12 April 2024

James by Percival Everett

“My idea of hell would be to live with a library that contained only reimaginings of famous novels,” says Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Percival Everett’s James is “the rarest of exceptions”. The novel is a spin on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, but told from the point of view of Jim, the escaped slave who accompanies Huck on his adventures. In Everett’s book, the character calls himself James, is secretly literate – he has “extended internal dialogues with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire and John Locke” – and puts on his stupid-sounding slave dialect to stave off unwanted attention from white people. James “sticks to the broad outlines of Twain’s novel”, but with a few deft changes: in one “ludicrous and terrifying” scene, James is bought by a blackface singing troupe, but because no black man can appear on a stage, he “must himself put on blackface”.

Everett “often sacrifices poetry for pace”, says Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times, and several sections tend towards the “sketchy”. But pace has a quality of its own: we get a novel that feels “genuinely urgent” and “glows with intelligence and imagination”. At 67, after decades of being “politely passed over”, Everett is becoming a big-name author: his 2021 novel The Trees was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; the recent Oscar-winning film American Fiction is based on his book Erasure. I’m “always wary of making grand claims for fiction”, but James, a “bold and profound” (and also very funny) novel, has “the potential to become a classic”.

James is available to buy here.

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

The Talented Mr Ripley, which has a new adaptation out on Netflix, isn’t the only Patricia Highsmith novel that’s proved a magnet for directors. Alfred Hitchcock himself tackled her “exceptionally accomplished” 1950 debut, Strangers on a Train, says the thriller writer Paula Hawkins in CrimeReads. The book begins with a chance meeting between two young men, in which one proposes that they should “exchange murders” and bump off the person causing their counterpart trouble. In Strangers on a Train, Highsmith pioneered the now-commonplace technique of letting the reader “occupy the mind of a killer”, and began her career-long fascination with the idea that we all carry “the capacity for good and ill”. More than 70 years on, the book “has lost none of its power to disturb”.

Strangers on a Train is available to buy here.

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🧑‍🚀 Tom Hanks on The Rest is History