Percival Everett by Virgil Russell
Percival Everett is a black writer who teaches at USC. He does not like to be seen as a black writer because it is limiting, and reflects more on the person who sees him as a black writer than it does on him. I applied for Bread Loaf this year, hoping to attend his workshop, but life got in the way and Bread Loaf will go on without me. I wanted to learn something about identity and freeing myself of expectations of others based on my name, ethnicity, gender and experience.
I managed to learn all of that from reading his book with a seemingly circular title. Everett’s book is inspired by Finnegans Wake and the collective unconscious of the American, touching on slavery and lynchings, rebellion and independence. The book begins with a visit by a son to an aging father in a retirement community.The father suggests that the son write a book that he, the father, has already started writing in the voice of the son, describing in the first chapter, the drive to the center, the conversation with the father in which it is suggested that the visit might be the last. After that, it is no longer clear who the narrator is, and it does not matter. We live in ideas and memories, of the wife who left the old man to live in Canada, of childhood and fatherhood and war and history, interwoven with the present.
A demented widow of a mathematician, a mathematician in her own right, befriends the narrator. They belong to a group which dines together, true love is promised, and more importantly, the friendship is couched in respect. A friend Billy, also Virgil Russell, who dines with them, has stolen and hidden what could be lethal medication. During a search for the medicines by the guards, a framed photograph of Billy’s grown daughter falls to the ground, the glass shattering, and Billy dies soon after, presumably of a broken heart. In a coup reminiscent of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the other residents steal a car and flee.
The narrator has read Joyce and Jung, and is quietly, darkly black, a fact never revealed directly. It should not be relevant, but it is, to me, because I want to embrace the otherness and the power of its perspective.
I have to read this book again, slowly. What a treat.
Percival Everett is a black writer who teaches at USC. He does not like to be seen as a black writer because it is limiting, and reflects more on the person who sees him as a black writer than it does on him. I applied for Bread Loaf this year, hoping to attend his workshop, but life got in the way and Bread Loaf will go on without me. I wanted to learn something about identity and freeing myself of expectations of others based on my name, ethnicity, gender and experience.
I managed to learn all of that from reading his book with a seemingly circular title. Everett’s book is inspired by Finnegans Wake and the collective unconscious of the American, touching on slavery and lynchings, rebellion and independence. The book begins with a visit by a son to an aging father in a retirement community.The father suggests that the son write a book that he, the father, has already started writing in the voice of the son, describing in the first chapter, the drive to the center, the conversation with the father in which it is suggested that the visit might be the last. After that, it is no longer clear who the narrator is, and it does not matter. We live in ideas and memories, of the wife who left the old man to live in Canada, of childhood and fatherhood and war and history, interwoven with the present.
A demented widow of a mathematician, a mathematician in her own right, befriends the narrator. They belong to a group which dines together, true love is promised, and more importantly, the friendship is couched in respect. A friend Billy, also Virgil Russell, who dines with them, has stolen and hidden what could be lethal medication. During a search for the medicines by the guards, a framed photograph of Billy’s grown daughter falls to the ground, the glass shattering, and Billy dies soon after, presumably of a broken heart. In a coup reminiscent of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the other residents steal a car and flee.
The narrator has read Joyce and Jung, and is quietly, darkly black, a fact never revealed directly. It should not be relevant, but it is, to me, because I want to embrace the otherness and the power of its perspective.
I have to read this book again, slowly. What a treat.
