James: a book review

Just finished reading “James” by Percival Everett. This novel is a re-imagining of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” through the eyes of Huck’s slave companion Jim. I need to make two disclaimers: (1) I’m not a big consumer of novels and (2) I never read Huckleberry Finn, although I’m familiar with the basic plot line.

The character of James is a self-educated slave who hides his education from the white folks by affecting the semi-literate argot that Twain styles as slave speech. He is acutely self-aware. When he learns he is to be sold and separated from his wife and children, he escapes. Soon, he is hunted both as escaped property and a suspect in Huck’s faked murder. There are episodes that are explicit nods to the Twain novel, but also some departures. Throughout, we’ve forced to see the character of James as fully human and not simply a foil to Huck and the other white characters.

I found the education of the auto-didact James, gained by reading books in the library of a wealthy character, to be implausible. The amount of violence was also a bit much for me, although it certainly underscored the horror of slavery as experience by slaves. But I keenly appreciated the device of tweaking the Twain genre to paint a far more realistic picture of Jim’s lived experience. The book has gotten great reviews in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. If novels are your cup of tea, this one may be for you.