Jim (2024) by Percival Everett

 Book Review

Jim (2024)

by Percival Everett

   It has been quite a couple of years for author and USC Professor Percival Everett.  Everett is the authorial equivalent of an English soccer player who works his way up from the 2nd division to the Premier League over the course of his career.  He's been publishing novels extremely frequently going back to 1983.  His first New York Times review came in 1994 for God's Country.  The reviewer noted it was his sixth novel and mentioned his first novel within the review.  He then got a capsule review for his next book...and that was it. more or less.   Everett hasn't exactly been obscure- he became a tenured Professor of English at USC in 2007, but the rise to Everett as an author with a general/popular audience began in 2022, where he was another example of an American author who saw an uptick after the Booker Prize opened the nominations to American authors who publish their books in the UK.  Everett didn't win, but he made the shortlist.  That was enough for me to check it out, and I came away impressed.

  Last year, Everett made another exponential leap into the public consciousness with the success of the movie version of his 2001 novel, Erasure.  That movie is currently sitting at Rotten Tomatoes at a 93/96 critics/audience split and as modest financial hit, with grosses over 20 million on a budget of 10 million.  It has certainly expanded the audience for Everett's back catalog.  He released Dr. No in 2022 and last month he published Jim, his ambitious retelling of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  Considering they just gave the Pulitzer for her retelling of David Copperfield in the West Virginia coal fields (IDK I never read it), you'd have to think he has a shot at the Pulitzer Prize this year.  

 I was leery going in because of the whole rewriting of a classic text situation- not something I'm necessarily opposed to, but it needs to be pretty good to hold the attention, since the reader already knows the plot of the underlying text.   It's one thing to do that in the world of ancient epic- Homer, Beowulf, but as you get closer to the present it seems like less fertile territory.   But, as it turned out, Jim did live up the hype.  The plot is pretty spoiler intensive considering the source is a book everyone in the world at least knows about, so it's tough to talk in detail about what happens beyond the "Retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim" tagline, but Everett has a lot going on here- layers and layers of meaning, all of which was interesting and not overly clever or pedantic etc.  Jim is a real hit, and maybe a prize winner this year.