James – Percival Everett

I love a re-telling of a classic, so it felt inevitable that I would pick up James. Not only does it reinvent Mark Twain’s The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, it does it so well that it won just about every American literary award known to man, including the 2024 Kirkus Prize, the National Book Award For Fiction, and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Oh, and it appeared on 33 different “best books of the year” lists. The hype was hyping.

In case your memory of Huck Finn is a little fuzzy, here’s the potted-est summary I can manage: a young boy in mid-19th century America, tired of the abuse laid out by his drunk father, escapes and runs away by faking his own death. He makes his way down the Mississippi River on a raft, accompanied by Jim – a large but gentle slave who ran away himself after being accused of murdering Huck. It’s a perilous journey for both of them, but eventually they are both able to return home safe and sound.

In Everett’s version, he reclaims “Jim”‘s story, and so he becomes the titular James. It’s a loose adaptation, in the sense that many of the scenes Everett draws from Twain’s original work are re-contextualised or re-shaped to fit a new narrative. Also, naturally, with Jim/James as the protagonist, we learn a lot more about this character, his past and his motivations.

So, per Everett, we begin with “Jim” choosing to run away from his owner Miss Watson after he learns she plans to sell him, which would separate him from his wife and children. Huck faking his own death around the same time is entirely coincidental in this version, but no less unfortunate for Jim; he ends up wanted as both a runaway and an accused kidnapper/murderer. That’s how he and Huck become travelling companions on the Mississippi. As they go through scrape after scrape, Jim remains determined to find a way to emancipate his wife and daughter so they can be reunited. He is equally motivated by a desire to tell his own story, and reclaim his own identity as James the man, rather than Jim the slave.

Honestly, a plot-point-by-plot-point account of how James diverges from The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn is less interesting than a discussion of how the character of James both reflects and reinvents Twain’s Jim. The simple, slow, superstitious man that Twain wrote is revealed to be an act, according to Everett – an act of self-preservation to keep the white people around him happy. Below the surface, Everett’s James is calculating, skeptical, and smart, even able to read and write. (His pencil, won through a stunningly brave act of sacrifice by another slave, is my favourite motif of the novel.) Rather than being the butt of Huck’s jokes, Everett reveals James to see them coming a mile off and submit to them rather than risk the danger of angering the white people by outsmarting them.

James is surprisingly funny, as a result – not split-your-sides-laughing funny, but chuckle-appreciatively funny. The protagonist in this version is astute, insightful, keenly aware of the injustice of slavery and the ridiculousness of the “rules” he has to follow – at one point, he involuntarily joins a minstrel troupe and has to be covered in boot polish prior to the show to be allowed into “whites only” performance halls (i.e., he is a black man, pretending to be a white man who is pretending to be a black man).

Naturally, there are plenty of readers who wonder whether there is still anything left to mine from a work as old and widely known as Huck Finn – and if there is, whether it could possibly have any resonance in the current climate. Everett proves it in James, with the way he interrogates the construct of racial identity, the labour of code-switching, and the value of literacy. Even if you don’t remember a thing from The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn (or never read it to begin with), you could thoroughly enjoy James and find it as moving and meaningful as I did.

Read James on audiobook via Libro.fm here. (affiliate link)

My favourite Amazon reviews of James:

• “I’m giving this one star because I read that Amazon isn’t accepting one star reviews of this particular book, and can’t resist the temptation to find out for myself. Really, it’s not that bad. It just isn’t terribly good.” – Firefly
• “Its focus on racism is obnoxious. The author could’ve written an original fiction story about a runaway slave, but instead he ripped of Twain’s classic literature for publicity.” – Scram
• “How pompous of this author to take a classic and ruin the characters!” – Tara Bessette
• “Improbability piled upon improbability. There was casual violence at every turn–sexual assault, physical torture, murder (Jim gets to kill a couple of people himself–yay Jim), etc. Multiple riverboats blow up, Not sure why the author needed to do that more than once. Speaking of riverboats–what was the deal with the uncaptained riverboat and the slave shoveling coal 24/7/365? Was that some sort of sly nod to Sisyphus? Whatever it was, it was silly.” – William Henley
• “The four and five star reviews are about as worthy of consideration as are the Grammy, the Golden Globes, and other such once-meaningful awards.” – Marcel Widzisz