James by Percival Everett review – a gripping reimagining of Huckleberry Finn

<p>Percival Everett’s gleeful reboot of Mark Twain puts the enslaved Jim centre stage in a horrifying, painful and funny novel</p><p>For most of his prolific, 40-year career, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/percival-everett">Percival Everett</a> has been published by a non-profit imprint in Minneapolis, outside the traditional centre of US publishing in New York. In the UK, he was long out of print until being picked up by Influx Press, the small independent that in 2022 published his Booker-shortlisted <em><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/aug/31/the-trees-by-percival-everett-review-potent-satire-of-us-racism">The Trees</a></em>. But after the success of that novel, major labels on both sides of the Atlantic came calling. Suddenly he’s hot property: his new book, <em>James</em>, arrives hard on the heels of the Oscar-winning film <em>American Fiction</em>, adapted from Everett’s 2001 novel <em>Erasure</em>, about a frustrated black novelist who decides to live down to stereotyped expectations of his work by producing a pseudonymous spoof titled My Pafology.<br><br>If you’ve read <em>Erasure</em> or seen <em><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/feb/03/american-fiction-review-cord-jefferson-jeffrey-wright-tracee-ellis-ross">American Fiction</a></em>, you’ll be prepared for the central conceit of <em>James</em>, a reboot of Mark Twain’s 1884 novel <em>Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</em>, narrated by the enslaved Jim, one half of the book’s runaway odd couple rafting up the antebellum Mississippi. In Twain’s novel, the boy narrator, Huck, has fled home, only to encounter Jim, his guardian’s slave, also on the run because he’s about to be sold (“Ole missus... treats me pooty rough, but she awluz said she wouldn’ sell me down to Orleans”). In <e