An Evening With Percival Everett
The novelist talks about everything from how he came up with “James” to why book clubs are subversive
Everett was speaking about his book, selected as the Duke Common Experience reading for last summer, at the university’s 20th annual Weaver Memorial Lecture. Everett is an English professor at the University of Southern California.
The nearly hour-long conversation was not without raucous laughter.
Unique brand of code switching
Rutter said that while having lunch with Everett hours before, she was impressed by his intellect, broad-mindedness and range of interests that span the arts, philosophy, music, people, anthropology and politics.
“Were we at the same lunch?” Everett deadpanned.
Everett talked about the work and research that went into writing “James,” including the unique brand of code switching in the novel where enslaved people speak in standard English and swiitch to a slave dialect when they speak to their oppressors.
“The thing I know is that enslaved, imprisoned, oppressed people find a way to speak to each other that doesn’t invite entry to their enemies,” he said.
Rutter told Everett that she heard he had read Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” 15 times before he started writing his novel.
Percival Everett-isms
“I don’t go online. It’s a bad neighborhood. I still use the library.”
“I guess I’m a fast reader. I’ve never raced anyone.”
“I have four influences on my sense of irony and humor, and they are my father, Mark Twain, Groucho Marx and Bullwinkle the Moose.”
“I never think I’m being funny, and it hurts my feelings that people laugh like that.”
“Well, masochism is a terrible thing,” Everett quipped, before explaining that he is an admirer of Twain’s work, but did not want to feel “beholden to his text.” Everett added, “The sad part is that 10 times would have been enough. But I was able to inhabit that world in a way that I could forget things and get things wrong. And then I started. I’ve never looked back at it, and I will never read it again.”
Everett noted that he “spent some time on the Mississippi. I love rivers,” and visited Twain’s boyhood home of Hannibal, Mo.
“It’s not a trip I would encourage,” he said. “And it was really useless. And it’s just littered with Mark Twain memorabilia shops. And there were no slaves for you to talk to.”
‘Become more critical … of the world around us’
Everett described the rise of book banning as frightening. “You know, reading is the most subversive thing that we can do in a culture,” he said. “Being educated is subversive. The second most subversive thing we can do is be a part of a book club. I’m serious. It’s because it’s there that we open up to each other and discuss the art and learn more about it and more about ourselves and become more critical of the work and the world around us, and that’s what fascists don’t want.
“It’s a frightening thing to think that we can lose that, and we can lose funding for public libraries, which have been more than repositories for books,” he added. “These have been places where communities can come together and learn about each other.”