Arts & Culture
Reimagining Huckleberry Finn: National Book Award-winning author Percival Everett to speak on campus May 4
Acclaimed novelist Percival Everett will step onto the stage of the Quarry Amphitheater at UC Santa Cruz next month for a highly anticipated conversation with Professor Vilashini Cooppan as part of The Humanities Institute’s Deep Read.
Acclaimed novelist Percival Everett will step onto the stage of the Quarry Amphitheater at UC Santa Cruz next month for a highly anticipated conversation with Professor Vilashini Cooppan as part of The Humanities Institute’s Deep Read.
At the center of this event is James, Everett’s searing, funny and inventive 2024 National Book Award-winning novel, a radical reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the point of view of Jim, the enslaved man who journeys down the Mississippi with Huck. This year a community of 10,000 Deep Readers in Santa Cruz and around the world are reading James as part of The Humanities Institute’s free public program, which includes an email series, an undergraduate course, virtual and in-person discussions with faculty members from different disciplines, and the culminating event with the author on May 4.
Ahead of his campus visit, Everett sat down for a candid and wide-ranging interview, discussing everything from the challenges of writing the screenplay for the forthcoming film adaptation of James to his enduring belief that art can still change the world, even at a time of declining readership.
Asked about an NPR story citing evidence that Americans are reading fewer books than ever before, he said, “(This) is crazy, since there are so many more of us, because they are not making that figure per capita. If I can write a novel that challenges TikTok, maybe we have a chance.”
Everett has long had a cult following among admirers of mischievous and genre-defying fiction. He broke through to a larger audience with Erasure, a widely praised book that was adapted into the satirical film, American Fiction.
But Everett, with more than 30 books to his name, is now living through the experience of having a national bestseller on his hands, reaching more readers than ever.
“It is great that people have this interest in this book,” said Everett, reached in the Los Angeles studio where he repairs guitars and mandolins in between dreaming up new ideas for fiction projects. “But my interest in it was gone as soon as I finished. People will point out things that I never thought of, which is why I’m writing in the first place… but I am thoroughly sick of James.”
Everett’s reaction to the success of James is self-effacing. Asked how it’s changed his approach or future plans, he compared it to an article of clothing.
“It’s like one day finally I might wear a shirt that everybody likes and it’s: ‘Hey, nice shirt.’ And then it’s in the wash.”
In other words: he’s moved on.
“I write because I am interested in different things in the world,” he said. “And now, as I’m older … it has dawned on me that I have a limited amount of time to make the books I might like to make.”
Still, he recognizes the unique impact this book has had. Unlike many of his previous works—formally inventive, genre-blurring novels such as Dr. No or Glyph—James has connected with a much broader audience, including “white people over 60 and 70,” he said with a laugh. “Every day. And they identify themselves: ‘I am a white woman. Eighty years old!’ Things like that. Just tons of that kind of mail. It is interesting. It is very sweet.”
Writing in Twain’s shadow
For Everett, a writer who resists didacticism and avoids novels with overt messages, the process of creating James was paradoxically both straightforward and deeply layered.
“I don’t like messages,” he said. “So I abandon all allegiance to my own beliefs knowing that I can’t escape them. My politics will be there, but if I think about politics when I am writing I am doomed to write a message novel, and I am not interested in doing that.”
Instead, James emerged from an abstract idea that Everett worked out through narrative. “Mainly, I always have some very abstract and logical or even arithmetical axiom or idea at the bottom of my work,” he explained. “I don’t expect any reader to see it … but in exploring that I start trying to find stories that will allow me to think about that in different ways.”
That process was complicated by the shadow of Twain, whose language Everett deliberately tried to forget while writing James.
“I tried to create a blur,” Everett said. “I didn’t want to remember any of the words that Twain used but I wanted to remember the world … so when I finished my exercise of finding a way to hate it, I closed Huck Finn and still have never looked at it since I started writing James.”
A novel that falls apart
Everett describes Twain’s novel as one that “falls apart”—particularly when Tom Sawyer returns in the latter third of the book.
“It’s not a very good novel when you get right down to it — but it’s really important for a number of good reasons,” he said.
Asked to delve into the novel’s flaws, Everett spoke of the way Twain at one point set the novel aside and then – somewhat awkwardly – revived the project:
“Twain abandoned the work for several years in the middle, and you can almost see the demarcation — the language changes, the movement of the novel changes. He abandons Huck’s moral dilemma to some extent to move on to an adventure with the reassertion of Tom Sawyer. And that’s sad to say — and I try to find ways to reason where it’s not the case — it is a mercenary move on his part to reintroduce this moneymaking character, Tom Sawyer, Twain having been quite famously in debt all the time. So it does fall apart — and because of the character I actually hate: it’s Tom Sawyer.”
Even so, Everett offers a more generous reading of Twain, speculating that the use of Jim as a pawn in the novel could reflect a metaphor for how newly freed Black people were treated post-Reconstruction—even if Twain himself wasn’t conscious of it. “It doesn’t matter what he meant,” Everett said. “But that’s a way of reading the text in a more generous way.”
That generosity has limits. Everett recently read Kerry Driscoll’s Mark Twain Among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples, which unpacks Twain’s racism toward Native people. It left a deep impression.
“You come away from it not feeling terribly positive about Twain,” he said. “He really hated—he was a bigot when it came to Native people. And I came to that just recently. So I am reassessing my reevaluation of Twain vis-a-vis African Americans as well.
James brings to life the character Twain had rendered in broad strokes, investing him with intelligence, sensitivity, and emotional depth. Early on in the composition of James, Everett knew that he would amplify a theme in Huckleberry Finn that Twain introduces yet elides – Jim’s role as a father figure to Huck. “
It’s present in Twain’s world also,” Everett said, speaking of Jim’s fatherly role. “But it is complicated by the fact that Twain’s depiction of Jim is so stereotypic — superstitious, simple-minded, and not subject to second-order thinking that might make him a more interesting character. But it occurred to me almost immediately — because it is there.”
“That is the first thing fascists do: they go after books and art.”
In Everett’s retelling, Jim—now James—switches modes of speech depending on who’s listening, a survival skill he’s honed over time.
“Everyone wants to call that code-switching—I just call it being human,” Everett said. “If you are surviving, language is the first survival skill we learn. And to give it a cool-sounding name … I think sometimes misses the point—that it is simply what we do. I am not going to start calling eating a ‘nutrition injection.’”
Language, for Everett, is power. And the ability for an enslaved person to read—let alone master rhetorical strategy—was inherently dangerous.
“The act of learning how to read could get you killed,” he said. “Yeah. Apparently it still can.” (Pause.) “Are you familiar with a state called Florida?” he added, with a laugh.
His indictment of contemporary censorship is just as sharp.
“It is an act of fascists,” Everett said. “That is the first thing fascists do — go after books and art — because that is where we are most human. Our consumption of those things. And it is not writing that I consider so wonderfully subversive. It is actually reading, the most subversive thing we can do. The second most subversive thing you can do is not writing. It is being part of a book club because you are really keeping art alive and talking about ideas and that is fantastic.”
In that light, Everett sees The Humanities Institute’s Deep Read as an act of defiance—and delight.
“It is terrific,” he said. “I go out and do these things now and speak to a bunch of people and I point out to them that we all think alike in that we love literature, but, in the mad scheme of things, this is not a very large group … We’re not a reading culture. We have to keep that in perspective. I wish we were more of one.”
Everett, in the midst of the ongoing swirl over James, is writing the screenplay for the film adaptation.
“It’s not the same as making a novel, and I have no proprietary feelings about a film in the same way I would about a novel,” he said. “Because I understand it is a collaborative work … it may well look very different from anything I’ve imagined, and I’m completely open to that.”
When asked about his next work, Everett was polite and elliptical. “It’s a novel,” he deadpanned. “But you probably could have guessed that. As I always say—if I could encapsulate it, I would have written a pamphlet, not a novel.”
But one ambition still tempts him: creating a novel that pushes the boundaries of abstraction.
“I am still trying to make an abstract work,” he said. “The difficulty for writers is that the constituent parts of our art are representational … unlike a note of music or paint. I think I should be able to do it. I’ve never seen it. I don’t know what it would look like. I may not even know if I’ve achieved it—if I ever do it—because someone else could say that.”
Everett may not remember every scene from James, and he certainly doesn’t linger on past accolades.
But he still holds out some hope that literary art can change the world, even at a time when Americans are reading fewer books than ever before.
“If I didn’t have that reason, I wouldn’t be making art at all. I truly hope that it’s possible—Walt Whitman in (By Blue Ontario’s Shores) said, and I paraphrase: if you want a better society, produce better people. And when I say art, I have an expansive idea of art. It is not just literature, it is not just painting and music. Scholarship is art. Journalism is art. These are things that affect us, and we should go at them with the understanding that we are creating our culture.”
Humanities Dean Jasmine Alinder spoke of the timeliness of Everett’s appearance on campus:
“At a time when books are being banned and intellectual inquiry is under attack, The Deep Read offers a necessary space for reflection, resistance, and radical empathy,” she said. “Percival Everett’s James reimagines – and reoccupies – a familiar story through a lens that demands we see humanity, the complexity, of a character who was reduced to almost a cartoon in Huckleberry Finn.”
“Reading, in James, is not just an act of learning; it’s an act of defiance, of compassion, of deep connection,” Alinder said. “I can’t imagine a more urgent moment to gather in person, to read deeply, and to listen carefully to voices like Everett’s that challenge us to see—and to think—differently.”
Percival Everett will be in conversation at the Quarry Amphitheater at 4 p.m. on May 4. The event is free and open to the public as part of The Humanities Institute’s Deep Read. Sign up for the Deep Read program to be a part of further conversations on James and register for the main event here.