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Alison Stewart: This is All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Percival Everett's novel James is a mainstay of 2024 best of lists, and that was before it won the National Book Award for Fiction this year. In it, Everett takes on one of the most well known works in the American literary canon, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain. In Everett's version, the story is told by Jim, an enslaved man who decides to run away rather than be sold from his family. Jim has taught himself how to read and also how to protect himself.

You remember that dialect that Jim uses in Twain's book? In Everett's writing, it's kind of code switching that Jim does to pacify the white people around him. Jim's dismayed to find that at the same time that he's run away, Huck Finn faked his own murder and split as well, leaving Jim as a suspect for the crime. Banding together, they journey along the Mississippi River. Everett's telling is engaging and funny, but it never lets you forget about the danger Jim is in. It's more violent than Twain's story and more honest about the threats faced by every Black man, enslaved or free in America.

When our guest host, Kousha Navidar, was filling in for me earlier this year, he spoke with Percival Everett on the book's publication day and they also spoke about the Oscar-winning film, American Fiction, which was adapted from Everett's book, Erasure. Kousha started the conversation, asking Percival about the first time he read the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Percival Everett: Well, I was a fairly young child. I read an abridged version first, and I can't remember exactly how it was abridged, but it was short. Then later in high school, and I don't know if it was for school or not, I did read an abridged version.

Kousha Navidar: What was your first impression of that book? Do you remember?

Percival Everett: I remember not being terribly impressed as the abridged version was merely an adventure story. I had been impressed by other works of Twain, Life on the Mississippi and Roughing It, which I found funny enough that I can say that Twain's humor influenced mine.

Kousha Navidar: [laughs] Go more into that. What did you borrow from his humor?

Percival Everett: The ironic observations, I always found very human, but also engaged and, at the same time, detached.

Kousha Navidar: Huck Finn, not totally impressed, you're saying on your first read. When did you get the idea at first to take on your own version of the story?

Percival Everett: Oh, that wasn't until three years ago perhaps when I thought to myself, "Has anyone told this story from the point of view of Jim?" I searched around and it turns out no one had. Then I thought, "Well, I hadn't thought of it either," and so I embarked on it.

Kousha Navidar: When you embarked on it, how did you navigate the idea of sticking to the original story versus deviating? Where did you decide you might want to stick to the plot and where did you decide, "No, this is the time that I should deviate"?

Percival Everett: Well, I had to accept, as all fiction writers, that this world exists. I read the novel some 15 times in a row. I would finish it and just start again. I did that to blur it, to own it, and to forget it. When I started working, I did not look back at Huck Finn. It was internalized, but yet not formed in any way. Much of the material of the novel remains, but it's not a retelling. It's just the same world.

Kousha Navidar: Did you say you reread it 15 times?

Percival Everett: Yes.

Kousha Navidar: Can you walk us through that process? 15 times, looking at this source text, what was that evolution like for you? What was something you took away the seventh, eighth, ninth time? How did that look?

Percival Everett: Well, you start feeling crazy after a while. It's like repeating a word over and over again until it sounds like nonsense, and that's what I was attempting to achieve.

Kousha Navidar: Tell me, attempting to achieve, make it sound like nonsense, why is that?

Percival Everett: I didn't want to merely regurgitate a story. I wanted to tell it as if it had happened. The text became meaningless and the only thing that exists was the world.

Kousha Navidar: It reminds me of the way a musician might approach variations on a theme. Tell me how you think about that. You are embodying the text enough where you decide, "I live in this world, now I'm going to tell a new version." Is that a fair comparison?

Percival Everett: I think it is. Immediately, and even when I was working on it, and often, when I work, I think of John Coltrane's rendition of My Favorite Things, which is recognizable as My Favorite Things in the beginning, but then it becomes Coltrane's. It actually does a great deal of violence to the song and can be uncomfortable for a lot of people.

Kousha Navidar: You play jazz guitar, right?

Percival Everett: I used to play jazz guitar. I'm not terribly good anymore.

Kousha Navidar: Still in your bones a little bit. You're talking about Coltrane, you still--

Percival Everett: I know how one plays jazz. We can put it that way.

Kousha Navidar: As one jazz musician to another, I got to ask, how does music influence your writing approach?

Percival Everett: Well, I think in timing. I can't articulate it, but I think that when I go to fiction, there's a syncopation that one might find in jazz. I never start on the one. Ironically, I can't listen to serious music while I'm writing.

Kousha Navidar: Brain space gets too distracted?

Percival Everett: I listen to it. Yes.

Kousha Navidar: Absolutely. Let's talk about the character of Jim a little bit. How would you describe the Jim created by Mark Twain in the original novel and how does your version differ?

Percival Everett: Well, Twain's novel is about Huck, and so Jim is however important a character. It's not even a character that Twain was equipped to inhabit fully. His Jim is fairly superficial. There's no depth to his story. He's a representation of an enslaved man. My novel is about Jim. I suppose a complaint about it might be that Huck isn't fully developed. I hope that he is. My Jim is moving through a space where the most important thing to him is his family and a psychic survival more than a physical survival.

Kousha Navidar: Tell me more about the psychic survival element. I think what that reminds me of are these dream sequences where he's talking to political philosophers like Montesquieu, and Voltaire, and Locke. Is that what you're referring to there?

Percival Everett: Well, that informs his sense of self, certainly. It's the intellectual self that he's denied by the culture that he lives in. He can't articulate his thoughts to anyone in the world because it's a danger to him.

Kousha Navidar: Part of that character choice that I think readers will immediately grasp is through dialect. Part of what made Mark Twain famous was his use of dialect in his writing. You really play around with that in this novel because Jim is constantly code-switching. In front of white people, he talks with a certain dialect, but around his family and friends, he speaks differently. At one point, talking in his sleep, Jim uses the word hierarchy, and then Huck has to ask him what it means. How did you want to play around with language and code-switching there?

Percival Everett: One of the things that I think oppressed peoples do is create languages that allow them to communicate with each other that does not allow entry of their oppressors. They can speak privately. That's essentially what I'm working with here. They have to speak a certain way to navigate the world of white people and their owners, but they also have to be able to speak to each other in a way that doesn't betray what they're actually talking about.

Kousha Navidar: It's not just that James wants to read, but he also feels compelled to write, too. He even has another enslaved person steal a pencil for him, which leads to the man being whipped horribly. Why is James so drawn to writing? What is it that he wants to capture on the page?

Percival Everett: A language. Owning languages is perhaps more crucial to freedom than anything else.

Kousha Navidar: Have you ever felt similarly to that yourself? Are you using writing as an act of liberation, or that you almost can't write as fast as your own brain wants you to?

Percival Everett: I don't know if I've had the experience that Jim is actually having, but it's certainly the case that, for me, language is my way of being in the world. For other artists, it would be a paint or music. It's how I understand the world. It is, in that way, my place and my freedom are established by my ability to use it. He's also responding to the history of slave narratives that are related or told by someone for an individual. Jim is really intent on writing his own story and not relying on someone to translate it for him.

Kousha Navidar: You brought a reading of that exact topic, a part where Jim is writing?

Percival Everett: As it turns out, yes. You steered me right toward it.

Kousha Navidar: It's two to tango.

Percival Everett: My mother's mother was from someplace on the continent of Africa, I've been told, or perhaps simply assumed. I cannot claim to any knowledge of that world or those people, whether my people were kings or beggars. I admire those who, at five years of age, like Venture Smith, can remember the clans of their ancestors, their names and the movements of their families, their wrinkles, trenches, and chasms of the slave trade.

I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written. With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here.

Kousha Navidar: When you say, "The act of writing is an act of empowerment." In your own writing, you've, in past interviews, talked about how you don't know exactly what you're doing and how you are putting things on the page. It sounds a lot like improvising. There's this whole idea for yourself as well. In previous interviews, you talked about work amnesia, where you forget about the novel as soon as you've written it. Juxtaposing those two things is really interesting. For yourself, is that work amnesia by choice, is it just how you, like you said, live in the world with your writing?

Percival Everett: It feels like it's not by choice, but I would accept that if someone accused me of choosing to do it, I wouldn't fight that. I think about what I'm making, about the work in front of me, and to pause and live in past work is not conducive to new work. I call it the mother bear school of art. When I turn it loose, it's on its own. If you can eat and survive, that's great, but it can't come back to the den.

Kousha Navidar: Mother bear school of thought, that is wonderful. Also, slightly violent, I got to say, it's primal.

Percival Everett: It's a mean world.

Kousha Navidar: Good segue there because the world that we're living in with Huck Finn is also mean. Not to put too much of a point on it, but in the scenes where Huck and Jim get separated, you really have the freedom to take things beyond the scope of the original novel. We really see mother bear come out in full force. What was something you knew you wanted to achieve in those moments where Jim and Huck were separated and you really did get to stray from the source material?

Percival Everett: Slavery. There's an opening scene in a novel called Band of Angels, by Robert Penn Warren, and later a film with Sidney Poitier and Clark Gable. In the opening scene, you get to see a good slave owner, and that's always been amusing to me that slavery can be depicted as somehow a good time. This could be gentle slavery, and in my novel, that's not happening.

Kousha Navidar: Another element of the novel that really sticks out is naming. The name of the novel is James, which is an elevated version of Jim. How much of a role do names have in determining who we are, you think?

Percival Everett: First, I'll back up and say that it's not so much that James is an elevated version of Jim, that Jim is a diminished version of James. There's a distinction to be made there.

Kousha Navidar: Thank you for that.

Percival Everett: Naming is important, in that you talk about power. We name our children, we name places if we get there first. Names can have a cultural input. If my name was Conway Twitty, I would be a country singer. I would have no choice. Naming is crucial in our understanding of the world and our participation in it, but also, for me as a novelist, name is just a little bit fun.

Kousha Navidar: Absolutely. Your own name has so much meaning, too. Percival means piercing the vale or the valley. Has that been important in your name? Do you carry anything from the meaning of your own name into your life?

Percival Everett: No, I don't, [laughs] except for the fact that Percival is the only knight of the round table knight even have to actually see the Holy Grail, so I suppose that's something.

Kousha Navidar: Erasure was adapted last year into the film American Fiction, screenwriter and director Cord Jefferson was the person who took home the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. What did you think of that adaptation?

Percival Everett: I enjoyed it very much. I never expected to see my novel on screen. I expected to see what I saw, which is a translation of it. I think he made a very nice piece of work. It's different and necessarily different, and I think enjoyably different.

Kousha Navidar: Were you able to join any of the Oscar night celebrations?

Percival Everett: My wife and I did attend the Oscars, and that's something I need to do again. It was fun.

Kousha Navidar: Now that you're speaking soon about James to audiences, have there been any reactions that have surprised you or delighted you as you talk to people now that this book is out in the world?

Percival Everett: Well, I don't read reviews, but I've been told by my publisher that they're good. I get reports. It's great. I think that the book is getting so much attention, is wonderful. If I can get a few more readers, that's terrific.

Alison Stewart: That was author Percival Everett speaking with our guest host, Kousha Navidar, about his novel, James. It won this year's National Book Award for Fiction.