BOOK REVIEW
Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for fiction
‘James’ by Percival Everett
Though not a “retelling” of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (1876), or “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (1884), readers of Percival Everett’s “James,” published in 2024, will recognize names, settings, and certainly situations from those classics.
It is, however, the story of Jim in this book — Huck Finn’s 27-year-old black friend.
Jim, the enslaved narrator/protagonist, a victim of the Southern pre-Civil War environment, lives and works on Miss Watson’s property near Hannibal, Missouri, Twain’s boyhood home, on the Mississippi River with his wife, Sadie, and their 9-year-old daughter, Lizzie.
Judge Thacker, who oversees Huck in his father’s absence, runs a tight ship — but not so tightly that Jim can’t surreptitiously slip into the judge’s study through the years, teaching himself to read and write.
In the process, he learns how to mimic the enslavers’ linguistic style, dropping his local slave dialect and vocabulary.
Jim, in fact, calls his dialect “correct incorrect grammar.” This “intentional dialect” is only one characteristic that sets Jim apart from his peers.
Spoiler alert: Readers; watch as a 3-inch pencil stub takes its place as one of the book’s most important symbols.
Since his abusive father disappeared, Huck and Jim have forged a relationship so close that when Jim runs, Huck decides to follow.
Sadie overhears that Miss Watson intends to sell Jim in New Orleans, which leaves him no choice.
His run takes him — for example — up and down the Mississippi, onto and off various islands, onto numerous rafts and canoes, and in and out of woods, caves, and marshlands.
He is bitten by a rattlesnake; falls prey to White men who capture him to collect a reward; is “hired” by a Black minstrel band to pose as a white man in blackface makeup; takes up with Norman, a passing-for-white negro man who befriends him and then survives a riverboat explosion.
The “run” becomes tedious to the reader but certainly not to Jim, who is wanted not only as a run-away slave, but also for murder and robbery.
Eventually, Jim makes the decision that his journey must take on a purpose: to raise enough money to buy back his wife and daughter, who he discovers to have been sold on to a “breeding farm” in Iowa.
Besides Everett’s brilliant and emotional retooling of Jim, several other ingredients of “James” may have played into its selection as the 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction: first is this “intentional dialect” and then, also, a superb play with irony.
In a discussion early in the novel, Jim and Luke mention two kinds of irony: proleptic and dramatic — hardly the kind of conversation the reader would expect between two slaves in Missouri.
With that idea in mind, the word play often takes on new significance. Every time Jim switches from one linguistic preference to another, the reader encounters proleptic irony, a situation in which earlier events foreshadow later events, giving the reader a clue about the future.
Likewise, dramatic irony, a situation in which the reader knows more than the characters know, is a constant in the scenes where Jim is camouflaged to be a minstrel performer.
Music also lends credence to Jim’s situation.
The novel opens with stanzas of an 1840s minstrel song, featuring grammar written to caricature the life of American slaves as simplistic and idealistic.
That opening does not prepare the reader for the violence and inhumanity that Everett paints so graphically.
Again, irony — because the modern reader is aware of the grotesque mockery of America that slavery portrays.
Here’s a veiled “spoiler alert:” From the Chapter 5 rape scene that Jim witnesses in the house which he had previously shared with his family to the last few words in which Jim becomes “James,” trying for a more noble future, the action moves at breakneck speed. Be ready to finish the book.
Enjoy!
About the author: A native of Fort Gordon, Georgia, graduate of the University of Miami and Brown University, and resident of Los Angeles, Percival Everett’s career as a novelist and short story writer has spanned decades. The recipient of numerous prestigious awards, he calls himself “pathologically ironic.” Most of his works are satirical, spreading across a variety of genres, which focus on exploring race and identity issues. In an interview, he admitted that he has read Huckleberry Finn 15 times in order to “absorb the world of that narrative.”
— Kay Bradshaw Holland is a retired English teacher and writes book reviews for the Concho Observer.
