Critique de James par Josh

Fine, if you like experimental fiction. I don't get the hoopla.

I was under the impression that James was going to be a retelling of The Adventures of Huck Finn, told from the perspective of Jim, the escaped slave who runs away with Huck in Twain's novel. It's not.

Rather, the original character of Jim is eliminated and replaced with the consciousness and sensibilities of a 21st century literature professor.

Like all black characters in the book, James speaks the 'slave dialect' of Twain's Jim only when white people are around. When black character in the story are alone they speak exactly like like 21st century university graduates (though the white characters around them sound the same as Twain described).

One of the things I found frustrating about this book is that it doesn't seem like Everett really did much research, and thus James is a man who is familiar Voltaire, Mill, Locke, and their critics but knows surprising little about Missouri in the 1840s.

For example at one point James writes "Seeing one lynching was to see ten. Seeing ten was to see a hundred, with that signature posture of death, the angle of the head, the crossing of the feet." (101) It's unlikely that Jim would have seen any lynchings though, certainly not ten. Lynching of slaves (escaped or otherwise) was relatively rare because it might require compensation to their owners. The most famous lynching in Missouri in this period was a of free black man - Francis McIntosh - and he he was burned at the stake, not hanged. That's not to say that the fear of lynchings wasn't real or that Jim wouldn't have seen other atrocities his description reads as the poetic fancy of one who was not present. Jim is turned from a real (albeit somewhat two-dimensions) person into an abstract representation of a slave and what what the author imagines he might think if he found himself enslaved.

Returning to the language: it's surely true that slaves spoke and behaved differently around white people. Twain's portrayal of slaves was based personal experience - he grew up around slaves was friends with several as a child, and years later hired a former slave as an assistant. In other words, he spent far more time talking actual people who were slaves than any writer today. That's not say that his portrayal of Jim's speech patterns is accurate, but it seems plausible that it's accurate as a representation of what Huck would have heard. By contrast, James' speech doesn't seem like how anyone would talk for another 150 years.

Overall, I think the book would have been much better if it were structured as a time or consciousness travel story. Like Kindred by Octavia Butler.

Three stars because it's better than I could write.