I have mixed feelings about James by Percival Everett.

In general, I am not a fan of fan fiction…in other words, taking an author’s work and adding to it. For instance, I love Geraldine Brooks’s writing (Year of Wonders, Horse, People of the Book), but I refuse to read March because it riffs off of Little Women. If Louisa May Alcott had wanted to write a novel about the father of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, she would have. After all, Alcott penned two sequels to Little Women: Little Men and Jo’s Boys.

That being said, one of the criticisms of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is that the book abandons the runaway Jim by the side of the river while Huck goes off to have adventures. I totally agree that Jim feels marginalized in the midsection of Twain’s novel both figuratively and literally, and the novel loses much of its heart in the sections without Jim.  So, for that reason, I can get over my usual rule about spring-boarding from another author’s creation and delve into James by Everett Percival.

I thought the story of James as Everett wrote it is a good one. In the novel, James displays all the kindness, strength, and intelligence that made readers fall in love with him in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And in Everett’s deft handling of James, his life experiences are authentic and raw. The pencil (at great cost) is in his hands.

But, now there’s a new problem. While Jim, now James, is made whole, Huck is diminished—no longer the neglected, abused, but steadfast boy we fell in love with in Twain’s novel. In James, Huck has become flat and uninteresting. Worse, his lovely voice and speech cadence have been stripped away.

The opening of The Adventures of Huck Finn is one I love to read over and over again. I adore Huck’s conversation with Miss Watson in which he concludes that heaven sounds boring (“all a body would have to do there was to go around all day long with a harp and sing”), so he decides not to aspire to it as well as his relief that his friend Tom Sawyer would not make the heaven draft (“not by a considerable sight” as Miss Watson sees it) because Huck “wanted him and me to be together.” Yes, Huck is funny, honest, and wise with a soupçon of naiveté. Later, of course, as Huck matures, he once again contemplates the grave implications of heaven and hell and decides to make the ultimate sacrifice for his beloved friend and mentor. 

Unfortunately, that generous, endearing Huck is nowhere to be seen in Everett’s James. In James, Huck is a whiney and practically monosyllabic foil.

In Everett’s novel, James expresses his agency with a true and fully wrought life experience. Yet in giving voice to James, Everett has robbed Huck of his.