“For a while, even racists realized that it was not a good thing to be seen as one,” Percival Everett tells me. “But racism has its swagger back. White supremacists are enjoying their day. I don’t know how anyone can miss Elon Musk’s hail-to-the-Führer salute that he does all the time.”
Everett is not a naturally gloomy commentator but, on racial matters, with Donald Trump in power, he says it’s a case of “one step forward, two steps back”. He has spent decades chewing on America’s racial problem and the legacy of slavery. He has then turned that into novels. Very funny ones. The 68-year-old, who has more than 30 books under his belt, writes with a raised eyebrow, rather than the raised voice of the megaphoning activist.
Not many writers would have the chutzpah to reimagine America’s dark tradition of lynching and turn it into a comic novel where rednecks get strung up by black zombies (The Trees). Or concoct an extended parody of ghetto literature — a novel in a novel — where a Classics-loving professor writes a book entitled My Pafology. That appeared in his 2001 novel Erasure, which was turned into the 2023 Oscar-winning film, American Fiction, a biting satire of the publishing world. His latest novel, James, has a brilliantly farcical scene in which an African-American character puts on “black face” to disguise himself in a black and white minstrel group. Yes, Everett is happy to splash around in dangerous waters.
This month, he won the Pulitzer prize for Fiction for James, his subversive retelling of Mark Twain’s American classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the viewpoint of Jim, the runaway slave.
The Pulitzer judges got it right. It was my favorite novel of 2024 and has been Everett’s bestselling book — No 1 in the US charts. Why? “I suppose it speaks to the resistance against the eradication of history that some forces are about these days,” he tells me over a wavering Zoom video link from his home in Los Angeles. “But I really don’t know. If I did, then I could sell this bit of information to publishers and they could do it all the time.”
Those forces are Donald Trump (“it’s amazing how far a completely incompetent idiot can rise”) and his MAGA movement. The Trump White House is so weird that as a subject it defeats even satirists — “it’s just so absurd that it doesn’t leave much room for a novelist to work”, he says. “How can you come up with anything crazier than this?”
He adds: “The seriousness of it is frightening. If you look at the parallels of the US and 1933 Germany, they’re frightening. But you’re talking about a population here that not only is increasingly deprived of an education, but critical thinking about history is discouraged.”
Everett is a distinguished professor (distinguished? “thanks for pointing out my age”) of English at the University of Southern California so he feels Trump’s attacks on universities, such as the White House’s freezing of funding for Harvard University, particularly keenly.
“I guess I’ve been saying this my whole life. Popular culture needs an intellectual hero instead of superheroes. It used to be that poor people, poor white people especially, wanted their kids to go to college. Now, university is the enemy. It’s where the elite are and they hate them.
“And some of that is the fault of liberals,” he adds. “They’ve allowed themselves to be dismissive of the kinds of people who supported Trump instead of trying to communicate with them. But, in our defense, how do you talk to irrational, uneducated people? It’s very difficult. And they’re being persuaded by people who have no conscience, who do not care about them, except in getting them on board with something that appeals to their selfishness.”
Has he read Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance’s memoir of growing up dirt poor in Appalachia? “No. And I have no plans to, no matter what you say to me. I’ve read it by watching this man’s behavior. He’s a liar. There’s no moral center … He was able to exploit his past and make some money. And now he’s able to abandon it for a little bit of power.”
I’m making him sound like a scold. He’s not. He laughs a lot and describes himself as “pathologically ironic”. He is also a fan of Mel Brooks’s 1974 comedy western, Blazing Saddles — the film features a black sheriff, a Yiddish-speaking Native American chief, fart jokes and generous use of the n-word. ”Blazing Saddles is so much smarter about race than anything we have now. And part of the reason is because it felt free to make fun of problems. I wonder if [Brooks] could even make it now.
“Humor and irony have gotten people through difficult times throughout human history,” he says. “There were jokes in the death camp because people recognized the absurdity of their situation. And this is how we often deal with [grim] things. God, if we were just earnest all the time!” he says, with an exasperated laugh.
So, even a subject such as slavery can be approached in a playful manner. He has great affection for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a book he has read 15 times or more. Many schools won’t teach it or keep it in their libraries because of its racially offensive language. Should it be taught in schools? “Yes, it should be. It’s the first time you have a character who represents an adolescent American wandering through his own landscape, dealing with that issue that becomes the most defining of American experiences — race. So it’s important.” Remember that 13-year-old Huck has to make sense of the fact that his friend Jim is also someone’s property.
“In many ways, [Twain’s novel] should be regarded as offensive, but why should that stop us from reading it? Good Lord, there are any number of women in novels who are portrayed in less than fair ways and we still read those. And the word nigger, it’s a six-letter word. Why should you be afraid of a word?” he says. “There’s no inherent power in it. [In Huck Finn] it’s appropriate, contextually and historically. If I’m writing a novel and trying to be true to life and I have a racist character say ‘n-word’, well, who’s going to believe the rest of the novel?”
Publishing can tie itself in knots over such things. Erasure brilliantly satirizes the expectations of the kind of books black people should write about — either tales from the urban ghetto or the antebellum plantation. Everett has never allowed himself to be typecast, which might explain why he has only got the acclaim he deserves in his sixties. His books have ranged widely — Glyph, a 1999 novel narrated by a baby genius fluent in modern philosophy; Frenzy (1997), a retelling of the Greek myth of Dionysus; God’s Country (1994), a parody of the western; I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), the story of a man called Not Sidney Poitier who is adopted by the media mogul Ted Turner. Batty.
“There is a scene in Erasure which is reported from my life,” Everett says. “An editor at a party said ‘Can I ask you a question: what does Dionysus have to do with black people?’
“I think that’s gotten better. And I think there’s a wider range of work but those expectations persist in insistent and covert ways. I had a friend who’s a film director, she made a drama and it did well. The calls she got were if she wanted to make biopics of George Floyd. That’s nothing to do with her interests or work.”
He points out publishers had got hold of “a notion that there was such a thing as an African-American experience. Instead of thinking that that experience might be as wide and varied as white America’s. They never talked about the white American experience. The only time you might talk about the white American experience is if somebody wandered into a tough neighborhood.”
American Fiction won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. In a very cool “no drama Obama” way he was underwhelmed by the whole Oscar experience. He went along to the awards ceremony in a spirit of sociological inquiry. “Sometimes these things are kind of anthropological.” He went to the after-party with his wife, Danzy Senna, also a writer. “We lasted for about ten minutes. And then we said, ‘Let’s go home.’”
He’s sort of famous now, isn’t he? “I haven’t gotten to semi-famous yet. I’m mildly in the news. That’s plenty for me. I’d settle for not being in the news at all and have my old cult following that I always heard about: the 15 people who buy copies of my novel.”
Even winning the Pulitzer doesn’t particularly turn his head. “It’s great to win an award. It would be great to win one every week, but comparisons of works of art are invidious. If the judges had met on a Thursday instead of a Friday then someone else would have got the award. That’s fine.”
Everett has twice been nominated for the Booker prize — for James and The Trees — but he can’t get excited about the posh bingo of the prize game. In fact, the award he seems most pleased to have won is the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction (he got it for The Trees), possibly because a Gloucester Old Spot pig is named after the winning novel. “They had the farmer bring the pig to my house. They set up a pen in the front yard and the pig sat on the porch with me. It was a very personable pig.”
Prizes are good if they encourage people to read fiction — empathy-expanding, imagination-stretching, mind-altering fiction. “The most subversive thing is reading, which is why I’m passionate about books. Reading is education. The second most subversive thing is belonging to a book club. Because then you’re not only reading, but you’re talking about the meaning that you’re finding.” Imagine, he says, little old ladies quilting, chatting and reading to each other at their book club. “It’s swell. They throw their quilting needles down and take to the streets.
“The nicest thing someone said to me about James was when a woman came up and said that her father is a Republican and the book changed him. Her saying that to me, that was better than knowing how many thousands of books have been sold. That’s why we make art, hoping that we affect somebody.”
That’s a bit earnest, I say, to the pathological ironist. “Don’t tell anybody I said it. It’ll ruin my reputation.”
Robbie Millen is the literary editor at The Times of London
