Percival Everett’s James review: a powerful retelling of Huckleberry Finn

The Oscar-nominated film American Fiction is based on Percival Everett’s novel about literature, prejudice and bias. In James, Everett’s rifs on his earlier book, retelling The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Huck’s slave buddy Jim (pointedly renamed James) as they journey down the Mississippi after fleeing the house where Jim is enslaved. James is a slave who’s taught himself to read and write, who speaks as well as any white man and who in a series of twists entirely of Everett’s invention ends up the putative hero of a story that starts to resemble a Hollywood blockbuster. Everett demonstrates with electrifying vim the ways in which language and its usage have the power to enslave, and to liberate.