Emerging Writers Network

Excellent News: More Percival Everett on the way!

The only bad news is that the title pictures, Swimming Swimmers Swimming, a poetry collection from Red Hen Press, isn't slotted until June 1, 2011, and the other book I know of, fiction coming from Graywolf, is a fall 2011 title.

Novella Month - EWN Classic Review - Grand Canyon, Inc. by Percival Everett

In what appears to have been an error during the big Percival Everett coverage last year, I never posted my old review of his novella, Grand Canyon, Inc.

Well, now that's it's novella month, we'll rectify that, though I must say upon re-reading the below, I'm not sure it's anything that would convince me as a reader to rush out and find a copy.  So, instead, I'll simply state here, you should rush out and find a copy - this is satire at its finest by a master of the written word.

This review was originally emailed to EWN’ers on April 11, 2003

 

Grand Canyon, Inc. by Percival Everett

126 pages by Versus Press in 2001

 

Grand Canyon, Inc. has Everett returning to writing in an over the top satirical mode.  His protagonist, Rhino Tanner, is a self-made man who has made his fortune killing large game animals and getting involved in the marketing of such.  He is also a buffoon, somewhat comparable to Everett's earlier protagonist of God's Country, Curt Marder.

 

Rhino's goal, from the age of early boyhood on, was to 'acquire the canyon,' that is the Grand Canyon that he's speaking of.  The story is told from the point of view of his sidekick, Simpson "BB" Trane.  Simpson earned his nickname by allowing Rhino to shoot a bb into his forehead - one that would stay there forever, slowly moving deeper into his forehead.

 

Within this short work, Everett expertly skewers the NRA, the government, machoism, consumerism, and many other groups or agencies.  Everett, with his abilities to use words as accurately as possible, is one of the few authors around that could take on as many timeworn American myths and ideas in a novella, and not within an epic novel.  The skewering that occurs within these pages will have you laughing frequently.

 

The plot which moves things forward is Rhino's wish to own the Grand Canyon.  He eventually is able to purchase it from the government with the promise to upkeep it.  He than begins to plan an amusement park, which upsets natives to the area, as well as his son, who was raised by pure idealistic women. These people all get together to plan to stop Rhino, to no avail, but another force, that of Mother Nature, seems to be on their side.

 

Novellas, sold by themselves, and not within a story collection, are among the priciest books around, word for word.  They need to be extremely well written to convince the reader that they have not overspent when purchasing one.  Everett comes through swimmingly on this.

 

4 stars

Source of Lit - Percival Everett - The Poetry Collections

Poetry collections?  A bit of a surprise when 2005 rolled around and I heard that Percival Everett had a poetry collection coming out in early 2003.  A response only 2 1/2 years earlier in an interview will explain that - you'll see below.  I'd really never written out full reviews for either of these, only mini-reviews.  I had enough information from that for re: f (gesture) but needed to re-read the newer collection last night.  I know for sure that the cover to Abstraktion is a Percival Everett painting.  Both of these titles were edited by Chris Abani.

re: f (gesture)

2006 by Red Hen Press, 72 pages

 

Abstraktion Und Einfühlung

2008 by Black Coat c/o Akashic Books, 63 pages

 

“I can't write a poem to save my life.  I wrote the anatomical poems for Glyph, because the character wrote them.  They're political poems.”  So said Percival Everett in an EWN interview back in 2003.  I don’t want to call the man a liar, but there are now two full-fledged collections of his poetry, put out by two pretty well-respected poetry publishing houses.

 

The poems are what might expect, full of philosophical expressions, the occasional formula, wordplay and whatnot though always seeming to just avoid looking gimmicky.  There are things that I’m sure I’m not grasping, either on a philosophical or poetic level.  For instance, there’s a nature of three going on.  In re: f (gesture), the collection is broken into three sections.  The first, “Zulus,” goes through each letter of the alphabet, each receiving a stanza or so of attention, again frequently of a philosophical nature.  Names such as Kant, Robespierre as well as names from Greek mythology such as Leda and Ganymede pop up regularly.  Another section concentrates more on the body, and the poems are, well, a little warmer, a few even sliding towards eroticism in nature.

 

Looking up the phrase Abstraktion Und Einfühlung to see if I could find out what it means, I discovered it’s the title of a book written by a German art historian back in the early 1900’s.  His name was Wilhelm Worringer.  I believe there’s some importance in the fact that he was an art historian as many of the names that pop up in this collection seem to be those that spent their time in the visual art world:  Picasso, Manet, Warhol, Van Gogh and many others.

 

There is also the continuation of focus on trios.  Each of the seventeen poems is broken up into three, numbered, sections.  I’m not fully sure what is going on in the first two sections, but Percival Everett seems to be focusing on language, and its limitations, in the third sections.  Each of these has what I believe would be considered a Joycean (with apologies to anybody that was doing it before him that I’m unaware of) playing of spelling.  For example in the first poem, “Picasso 1916,” the third section reads as follows:

 

hairvery

maynining

ewolves

a forum

 

Which is basically a phonetic repetition of the sixth line of the second section:

 

that every meaning evolves a form,

 

While the two books were enjoyable, I’ll openly admit that I’d prefer Everett write novels or short stories.  There are times that he confuses the hell out of me when writing fiction, but something usually follows what confused me in a manner that helps me figure out what he was doing.  In poetry, there’s just not enough time for him to include that something.  I still believe, though, that he was way off on that interview response.

 

3.5 stars apiece

Source of Lit - Percival Everett - The One That Got Away

Babysitting.  That is what led to Percival Everett's decision to write a young children's book.  At least that's what he said back in the 2003 interview with the EWN.  That's about when this review was originally written and distributed to the EWN too.

The One That Got Away

1992 by Clarion Books, 32 pages

 

The cover of this children's book points us toward what is inside as the One in the title is highlighted by being a different color than the rest of the words in the title.  The One that got away, is literally that, a number one.

 

Percival Everett, fond of wordplay and the need to be specific in one's use of language in his adult novels, teaches children this lesson early on with this book and Dirk Zimmer's illustrations have enough going on in the background to keep them entertained as well.

 

There are often other numbers skirting the edges of the pages, hiding behind rocks, and the like, but Everett is clear that it is One's they are looking for.  They end up catching nine Ones, and each is different in size, shape and color.  During a nice, clear night, one of the Ones escapes.  While they search for it, they come to a mountain with a staircase, missing a single stair.  When one of the riders and his horse go back to find a stair, they look in a hole.  When they pull out a step, the hole becomes a stairwell.  More wordplay.

 

It is a pleasure to find a children's book about language and the usage of it, as opposed to a moral or social message.  To find it done in such an entertaining little story is even better.  I tested it out with my six and three year olds and I'm going to be in a world of trouble when I take it back to the library - they love it and we've read it about 70 times since I checked it out.

 

The ending, when the riders go back to the corral, finds them talking about the Ones they have left.  We have eight, one of them says.  What do you think they found in the corral when they returned?  If you have a young child, this is a great way to help explain to them how important it is to say what you mean.

 

4.5 stars

Source of Lit - Percival Everett - The Short Story Collections

Percival Everett has published three story collections among his 23 books, not always seeing a lot of the stories published individually beforehand.  As you'll see below, I think he's grown as a story writer, or at least as one putting together full collections, over the years.  If I had to pick a favorite, it would be "The Fixer," which I believe led off his latest collection.

Weather and Women Treat Me Fair

1987 by August House, 115 pages

 

Big Picture

1996 by Graywolf Press, 156 pages

 

Damned If I Do

2004 by Graywolf Press, 208 pages

 

Percival Everett’s short stories tend to be much like his novels.  They are thoughtfully written, employ a generous helping of humor ranging from very subtle to laugh-out-loud funny, and rarely club the reader over the head with what the author wants taken from the work.

 

If one has read many of Everett's novels as well, the characters might sound familiar:  The protagonist of “Alluvial Deposits” is a hydrologist, as is the protagonist of Everett's novel Watershed.  “Warm and Nicely Buried” has a family of Penitentes, a religious sect that has specific rules about body burial.  This is reminiscent of his novel, The Body of Martin Aguilera.  There are also cowboy/romance novelists, fly fisherman, painters and other types of characters we’ve seen in his novels.

 

As he’s progressed from collection to collection, I think the work has become stronger, seeing the stories from Damned If I Do even more like compact novels, with Everett getting an amazing amount of ideas and information and character development in each.

 

There’s also a larger variance in style between stories in the latest collection, including a story mainly told through formulas, not sentences.  The stories in Weather and Women Treat Me Fair are all pretty straightforward narrative driven pieces.  And Big Picture has recurring characters popping back into stories here and there through the collection.

 

What Everett gives his readers are collections of stories that are full of well developed characters, strange situations, great wordplay and, especially in Damned If I Do, as diverse as you could hope for.  The diversity makes it difficult for the reader to put this last book down, knowing the next story is going to be so different from the last one.  His collection is like a best of 2004 collection, but all written by one man.  Pick it up, you won’t be sorry.  But if you get a chance, I’d read them in order.  Like many authors, Everett has improved over time.

 

3.5, 4, and 4.5 stars respectively

Source of Lit - Percival Everett - The Water Cure

Book number 21 and novel number 15.  Those are pretty amazing numbers when you stop and think about it.  And done in a 24 year period to boot.  The Water Cure saw Percival Everett coming back to the novel form after publishing a collection of poetry (more on that later).

The Water Cure

2007 by Graywolf Press, 216 pages

 

This latest novel, his fifteenth, is another step into the investigation into the usage of language by Everett.  In fact, it’s the closest that he’s come to using what one might refer to as literary pyrotechnics to tell a story.

 

He begins with the story of Ishmael Kidder, a very bright man who writes extremely successful romance novels under the pseudonym of Estelle Gilliam.  Kidder’s divorced, and struggling a bit with alcohol, when his 11 year old daughter is raped, and killed.  The search for justice via the legal system isn’t successful, and so he decides to take matters into his own hands.  He kidnaps the man, and tortures him in his basement – though there is precious little in terms of narrative that covers this torturing. 

 

Instead, Percival Everett uses stories from Ancient Greece, pictures, language theory, military information, and a bucketful of other methods to write this provocative novel.  The basement in which Kidder tortures this man has 16 mirrors attached to the walls, completely encompassing the wall space so that no matter where he looks he can see what is being done to him.  These fragmented views he has are similar to the fragments that the reader is subjected to by Everett.  At times I wondered if he was trying to show the frustration that both Kidder and his “victim” must be feeling by bouncing the story around as much as he did, or through his inclusions of explanations on the history of water.

 

The Water Cure is described on its back cover as “… a timely and important novel that confronts the dark legacy of the Bush years and the state of America today."  If there’s a place where this novel fails, I think it may be in its attempt to hammer this particular statement home as hard as possible.  In much of Percival Everett’s work, he leaves things open ended, but has done such a solid job with his writing that there really isn’t much ambiguity remaining.  The Water Cure seems to go in the opposite direction.  In trying so hard to show that by voting W. into office not once, but that second time, that all Americans are, in his words “stupid fucks”, and that we’ve somehow condoned atrocities like Abu Ghraib to the point that we ourselves could each suddenly start water-boarding those we hate, Everett has flip-flopped on his usual course of action and I don't find him nearly as successful going this route.

 

That said, there is still a great deal to gleam from this novel.  It does make the reader think, and it does have some fantastic writing within.  And to see how Everett throws such disparate means of circling back to his main idea is always a treat to watch.  However, were The Water Cure the first of his books that I’d read, I’m not sure I can say I’d have searched out the other 20 so fervently.

3.5 stars

Source of Lit - Percival Everett - Wounded

The following was written and distributed to the EWN in August 2005, a preview of the title if you will.  This book marks Percival Everett’s continued return to Graywolf Press for his fiction.  He’d published his short story collection, Damned If I Do, with them the previous fall and these two titles have been the first of four consecutive fictional efforts (the two poetry titles since then have been with other houses), and the first since back in 1999 (Glyph).  It truly seems to be an excellent match, with Fiona McCrae editing Percival’s work.

I also have to say, I LOVE this cover.  Graywolf must have too as it was their catalog cover that fall.

Wounded

October 2005 by Graywolf Press 207 pages

With Wounded, Percival Everett’s fourteenth novel, and nineteenth book, he continues to create a unique body of work – one that regularly shows his readers that frequently when one is searching for something specific, they are often searching for something within themselves at the same time.

As a great deal of Everett's stories are, Wounded is set in the west, Wyoming to be specific.  The protagonist, John Hunt, is a horse trainer by profession, and one with a fair amount of land and his own business. He is also black, something that comes up on the third page of the novel, and beyond his works that have been parodies in nature, God’s Country, Erasure, and A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond As Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid, this announcement of the color of a main character is something new to Everett's work.  

A young man, Wallace Castlebury, who was doing some manual labor on Hunt’s farm, is arrested for the brutal slaying of a young man who happens to be gay. As he had just started with John, and not in any spectacular fashion, Hunt didn’t have much to say to the sheriff, nor did he want to be too involved with the arrested Castlebury. This crime leads to a hate crime rally that draws a college age man, David, to town. He happens to be the son of Howard, an old college roommate of John, who calls and asks Hunt to kind of watch over David if he could.

Everett has rarely seemed satisfied writing about a single topic in the past and Wounded is no different.  Everett has John Hunt dealing with his lack of belief that Wallace murdered the gay man, but not wanting to get involved. He also has him dealing with his own feelings about homosexuality as David ends up working on his farm. Then there are relationships John is in himself, with his Uncle Gus, an ex-con who actually has murdered before (though with a fairly decent excuse), with his old friend Howard, and the burgeoning romance with a younger woman named Maggie, who sees her mother die during the course of the story.

As usual, Everett writes about all of this with great economy. He moves crisply from scene to scene and storyline to storyline without skipping a beat. Through all of his dealings, be they with the sheriff, with Native Americans, homosexuals, Gus, Maggie, Maggie’s mom, and others, John Hunt, while trying to help each and every one, is desperately searching for himself, and for a way to get beyond his own past, during which his wife died, trying to ride a horse they both knew she wasn’t ready for. 

Everett doesn't do all that much in this novel that is new to devout readers of his works, though, as mentioned before, he’s certainly making it as clear as possible that race is an issue this time around. These are issues he’s written about before and one assumes will again, especially the searching to find oneself. The great thing is, even in not really tackling much new this time around, it’s still Everett and as long as he tackles old topics as well as he has in the past, his new works will be well worth your time.

4 stars

Source of Lit - Percival Everett - American Desert

Book 17 and novel number 13 found Percival Everett publishing with Hyperion again (they'd done the paperback version of Erasure).  I'll be honest and say I don't remember but it seemed to me that this one might have received a few more reviews than the typical PE title.  Still not on the front page of the NYTBR like it should have been, but maybe a few more due to the success of Erasure.

American Desert

2004 by Hyperion, 304 pages

 

In this, his thirteenth novel, Percival Everett continues to challenge his readers.  In American Desert, Theodore Street, a professor of English, is on his way to commit suicide when he gets in an automobile accident, throwing his body through the windshield, decapitating him.  Three days later at his funeral, Theodore, with his crudely stitched on head, sits up in his casket.

As crazy as this premise sounds, in the hands of Everett you can only wonder what varied directions he’s going to take it.  Will it be a historical explanation of decapitation?  Or perhaps a humorous look at reincarnation?  Maybe a straightforward horror novel.  With the book coming from Everett, any of the above would be exciting, but he’s chosen to use these events to take a close look into many aspects of American life, and most do not come out looking pretty.

 

One might have to read back to Everett's God's Country or Grand Canyon, Inc. to find a work where he has unleashed his sarcasm to such full effect.  With great logic and brilliant wit, Everett takes on the government, cloning, religion, and jumbles it all with the best explanation for Area 51 that I’ve come across yet.  He also points his laser sharp jabs at university faculties, media, especially the visual media, family, and even riot culture (his rising in his casket is enough to start rioting and looting in the city).

American Desert also allows Everett to wander back to his days of studying Philosophy.  Theodore Street, upon rising from his casket, spends a great deal of time pondering life and the meaning of it.  He seems to capture some interesting ideas within family dynamics.  Prior to his death, Theodore was being shunned by his wife.  He was sleeping on the couch, and their conversations were non-existent.  They were probably on the road to divorce.  Once he rose from his casket, he couldn’t get more than ten feet away from her.  She talked with him, slept with him, and did her best to help protect him from the media hordes.  On the other hand, their oldest daughter could barely stand to be in the same room with him once he returned to life.

 

Everett has rarely seemed satisfied writing about a single topic in the past and American Desert is no different.  He also looks at university faculty dynamics and the way the media can go overboard in our society.  The looks at media in particular are quite good and there a couple of great scenes with post-mortem Theodore being interviewed by local television news anchors.

 

As usual, Everett writes about all of this as succinctly as possible.  He gets to the point in each scene and brings both energy and wit to the action.  While certainly sarcastic in tone, the story brings with it the usual hopefulness that Everett infuses into his work.  A wide target, America's society allows Everett even more avenues than I originally thought about when Theodore Street rose from the dead – and it turns out that’s a very good thing.

 

4.5 stars

Source of Lit - Percival Everett - A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid (A Novel)

So, the image to the left is of the UK version of this and not the US version, but I just couldn't pass it up (I love the changing of "as told to" to "as recounted to").  This was Percival Everett's 16th book and 12th novel.  And the first of three titles that would be published in 2004.  Don't read this one in public if you don't like people wondering why you're laughing so loud.

A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid (A Novel)

2004 by Akashic Books, 300 pages

 

Percival Everett, not content with publishing his own novel and short story collection in 2004, has also co-written this novel in the form of memos and letters, with his USC English Department colleague James Kincaid.  Together they have come up with a book that will make you laugh out loud at times, and scratch your head at times.

 

The book begins with an Assistant to an Aide of Strom Thurmond, Barton Wilkes, writing a letter to Simon & Schuster proposing they publish a book with the title of this one.  Not too surprisingly, Wilkes doesn’t get a response from the publisher until he sends a second letter to them.  Their response is a very standard – we get many proposals, etc.

 

As Wilkes continues his barrage to Simon & Schuster, a specific editor, Martin Snell, is given the responsibility of getting rid of him.  In the meantime, Snell is sending strange internal memos to his assistant, R. Juniper McLeod.

 

S&S decides to go ahead and accept the proposal.  It is decided that they need somebody to ghostwrite the novel, which is where the authors come into play.  Both Percival Everett and James Kincaid are characters within this novel.  They avoid including themselves in the way that say a Paul Auster includes characters with his own name.  Instead, these characters are actually English Department faculty members from USC and seem quite similar to the Everett and Kincaid actually writing the novel.  In fact, the description of why they’ve selected Everett is nearly a perfect book flap description of the author:  “…it’s hard to find all that in one – a writer, scholar, and a black…..There are, however, a few black writers who seem impervious to politics of any kind,….we could come up with but one name that would seem likely for your purposes --- Percival Everett.  He has what you want:  he is experienced, virtually unknown, and black.  What’s more, we think he’ll do it.”

 

Once Everett gets on board with the project, and then gets his colleague Kincaid to help out with research, the book moves forward at a rapid pace.  There are letters from Everett to Kincaid and back; memos from Snell to McLeod; letters from the lunatic Wilkes to everybody involved; and eventually involvement from rival editors to Snell, and Thurmond himself.  They range from silly to strange to just plain funny.  The give and take between Kincaid and Everett in particular is ‘go back and read it again’ funny.

 

The authors have taken a crazy idea they shared, and gone through with it, to fabulous success.  They obviously have had the types of experiences with publishers that you read about and shudder.  They have also taken the strange stories one might hear of about Capital Hill and (hopefully) exaggerated them.  Possibly the most surprising thing is that Senator Strom Thurmond does not come off nearly as silly as one might expect.   He instead comes off as entertaining, as does this book.  It may not be as challenging as the other novels Everett has written, and will probably sell more than the rest of Kincaid’s oeuvre, but this book will be as enjoyable as anything either has written to date.  It’s a great hour and a half to two hours worth of laughter and amazement.

 

4 stars

Source of Lit - Percival Everett - Erasure

Thanks to Mike Magnuson.  He pretty much threatened to drive to Michigan and kick my ass if I didn't find a copy of Percival Everett's Erasure, telling me the man had written a plethora of kickass books (this was his fifteenth), most of them novels (this was his eleventh) and all funny as hell, but this one laugh out loud funny.  It's the first Percival Everett title I bought and read and well, I've read 23 of them now.  Nice job Mags.

Erasure

2001 by University Press of New England, 277 pages and then reprinted in paperback by Hyperion in 2002.

 

In his eleventh novel, Percival Everett seemingly lets off some of the steam he has built up in dealing with the literary establishment over the course of his first fourteen books.  He does so with a keen eye, wonderful language and a story both sad and funny at the same time.

Erasure is the story of Thelonius "Monk" Ellison. While teaching at UCLA, he has published several 'critically acclaimed' novels and had modest success, in terms of sales, with one of them.  His agent gives him the news that nobody is biting on his latest work, sometimes declining harshly (one agent ends his reply with "does anybody really want to read this shit?").

Ellison's personal life is not going any better.  He's not in a romantic relationship, he rarely speaks to his siblings - one older brother and one older sister, both successful doctors, has very few people he can consider friends, and is still trying to reconcile his father's suicide from seven years earlier.

Early in the book, Ellison takes advantage of being able to give a reading of a paper to the Nouveau Roman Society back in Washington D.C.  This brings him back to the home of his youth where he is able to visit his mother and sister Lisa.  Lisa is a partner, along with two other doctors, in a Women's Health Clinic.  Everett makes two things very clear in this early chapter - that Ellison's mother is falling hard to Alzheimer's, and that even amongst the crowd that would attend a Nouveau Roman Society meeting, Ellison's mind, and use of language makes him an outcast.

Everett does a great job of bringing a lot of information about each character into the novel while allowing the story to remain that of Thelonius.  He does an excellent job of foreshadowing a specific fact about his brother via conversations Thelonius and Lisa have, and then of an event that will happen to Lisa later in the novel as well.  It is the combination of all of these events that brings Thelonius to the decision to take a leave of absence and go home and take care of his mother.

It is also during this time that a young woman hits it big with her novel We's Lives in Da Ghetto, based on an experience she had visiting some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days.  Besides being a best seller and getting her on the not so subtly fictionalized Oprah show, she also sells the movie rights for three million dollars.

This is where a little more of the fun comes in - Ellison takes about a day and a half to crank out a parody of what he consider the crap that he has found selling in the African American section at great chain bookstores next to his scattered titles and titles it My Pafology.  Everett includes this treat within Erasure and creates a guilty pleasure for his audience as the book is obviously intended to be bad but is so well done that it is truly entertaining.  He whisks it off to his agent under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh.  The book is accepted immediately, at by far the biggest advance of Ellison's career.  It is enough to allow him to not have to take a summer teaching gig at American University, or anywhere else for that matter.

What follows is the hilariously incisive commentary by Everett on the literary community.  Ellison finds his contemporary updates of Greek tragedies in the African American sections of bookstores knowing full well that people looking for such wouldn't go to that section, and that people going to that section are not looking for such;  the lunch between Stagg R.Leigh (most wouldn't recognize Ellison anyways but he comes up with an attire he feels appropriate) and the potential publisher - who comes across as a buffoon trying to impress his 'assistant'; and best of all the version of the National Book Award where Ellison is asked to be one of the five judges, and of course Stagg R. Leigh's novel, now re-titled Fuck, is on the short list.

Everett has done a fantastic job of merging the literary satire, with the family storyline, while mixing in race and the issue of being 'black enough' to the African American community.  If I tossed in every thing that caused me to laugh out loud, or made me think a little longer about something, or made me think to call and talk to a relative I hadn't heard from in too long, my review would be longer than the book itself.  It should be read and passed along to family and friends.  The only negative thing about it was that the satire was missed by those shelving it at Borders - you'll need to go to the African American section to find this one, which sadly will hide it away from the many unwilling to stray from the general fiction shelves.  Do yourself a favor and stray.

5 stars