Percival Everett is my favorite author. I marvel at the way he writes. I've only read 7 of his books and would have trouble ranking them. But agree that The Trees is number one. It was the first I read and it has stuck with me and was the reason I read more of him. Each book is different and clever. Also enjoyed his acceptance speech at the National Book Awards.
I’m a huge Everett fan and appreciate this guide to what I should read next. I didn’t care as much for his Strom Thurmond book (though—as with all his work—there are brilliant and very funny passages) but he is my favorite author for being engaging and entertaining while also forcing deep reflection, insight, and powerful emotions.
I’m very glad you wrote this! I’m archiving it for reference. I liked Erasure and I can’t say I’m happy about the apparent backlash to this new book, which I have not read yet; I did read a book of Everett interviews which made it difficult for me to imagine that he would have written this new book as either a big joke or an attempt to pander to white suburban book clubs.
Just finished James- the library had extra copies because a book club there is reading it. my first response was "this just makes me want to read huckleberry finn" (thanks for the reminder.) and there was something to the writing in James that made me wonder exactly what Percival Everett was trying to do... there is something a little uncanny/overly uncanny about the way he writes sometimes. i wonder if the response to James you touch on is a personal reaction to the uncanny bits.
I liked seeing your recommendation for Kathryn Davis! I haven’t read Duplex yet, but I’ve really enjoyed some of her other mind-bendy novels. I’ve always thought that she is another underrated writer.
I've only read American Fiction and The Trees so far, but I have them ranked the same as you. The Trees had me laughing out loud at the absurdity and I've recommended it to friends. Haven't had time to read James yet but it's on digital hold at the library so I will get to it soon.
I fall into the category of people who didn't really like James. I didn't find it as engaging as I expected, and it felt more like social commentary than satire. That said, The Trees is really excellent, notably because Everett's imagination is so biting and hilarious. With James it felt like he'd boxed himself into more of a corner and his imagination didn't have as much room to shine.
"This is a book that everyone seemed to think had the potential for wide appeal. And they were right! Are we now saying this is a bad thing?
It’s strange to think that wide appeal somehow discredits a literary writer. "
Okay, I'll stand up and take the beating. I'm saying that it is a bad thing.
I mean, to be clear, not bad for Everett, not bad for the hoi polloi, but yes, wide appeal does mean something about the kinds of compromises that an author makes.
No one likes to hear this, because we all think we are, each of us, the best kind of reader we can imagine, but the fact is, people have different skills for engaging with literature. No one gets their back up when they are told that, say, there are people who play tennis better than they do. But for some reason, we are very reluctant to acknowledge that some people may be better readers than we are.
If we imagine a distribution of tennis skills, it's probably not a gaussian, but that will be a close enough model for this discussion, because the salient point is that at the top level of tennis, the number of competitors is getting smaller and smaller. There are only a handful of people in the world who can give Novak Djokovic a decent game. If I'm on the court returning serves, it's because Djokovic is not giving me his best game. If Djokovic is determined to play at a level that gives the most number of people a decent game, he's not going to be playing as well as he could be, he's going to be playing down to what he thinks we can handle.
If you think it's different for literature, I think the burden of proof is on you.
This analogy does not hold for me. It makes some assumptions that don't necessarily follow. One is that wide appeal necessarily means "compromises" which isn't necessarily true. What is being "compromised" in this case? I think the calculus for wide appeal was not that Everett was compromising, but that a novel jumping off from one of the most read and widely loved books of all time would be interesting an accessible to a lot of people, as compared to something like "Glyph" which is a satire of poststructuralist philosophy that most people have never read and even fewer understand. The only way we could say this is a compromise is if we think the merits of a book are rooted in how few people can grapple with it, which seems like a pretty limited notion when it comes to an art from that's meant to communicate with audiences.
Analogizing a tennis player to a novelist breaks down pretty quickly. A tennis player's aim is to defeat their opponent, to leave them without a response. A novelist's aim is the opposite. They aren't trying to defeat their opponent, they're trying to engage their audience. Engaging an audience isn't "playing down," it's the job itself. Now, the ways that's achieved, and the ranges of audiences are pretty infinite, but that's part of what makes it all so interesting.
Okay, let's look a little more closely, then. "wide appeal necessarily means 'compromises' which isn't necessarily true." I'll defend the tennis analogy next paragraph, but if Djokovic wants me to return the ball, he can't serve it to me at 130 mph. Similarly, as you point out, if Everett wants a wider audience for =Glyph=, he's got to take out all the linguistics and philosophy. Taking the linguistics and philosophy out of =Glyph= makes it a pretty pale (pardon the expression, given the turf) caper novel, the kind one might put at the bottom of a ranking instead of near the top. So it should be pretty obvious that what is being compromised in this case the number of readers who are going to like it in favor of realizing his idea. That complicated stuff that not everyone gets? That's the point of the novel, that's not the furniture in the room.
When Djokovic is playing in Wimbledon, he's playing to win, sure. But a lot of us play sports for the love of the game, not as a way to make a living (or to punish our opponents). And while it is nice to win, when one's livelihood is not at stake no one wants to play a tennis game that they are going to win in straight aces (yeah, okay, and unplayable returns). What makes the match fun is playing a game with someone who is just about the same level as you.
The same is also true for reading - reading requires that we engage with the text, and that the writer make choices about what they serve up to the reader. If we don't get what Everett is doing with =Glyph= or Joyce with =Ulysses=, we aren't going to enjoy the books as much. If your main concern is maximizing your audience, you are going to limit your means and ends to creating things that almost everyone can get instead of realizing full scope of your artistic vision. What would it even mean to write a more accessible =Ulysses=? Who thinks that would be a triumph?
In your analogy to tennis, you're making what I think is a false assumption about the author's intent in writing a book and then suggesting that this is, by definition a "limiting" of the author's potential. I'm going to assume, given his extensive track record, that Percival Everett tries to write the "best" book he can every time out. What constitutes "best" can be defined in different ways, but for these purposes, let's assume - again, given the apparent integrity of his work - that he's trying to capture his artistic vision for a specific project with the greatest possible integrity. You seem to suggest that the choice to write a novel that jumps off from Huck Finn as opposed to post-structuralist philosophy is somehow a "limit." But this simply isn't true. Glyph is a success if people who connect to what he's doing get what he's up to. James is a success if people get what he's doing and connect to what he's up to.
The fact is that perhaps the most read and discussed work of American Literature as a jumping off point for a novel has a larger audience than a novel riffing on philosophy is not surprising, and it also doesn't mean that the author is pulling back on the velocity of his serve (to use your analogy). You're assuming "maximizing audience" was the inciting motive without any evidence and then judging the output on that phantom.
It's probably worth noting that Everett has also frequently stated in interviews that he does not try to influence (or even to consider) his audience's potential reactions to his book while he's writing. He has even claimed on multiple occasions to be so disconnected from his books once he's done with them that he doesn't actually remember their plots or salient details.
That issue that John calls a work's "greatest possible integrity" seems for him to be a very personal value-judgment that neither can be nor needs to be transmitted to his audience. Many of the overt games he's played with confounding (or perhaps exposing is a better term) the expectations that readers bring with them to any of his books seem very much intended to remind the reader that they -- not he -- are the ones constructing their interpretations of what he has written.
About a third of the way into _Glyph_, for example, the narrator/protagonist Ralph breaks the "fourth wall" to explicitly ask the reader if they have assumed to this point that he is Black, something that the text itself has neither specified nor even hinted at in any particularly telling manner. Everett wants to make you conscious of what you've been thinking, not to absorb what he's been thinking. There are few authors I can think of who have more wholeheartedly embraced Barthes's "Death of the Author" mentality than Everett.
There is something about _James_ (and perhaps to a lesser extent, _The Trees_) that does feel somewhat different in this regard, though I'm not sure it's primarily or even considerably related to his "riffing" on _Huck Finn_. He has, after all, similarly riffed on _Medea_ (in _For Her Dark Skin_) and on various Sidney Poitier films (_I Am Not Sidney Poitier_), though neither of those has the same influence as Twain's monumental novel.
To me, I don't see what he's doing here as analogous to Djokovic under-handing his serve so that the person on the other side of the net has a chance of returning it. There's no "selling out" or "dumbing down" that I can see in _James_, which still presumes that its reader knows the larger context of Jim's/James's "conversations" with John Locke, Cunégonde from _Candide_, and other fairly esoteric (in the context of twenty-first-century US culture) topics. No, it's not _Glyph_, but that book is an outlier even for Everett.
It's pretty fascinating to hear Everett talk about how thoroughly he sets aside his books after he's done with them. It makes sense given how prolific and apparently quick he is in writing them. I identify with the notion that writing a book is an attempt to solve an internal problem, a problem you may not entirely grasp when you start, but which is fully revealed through the writing.
I don't have nearly Everett's skill or success, but it's how I've always thought of writing. I feel like I've written about this somewhere, maybe on the newsletter, but I think some writers work inside/out, while others work outside/in. Inside/out writers work from a feeling or notion or maybe some scrap of their own life and build a narrative from there.
Outside/in tends to stem from a kind of "what if" problem or a high concept that will drive the additional inquiry. Everett reads very outside/in to me. He often works from concepts and burrows his way towards an emotional core that satisfies the larger artistic impulse to say something (for lack of a better word) meaningful.
"It's probably worth noting that Everett has also frequently stated in interviews that he does not try to influence (or even to consider) his audience's potential reactions to his book while he's writing."
Given that he wrote =Telephone=, I think we need to be cautious about taking him at his word about that. Your own example, breaking the fourth wall in =Glyph=, demonstrates a deliberate awareness of his readers and how they are responding to his work. But otherwise, see my clarification above.
Although your skepticism about Everett's pronouncements on this score is well-taken, I would stress that *awareness* of their potential or even likely responses is not equivalent to attempting to accommodate those responses in specific ways, which is sort of how I took your analogy of Djokovic changing his game in response to recognizing that his opponent lacks his skill at tennis.
To wit, Ralph does not follow up his question to the audience about their presumptions in _Glyph_ with a corrective and _Telephone_ does not suggest that any of the three versions of the text is a more "correct" one that reflects Everett's actual intentions. To belabor the tennis analogy one more time, Everett does not blow a serve past his audience in order to show them his philosophical or aesthetic superiority, even in _Glyph_. Ralph, not Everett, is the one with the absurd I.Q. of over five hundred, after all.
Okay, my fault, I was insufficiently clear - you were making an argument about =James= and I am making an argument about the abstract idea of writing to maximize one's audience.
I am not suggesting that Everett was selling out by writing =James=, nor do I mean to give aid or comfort to those who do. Given that this was your main concern, I should have been more careful to make the distinction. And maybe with that, we don't have a disagreement. But just in case....
"Glyph is a success if people who connect to what he's doing get what he's up to. James is a success if people get what he's doing and connect to what he's up to."
The abstract point I was trying to make is that if an abstract writer wants to maximize her abstract audience, she will want to make sure her serve is something that most readers can return. She will also, as you note, want to make it about something that most readers would be interested in - it's not just the serve, it's also whether she's playing tennis or ... I dunno, polo - which choice, while it probably affects the size of the potential audience, probably doesn't affect the art so very much - as you note above. I'm not entirely sure how "what he's doing and what he's up to" maps to the subject matter and the delivery.... Although, I agree, the sports analogy is straining under the weight it is being asked to carry.)
The sports analogy may be too far, but we could consider this from the standpoint of a "game" where the player (the reader) comes to the experience with certain needs, attitudes, and knowledge of the game and the degree to which the the author satisfies those things is a determinant on the "success" of the book.
That success could aesthetic in some cases, but in others it could be sales, or audience size. The choice of what game you want to play immediately puts some kind of scope on a potential audience. Even deciding to write "literary fiction" immediately shrinks the potential audience because that's more like polo than tennis, to go back to the sports analogy.
I think ultimately, when thinking about art/media/stuff that's meant to engage some audience somewhere, unless the explicit goal for success is audience size, the fact that something garners a larger audience than usual or expected is maybe incidental to the original impulse that led to the object's creation.
Just to play devil's advocate *slightly* in regard to your last paragraph, there is almost no doubt in my mind that Everett knew publishing this book with Doubleday was likely to garner him a far larger audience than he had been getting with Greywolf. _James_ very well might still have won the National Book Award if he'd published it with Greywolf, but he has undoubtedly seen an enormous upsurge in his mainstream visibility as a result of being enmeshed within Doubleday's comparatively vast p.r. operation. This book had blockbuster written all over it when I first read the press release about Doubleday having acquired the rights to it and at some level Everett must have at least suspected that.
However, based on what I've learned about Everett through the years, I don't *think* such a suspicion would have done much to change his creative thinking in regard to the final product. I also find it hard to believe that his Doubleday editor (Lee Boudreaux) would have been any more heavy-handed than his longtime editor at Greywolf (Fiona McCrae) given Everett's lengthy track-record. Honestly, I have a hard time imagining him signing the contract to publish the book with Doubleday without pretty ironclad artistic control.
If one hasn't ready any Percival Everett novels, in what order would you recommend reading them? Starting with the best is obviously one strategy; but if I start there, I suspect I may be less inclined to read his other works (thinking it's all "downhill" from there).
Which brings up another question which might be essay worthy: is there a general strategy one should use with authors who have written lots of books, when trying to decide which of their works to read first?
It is definitely a tricky task to approach his giant and diverse body of work. Just realize that there’s so much there of so many different styles and subjects that liking one may not say a lot in terms of liking another. _The Water Cure_ and _American Desert_, for example, are radically different books, as are _Frenzy_ and _Walk Me to the Distance_.
There are some readily available overviews of his work that give some brief summaries of each of his books. Starting there and just gravitating where your interest takes you isn’t a bad start.
That is an interesting question. Some of it would depend on how deep the reader thinks they might want to go. Like if someone was really going to make a study, it would be interesting to start at the beginning and go forward over time. Or in the case of Everett, it might be interesting to choose what they might think would be the "best" among the different main modes he works in. Like I haven't read hardly any of the "westerns" but if someone is into westerns they might want to start there. If someone really liked satires I'd say start with Erasure and then try Not Sidney Poitier. Of his non-comic novels I think Telephone is the best while The Trees is the best overall mix of what he's up to. If someone really dug that, they'd still find lots of pleasure in his other books, even if The Trees is the peak.
_ A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid_ (and, yes, that is its full and accurate title…) is a damn masterpiece.
Don’t sleep on _American Desert_, _Watershed_, and _Frenzy_ either.
Great list! I was only just recommended to read Everett - and The Trees was a Christmas gift to get me started. Evidently, that was a fortuitous beginning! As soon as I complete Jonathan Franzen's Crossroads in the next couple of days, it's up - and I'm as excited now about it as I've been about a book in a long while.
Thank you for this post. I just finished James and thought it was good. And then found some really scathing reviews here on Substack, including one by a person who didn't even read half of the book. I am now going to look for more Percival Everett books (I did see American Fiction- not knowing it was based on his book). Thank you for this thoughtful introduction to Everett. [I also only started listening to R.E.M. with Green. And then circled back.]
I appreciate this post a lot as someone who has not read any Everett yet, but has James on infinite wait at the library. I’m wondering if I should start with a different book—The Trees, perhaps?
I think James is probably his most "accessible" book, but I know lots of for lack of a better word "regular" readers who really connected with The Trees. It's got some very strange elements, but the humor and rising tension seem to draw just about everyone in.
Percival Everett is my favorite author. I marvel at the way he writes. I've only read 7 of his books and would have trouble ranking them. But agree that The Trees is number one. It was the first I read and it has stuck with me and was the reason I read more of him. Each book is different and clever. Also enjoyed his acceptance speech at the National Book Awards.
I’m a huge Everett fan and appreciate this guide to what I should read next. I didn’t care as much for his Strom Thurmond book (though—as with all his work—there are brilliant and very funny passages) but he is my favorite author for being engaging and entertaining while also forcing deep reflection, insight, and powerful emotions.
As a relative newbie with Everett with lots more read, this is just what I need. Heading off to get Telephone.
I’m very glad you wrote this! I’m archiving it for reference. I liked Erasure and I can’t say I’m happy about the apparent backlash to this new book, which I have not read yet; I did read a book of Everett interviews which made it difficult for me to imagine that he would have written this new book as either a big joke or an attempt to pander to white suburban book clubs.
Sounds like I need to read Suder! Your rankings and mine mostly align (for what I've read)
I will admit that I may grade it up a bit because it is his first novel, but I found it totally charming.
Just finished James- the library had extra copies because a book club there is reading it. my first response was "this just makes me want to read huckleberry finn" (thanks for the reminder.) and there was something to the writing in James that made me wonder exactly what Percival Everett was trying to do... there is something a little uncanny/overly uncanny about the way he writes sometimes. i wonder if the response to James you touch on is a personal reaction to the uncanny bits.
I liked seeing your recommendation for Kathryn Davis! I haven’t read Duplex yet, but I’ve really enjoyed some of her other mind-bendy novels. I’ve always thought that she is another underrated writer.
I've only read American Fiction and The Trees so far, but I have them ranked the same as you. The Trees had me laughing out loud at the absurdity and I've recommended it to friends. Haven't had time to read James yet but it's on digital hold at the library so I will get to it soon.
I fall into the category of people who didn't really like James. I didn't find it as engaging as I expected, and it felt more like social commentary than satire. That said, The Trees is really excellent, notably because Everett's imagination is so biting and hilarious. With James it felt like he'd boxed himself into more of a corner and his imagination didn't have as much room to shine.
<3"I'm that fool"<3
"This is a book that everyone seemed to think had the potential for wide appeal. And they were right! Are we now saying this is a bad thing?
It’s strange to think that wide appeal somehow discredits a literary writer. "
Okay, I'll stand up and take the beating. I'm saying that it is a bad thing.
I mean, to be clear, not bad for Everett, not bad for the hoi polloi, but yes, wide appeal does mean something about the kinds of compromises that an author makes.
No one likes to hear this, because we all think we are, each of us, the best kind of reader we can imagine, but the fact is, people have different skills for engaging with literature. No one gets their back up when they are told that, say, there are people who play tennis better than they do. But for some reason, we are very reluctant to acknowledge that some people may be better readers than we are.
If we imagine a distribution of tennis skills, it's probably not a gaussian, but that will be a close enough model for this discussion, because the salient point is that at the top level of tennis, the number of competitors is getting smaller and smaller. There are only a handful of people in the world who can give Novak Djokovic a decent game. If I'm on the court returning serves, it's because Djokovic is not giving me his best game. If Djokovic is determined to play at a level that gives the most number of people a decent game, he's not going to be playing as well as he could be, he's going to be playing down to what he thinks we can handle.
If you think it's different for literature, I think the burden of proof is on you.
This analogy does not hold for me. It makes some assumptions that don't necessarily follow. One is that wide appeal necessarily means "compromises" which isn't necessarily true. What is being "compromised" in this case? I think the calculus for wide appeal was not that Everett was compromising, but that a novel jumping off from one of the most read and widely loved books of all time would be interesting an accessible to a lot of people, as compared to something like "Glyph" which is a satire of poststructuralist philosophy that most people have never read and even fewer understand. The only way we could say this is a compromise is if we think the merits of a book are rooted in how few people can grapple with it, which seems like a pretty limited notion when it comes to an art from that's meant to communicate with audiences.
Analogizing a tennis player to a novelist breaks down pretty quickly. A tennis player's aim is to defeat their opponent, to leave them without a response. A novelist's aim is the opposite. They aren't trying to defeat their opponent, they're trying to engage their audience. Engaging an audience isn't "playing down," it's the job itself. Now, the ways that's achieved, and the ranges of audiences are pretty infinite, but that's part of what makes it all so interesting.
Okay, let's look a little more closely, then. "wide appeal necessarily means 'compromises' which isn't necessarily true." I'll defend the tennis analogy next paragraph, but if Djokovic wants me to return the ball, he can't serve it to me at 130 mph. Similarly, as you point out, if Everett wants a wider audience for =Glyph=, he's got to take out all the linguistics and philosophy. Taking the linguistics and philosophy out of =Glyph= makes it a pretty pale (pardon the expression, given the turf) caper novel, the kind one might put at the bottom of a ranking instead of near the top. So it should be pretty obvious that what is being compromised in this case the number of readers who are going to like it in favor of realizing his idea. That complicated stuff that not everyone gets? That's the point of the novel, that's not the furniture in the room.
When Djokovic is playing in Wimbledon, he's playing to win, sure. But a lot of us play sports for the love of the game, not as a way to make a living (or to punish our opponents). And while it is nice to win, when one's livelihood is not at stake no one wants to play a tennis game that they are going to win in straight aces (yeah, okay, and unplayable returns). What makes the match fun is playing a game with someone who is just about the same level as you.
The same is also true for reading - reading requires that we engage with the text, and that the writer make choices about what they serve up to the reader. If we don't get what Everett is doing with =Glyph= or Joyce with =Ulysses=, we aren't going to enjoy the books as much. If your main concern is maximizing your audience, you are going to limit your means and ends to creating things that almost everyone can get instead of realizing full scope of your artistic vision. What would it even mean to write a more accessible =Ulysses=? Who thinks that would be a triumph?
In your analogy to tennis, you're making what I think is a false assumption about the author's intent in writing a book and then suggesting that this is, by definition a "limiting" of the author's potential. I'm going to assume, given his extensive track record, that Percival Everett tries to write the "best" book he can every time out. What constitutes "best" can be defined in different ways, but for these purposes, let's assume - again, given the apparent integrity of his work - that he's trying to capture his artistic vision for a specific project with the greatest possible integrity. You seem to suggest that the choice to write a novel that jumps off from Huck Finn as opposed to post-structuralist philosophy is somehow a "limit." But this simply isn't true. Glyph is a success if people who connect to what he's doing get what he's up to. James is a success if people get what he's doing and connect to what he's up to.
The fact is that perhaps the most read and discussed work of American Literature as a jumping off point for a novel has a larger audience than a novel riffing on philosophy is not surprising, and it also doesn't mean that the author is pulling back on the velocity of his serve (to use your analogy). You're assuming "maximizing audience" was the inciting motive without any evidence and then judging the output on that phantom.
It's probably worth noting that Everett has also frequently stated in interviews that he does not try to influence (or even to consider) his audience's potential reactions to his book while he's writing. He has even claimed on multiple occasions to be so disconnected from his books once he's done with them that he doesn't actually remember their plots or salient details.
That issue that John calls a work's "greatest possible integrity" seems for him to be a very personal value-judgment that neither can be nor needs to be transmitted to his audience. Many of the overt games he's played with confounding (or perhaps exposing is a better term) the expectations that readers bring with them to any of his books seem very much intended to remind the reader that they -- not he -- are the ones constructing their interpretations of what he has written.
About a third of the way into _Glyph_, for example, the narrator/protagonist Ralph breaks the "fourth wall" to explicitly ask the reader if they have assumed to this point that he is Black, something that the text itself has neither specified nor even hinted at in any particularly telling manner. Everett wants to make you conscious of what you've been thinking, not to absorb what he's been thinking. There are few authors I can think of who have more wholeheartedly embraced Barthes's "Death of the Author" mentality than Everett.
There is something about _James_ (and perhaps to a lesser extent, _The Trees_) that does feel somewhat different in this regard, though I'm not sure it's primarily or even considerably related to his "riffing" on _Huck Finn_. He has, after all, similarly riffed on _Medea_ (in _For Her Dark Skin_) and on various Sidney Poitier films (_I Am Not Sidney Poitier_), though neither of those has the same influence as Twain's monumental novel.
To me, I don't see what he's doing here as analogous to Djokovic under-handing his serve so that the person on the other side of the net has a chance of returning it. There's no "selling out" or "dumbing down" that I can see in _James_, which still presumes that its reader knows the larger context of Jim's/James's "conversations" with John Locke, Cunégonde from _Candide_, and other fairly esoteric (in the context of twenty-first-century US culture) topics. No, it's not _Glyph_, but that book is an outlier even for Everett.
It's pretty fascinating to hear Everett talk about how thoroughly he sets aside his books after he's done with them. It makes sense given how prolific and apparently quick he is in writing them. I identify with the notion that writing a book is an attempt to solve an internal problem, a problem you may not entirely grasp when you start, but which is fully revealed through the writing.
I don't have nearly Everett's skill or success, but it's how I've always thought of writing. I feel like I've written about this somewhere, maybe on the newsletter, but I think some writers work inside/out, while others work outside/in. Inside/out writers work from a feeling or notion or maybe some scrap of their own life and build a narrative from there.
Outside/in tends to stem from a kind of "what if" problem or a high concept that will drive the additional inquiry. Everett reads very outside/in to me. He often works from concepts and burrows his way towards an emotional core that satisfies the larger artistic impulse to say something (for lack of a better word) meaningful.
"It's probably worth noting that Everett has also frequently stated in interviews that he does not try to influence (or even to consider) his audience's potential reactions to his book while he's writing."
Given that he wrote =Telephone=, I think we need to be cautious about taking him at his word about that. Your own example, breaking the fourth wall in =Glyph=, demonstrates a deliberate awareness of his readers and how they are responding to his work. But otherwise, see my clarification above.
Although your skepticism about Everett's pronouncements on this score is well-taken, I would stress that *awareness* of their potential or even likely responses is not equivalent to attempting to accommodate those responses in specific ways, which is sort of how I took your analogy of Djokovic changing his game in response to recognizing that his opponent lacks his skill at tennis.
To wit, Ralph does not follow up his question to the audience about their presumptions in _Glyph_ with a corrective and _Telephone_ does not suggest that any of the three versions of the text is a more "correct" one that reflects Everett's actual intentions. To belabor the tennis analogy one more time, Everett does not blow a serve past his audience in order to show them his philosophical or aesthetic superiority, even in _Glyph_. Ralph, not Everett, is the one with the absurd I.Q. of over five hundred, after all.
Okay, my fault, I was insufficiently clear - you were making an argument about =James= and I am making an argument about the abstract idea of writing to maximize one's audience.
I am not suggesting that Everett was selling out by writing =James=, nor do I mean to give aid or comfort to those who do. Given that this was your main concern, I should have been more careful to make the distinction. And maybe with that, we don't have a disagreement. But just in case....
"Glyph is a success if people who connect to what he's doing get what he's up to. James is a success if people get what he's doing and connect to what he's up to."
The abstract point I was trying to make is that if an abstract writer wants to maximize her abstract audience, she will want to make sure her serve is something that most readers can return. She will also, as you note, want to make it about something that most readers would be interested in - it's not just the serve, it's also whether she's playing tennis or ... I dunno, polo - which choice, while it probably affects the size of the potential audience, probably doesn't affect the art so very much - as you note above. I'm not entirely sure how "what he's doing and what he's up to" maps to the subject matter and the delivery.... Although, I agree, the sports analogy is straining under the weight it is being asked to carry.)
The sports analogy may be too far, but we could consider this from the standpoint of a "game" where the player (the reader) comes to the experience with certain needs, attitudes, and knowledge of the game and the degree to which the the author satisfies those things is a determinant on the "success" of the book.
That success could aesthetic in some cases, but in others it could be sales, or audience size. The choice of what game you want to play immediately puts some kind of scope on a potential audience. Even deciding to write "literary fiction" immediately shrinks the potential audience because that's more like polo than tennis, to go back to the sports analogy.
I think ultimately, when thinking about art/media/stuff that's meant to engage some audience somewhere, unless the explicit goal for success is audience size, the fact that something garners a larger audience than usual or expected is maybe incidental to the original impulse that led to the object's creation.
Just to play devil's advocate *slightly* in regard to your last paragraph, there is almost no doubt in my mind that Everett knew publishing this book with Doubleday was likely to garner him a far larger audience than he had been getting with Greywolf. _James_ very well might still have won the National Book Award if he'd published it with Greywolf, but he has undoubtedly seen an enormous upsurge in his mainstream visibility as a result of being enmeshed within Doubleday's comparatively vast p.r. operation. This book had blockbuster written all over it when I first read the press release about Doubleday having acquired the rights to it and at some level Everett must have at least suspected that.
However, based on what I've learned about Everett through the years, I don't *think* such a suspicion would have done much to change his creative thinking in regard to the final product. I also find it hard to believe that his Doubleday editor (Lee Boudreaux) would have been any more heavy-handed than his longtime editor at Greywolf (Fiona McCrae) given Everett's lengthy track-record. Honestly, I have a hard time imagining him signing the contract to publish the book with Doubleday without pretty ironclad artistic control.
A different but related question.
If one hasn't ready any Percival Everett novels, in what order would you recommend reading them? Starting with the best is obviously one strategy; but if I start there, I suspect I may be less inclined to read his other works (thinking it's all "downhill" from there).
Which brings up another question which might be essay worthy: is there a general strategy one should use with authors who have written lots of books, when trying to decide which of their works to read first?
It is definitely a tricky task to approach his giant and diverse body of work. Just realize that there’s so much there of so many different styles and subjects that liking one may not say a lot in terms of liking another. _The Water Cure_ and _American Desert_, for example, are radically different books, as are _Frenzy_ and _Walk Me to the Distance_.
There are some readily available overviews of his work that give some brief summaries of each of his books. Starting there and just gravitating where your interest takes you isn’t a bad start.
That is an interesting question. Some of it would depend on how deep the reader thinks they might want to go. Like if someone was really going to make a study, it would be interesting to start at the beginning and go forward over time. Or in the case of Everett, it might be interesting to choose what they might think would be the "best" among the different main modes he works in. Like I haven't read hardly any of the "westerns" but if someone is into westerns they might want to start there. If someone really liked satires I'd say start with Erasure and then try Not Sidney Poitier. Of his non-comic novels I think Telephone is the best while The Trees is the best overall mix of what he's up to. If someone really dug that, they'd still find lots of pleasure in his other books, even if The Trees is the peak.
_ A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid_ (and, yes, that is its full and accurate title…) is a damn masterpiece.
Don’t sleep on _American Desert_, _Watershed_, and _Frenzy_ either.
Great list! I was only just recommended to read Everett - and The Trees was a Christmas gift to get me started. Evidently, that was a fortuitous beginning! As soon as I complete Jonathan Franzen's Crossroads in the next couple of days, it's up - and I'm as excited now about it as I've been about a book in a long while.
Thank you for this post. I just finished James and thought it was good. And then found some really scathing reviews here on Substack, including one by a person who didn't even read half of the book. I am now going to look for more Percival Everett books (I did see American Fiction- not knowing it was based on his book). Thank you for this thoughtful introduction to Everett. [I also only started listening to R.E.M. with Green. And then circled back.]
I appreciate this post a lot as someone who has not read any Everett yet, but has James on infinite wait at the library. I’m wondering if I should start with a different book—The Trees, perhaps?
I think James is probably his most "accessible" book, but I know lots of for lack of a better word "regular" readers who really connected with The Trees. It's got some very strange elements, but the humor and rising tension seem to draw just about everyone in.