How strange a world, how strange an existence, that one’s equal must argue for one’s equality, that one’s equal must hold a station that allows airing of that argument, that one cannot make that argument for oneself, that premises of said argument must be vetted by those equals who do not agree.
page 52, James by Percival Everett
Table of Contents
Preamble
I first started hearing about James by Percival Everett sometime in the middle of last year when it was starting to become quite popular. The book became the Pulitzer Prize finalist and eventually ended up winning the 2025 Pulitzer prize for fiction which is when I put the book in my to-be-read list.
This was another library hold, which came in last week. The wait for it was unsurprisingly quite long due to the book’s popularity. Currently, the Toronto Public Library system has 439 holds for the book with 194 copies available.
Let’s get into it.
The Book
First things first – James is a retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a book I have not read and I do not plan on reading at the moment. James re-imagines the plot of Twain’s work from the point of view of Jim, the runaway slave. This means significant amounts of the book are spent exploring Jim’s own thoughts and feelings on what’s happening to and around him. It gives him an amount of agency that I presume the original story just did not have.
Descriptions of this book describe it as “harrowing and ferociously funny” and “brimming with [..] electrifying humor” which I found to be a really disconcerting way to describe this book. The book is quite harrowing yes, with graphic descriptions of the horrid conditions of chattel slavery and the miserable lives of slaves, complete with rampant racism and a copious dose of racial slurs. At no point however did I find any of it funny in any way. Humour is very subjective but I struggle to think of an aspect of this book that someone would consider funny.
Something I found interesting was how the book depicted the interactions of Jim with the members of the Virginia Minstrels, a group in which he is bought into as a tenor singer. Minstrel shows like this rarely had actual black performers in them and were usually performed by white people in blackface so James shows us how a black performer in a minstrel group creates a very weird situation for everyone involved and the group has to hide the fact that Jim is a black person and not a white person in blackface. by putting blackface makeup on him.
There are dream sequences in which Jim speaks to Enlightenment era philosophers Voltaire and John Locke. These felt rather odd to me. As far as I understand it, these are a way for Jim to express critiques of the hypocrisies of those two thinkers but it felt less like an expression of Jim’s thoughts and more like the author wanted to do a bit of philosophical commentary which I don’t think served much of a purpose in the overarching plot of the story.
This book is another case of a popular book that I came away from with the feeling of “I don’t get why this is so popular!”. The book is well written but not extraordinarily so, and I found the depiction of Jim as a character to be nuanced and well thought out. I just don’t get why this book has won so many awards and is so popular. I feel like I am missing something. Perhaps if I had read the Twain work this is based on it would have more of an impact on me but alas I did not.
Conclusions
James was a perfectly adequate read that I didn’t mind reading as a way to pass the time. Faint praise but I am glad that this didn’t turn out to be a popular book that I disliked or even hated. This book was in the end mildly disappointing due to the high expectations I had of something that had won the Pulitzer prize for fiction.
That said, considering this is a literary fiction novel, reading this means that I’ve made some more progress towards diversifying my fiction reading and that is always a good thing.
That’s all I’ve got for this review, see y’all in the next one!
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