they all speak “normal English” as their enslavers would call it when they are not in the company of those who expect them to be ignorant and lazy. James has imagined conversations with Voltaire, Rousseau, and John Locke about the nature of freedom and equality. And he wonders.

“I had wondered every time I sneaked in there what white people would do to a slave who had learned how to read. What would they do to a slave who had taught the other slaves to read? What would they do to a slave who knew what a hypotenuse was, what irony meant, how retribution was spelled?”

James is married and he and his wife have a daughter. It is when James learns that he is to be sold down river without his family that he decides to run. At the same time Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. They meet up on an island and begin the well-known journey on the Mississippi River “toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.”

The broad outlines of Twain’s book are used, although the time frame is shifted forward a couple of decades to the early 1860s and some scenes are left out while others are added. The reader slowly discovers that the bonds between Huck and James are much deeper than friendship.

One way that Everett demonstrates the intelligence and agency of the enslaved protagonist is by having James run every public utterance through what he calls his “slave filter,” to make himself sound “ridiculous and gullible, to pacify the truculent white people around him.” This comes to a head near the book’s end, when James has captured Judge Thatcher in order to find out where his wife and daughter have been sold. Their conversation is confusing to the Judge, but not because he has a pistol pointed at his head.

“Where are my wife and daughter? I know you handled the sale of them. I need to know where they’ve been taken.”

“Why are you talking like that?”

“Confusing, isn’t it?” I said.

“Slaves get sold. It happens,” he said.

“Who bought them? I cocked my head. I pointed the pistol at him again. “Have a seat.” I nodded to the chair in front of the desk.

He sat. “Why are you talking like that?”

“I’m pointing a pistol at you and asking about the where-abouts of my family and you’re concerned with my speech? What is wrong with you?”

And then, to have a little fun when the Judge asks if he plans to kill him:

“The thought crossed my mind. I haven’t decided. Oh, sorry, let me translate that for you. I ain’t ‘cided, Massa.”

By novel’s end, James will have killed men, freed fellow slaves, and set fire to a breeding plantation for slaves. He is a legend.

This book is also something of a legend. James was just awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In an interview, Everett notes, “I hope that I have written the novel that Twain did not and also could not have written. I do not view the work as a corrective, but rather I see myself in conversation with Twain.”

Among the many excellent reviews of Everett’s work is one by Dwight Garner in the New York Times that ends with these paragraphs:

“James is the rarest of exceptions [to wet-brained ‘reimaginings’ of famous novels]. It should come bundled with Twain’s novel. It is a tangled and subversive homage, a labor of rough love. ‘His humor and humanity affected me long before I became a writer,’ Everett writes of Twain in his acknowledgments. ‘Heaven for the climate; hell for my long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain.’

Everett does not reprint the famous warning that greets the reader at the start of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: ‘Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.’ Motives, morals and plot are here in abundance, of course. And Everett shoots what is certain to be this book’s legion of readers straight through the heart.”

Do yourself a favor. Read this book.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo of Mississippi River by rjdoc from Pixabay