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Percival Everett by Virgil Russell
A story inside a story inside a story. A man visits his aging father in a nursing home, where his father writes the novel he imagines his son would write. Or is it the novel that the son imagines his father would imagine, if he were to imagine the kind of novel the son would write?
Let’s simplify: a woman seeks an apprenticeship with a painter, claiming to be his long-lost daughter. A contractor-for-hire named Murphy can’t distinguish between the two brothers who employ him. And in Murphy’s troubled dreams, Nat Turner imagines the life of William Styron. These narratives twist together with anecdotes from the nursing home, each building on the other until they crest in a wild, outlandish excursion of the inmates led by the father. Anchoring these shifting plotlines is a running commentary between father and son that sheds doubt on the truthfulness of each story. Because, after all, what narrator can we ever trust?
Not only is Percival Everett by Virgil Russell a powerful, compassionate meditation on old age and its humiliations, it is an ingenious culmination of Everett’s recurring preoccupations. All of his prior work, his metaphysical and philosophical inquiries, his investigations into the nature of narrative, have led to this masterful book. Percival Everett has never been more cunning, more brilliant and subversive, than he is in this, his most important and elusive novel to date.
Let’s simplify: a woman seeks an apprenticeship with a painter, claiming to be his long-lost daughter. A contractor-for-hire named Murphy can’t distinguish between the two brothers who employ him. And in Murphy’s troubled dreams, Nat Turner imagines the life of William Styron. These narratives twist together with anecdotes from the nursing home, each building on the other until they crest in a wild, outlandish excursion of the inmates led by the father. Anchoring these shifting plotlines is a running commentary between father and son that sheds doubt on the truthfulness of each story. Because, after all, what narrator can we ever trust?
Not only is Percival Everett by Virgil Russell a powerful, compassionate meditation on old age and its humiliations, it is an ingenious culmination of Everett’s recurring preoccupations. All of his prior work, his metaphysical and philosophical inquiries, his investigations into the nature of narrative, have led to this masterful book. Percival Everett has never been more cunning, more brilliant and subversive, than he is in this, his most important and elusive novel to date.
227 pages, Paperback
First published February 5, 2013
74 people are currently reading
1691 people want to read
About the author
Percival Everett
72 books8,798 followersPercival L. Everett (born 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
There might not be a more fertile mind in American fiction today than Everett’s. In 22 years, he has written 19 books, including a farcical Western, a savage satire of the publishing industry, a children’s story spoofing counting books, retellings of the Greek myths of Medea and Dionysus, and a philosophical tract narrated by a four-year-old.
The Washington Post has called Everett “one of the most adventurously experimental of modern American novelists.” And according to The Boston Globe, “He’s literature’s NASCAR champion, going flat out, narrowly avoiding one seemingly inevitable crash only to steer straight for the next.”
Everett, who teaches courses in creative writing, American studies and critical theory, says he writes about what interests him, which explains his prolific output and the range of subjects he has tackled. He also describes himself as a demanding teacher who learns from his students as much as they learn from him.
Everett’s writing has earned him the PEN USA 2006 Literary Award (for his 2005 novel, Wounded), the Academy Award for Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (for his 2001 novel, Erasure), the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature (for his 1996 story collection, Big Picture) and the New American Writing Award (for his 1990 novel, Zulus). He has served as a judge for, among others, the 1997 National Book Award for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1991.
There might not be a more fertile mind in American fiction today than Everett’s. In 22 years, he has written 19 books, including a farcical Western, a savage satire of the publishing industry, a children’s story spoofing counting books, retellings of the Greek myths of Medea and Dionysus, and a philosophical tract narrated by a four-year-old.
The Washington Post has called Everett “one of the most adventurously experimental of modern American novelists.” And according to The Boston Globe, “He’s literature’s NASCAR champion, going flat out, narrowly avoiding one seemingly inevitable crash only to steer straight for the next.”
Everett, who teaches courses in creative writing, American studies and critical theory, says he writes about what interests him, which explains his prolific output and the range of subjects he has tackled. He also describes himself as a demanding teacher who learns from his students as much as they learn from him.
Everett’s writing has earned him the PEN USA 2006 Literary Award (for his 2005 novel, Wounded), the Academy Award for Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (for his 2001 novel, Erasure), the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature (for his 1996 story collection, Big Picture) and the New American Writing Award (for his 1990 novel, Zulus). He has served as a judge for, among others, the 1997 National Book Award for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1991.
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October 16, 2022Roland Barthes, author of The Death of the Author, was a character in the last Everett book I read (where he was deified and ridiculed in turn), so when I realised that this book was about the death of an author, I couldn't but connect it to the Barthes title, even if Everett's book is about a literal death and Barthes's about a metaphorical death (though Everett's dying author likes metaphor too: Where’s the joy in saying anything flat out? he asks.)
So Everett is referencing Barthes obliquely and not only Barthes but James Joyce as well. Joyce isn't mentioned by name, but there's a paraphrased line from Finnegans Wake in the text*, and there's a long Wake scene that reads like a sleep or a dream, which is one interpretation of what Joyce's Wake is, the main character's long sleep full of long and complex dreams.
Everett's book reads like a similar series of dreams, and the dreams are interspersed with scenes happening in real time in the care home where the elderly author lies dying. But what is real and what is dream is difficult to tell apart. Are the conversations he has with his son real or imagined? The great, splendid, useful thing about a character in a coma is that he can say just about anything.
Sometimes, the narrator seems to drift in and out of the stories of the books he himself has written, and some of the characters he has created get to interrupt the narrative with their own lines, unexpectedly on occasion. As the author says himself, this is a funny book with natural transitions, except where abrupt...
The narrator also drifts in and out of books he has read—Dante's Virgil accompanies him from time to time, perhaps in the form of his son, and whether this is before his death or after is unclear because the narrator refuses to choose past, present, or future tense for the narration. His narrative seems to be outside time, as in Rabelais's literary paradise, Thélème, which is mentioned at one point, and as in TS Eliot's Waste Land, also referenced. I was reminded of this quote from Carlyle's Sartor Resartus: Sure enough, I am; and lately was not: but Whence? How? Whereto?**
But I need to be careful of making too many connections in case I become, in the narrator's words, the pounder of metaphor, the seeker of stretched connection, the pioneer of extended conjunction.
Too late, I hear you say.
Indeed. I know it.
*Were I to begin this all again, here and undeferred and non circuitously, I might begin: The river runs past Eden, from the sag of the shore to the bend of the bay, delivering us back to where we first set about. Percival Everett's version of lines from Finnegans Wake (unacknowledged but then Joyce rarely acknowledged his sources either).
**Who am I; what is this ME? A Voice, a Motion, an Appearance;---some embodied, visualised Idea in the Eternal Mind? Cogito ergo sum. Alas, poor Cogitator, this takes us but a little way. Sure enough, I am; and lately was not: but Whence? How? Whereto? Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (not quoted by Percival Everett).
So Everett is referencing Barthes obliquely and not only Barthes but James Joyce as well. Joyce isn't mentioned by name, but there's a paraphrased line from Finnegans Wake in the text*, and there's a long Wake scene that reads like a sleep or a dream, which is one interpretation of what Joyce's Wake is, the main character's long sleep full of long and complex dreams.
Everett's book reads like a similar series of dreams, and the dreams are interspersed with scenes happening in real time in the care home where the elderly author lies dying. But what is real and what is dream is difficult to tell apart. Are the conversations he has with his son real or imagined? The great, splendid, useful thing about a character in a coma is that he can say just about anything.
Sometimes, the narrator seems to drift in and out of the stories of the books he himself has written, and some of the characters he has created get to interrupt the narrative with their own lines, unexpectedly on occasion. As the author says himself, this is a funny book with natural transitions, except where abrupt...
The narrator also drifts in and out of books he has read—Dante's Virgil accompanies him from time to time, perhaps in the form of his son, and whether this is before his death or after is unclear because the narrator refuses to choose past, present, or future tense for the narration. His narrative seems to be outside time, as in Rabelais's literary paradise, Thélème, which is mentioned at one point, and as in TS Eliot's Waste Land, also referenced. I was reminded of this quote from Carlyle's Sartor Resartus: Sure enough, I am; and lately was not: but Whence? How? Whereto?**
But I need to be careful of making too many connections in case I become, in the narrator's words, the pounder of metaphor, the seeker of stretched connection, the pioneer of extended conjunction.
Too late, I hear you say.
Indeed. I know it.
*Were I to begin this all again, here and undeferred and non circuitously, I might begin: The river runs past Eden, from the sag of the shore to the bend of the bay, delivering us back to where we first set about. Percival Everett's version of lines from Finnegans Wake (unacknowledged but then Joyce rarely acknowledged his sources either).
**Who am I; what is this ME? A Voice, a Motion, an Appearance;---some embodied, visualised Idea in the Eternal Mind? Cogito ergo sum. Alas, poor Cogitator, this takes us but a little way. Sure enough, I am; and lately was not: but Whence? How? Whereto? Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (not quoted by Percival Everett).
June 14, 2014
Due to an increased workload and slavish devotion to my ongoing novel (provisional title: How the World Has Wronged Me and the Various Petty Revenges I Will Get on All You Selfish Bastards), plus a vexing social life to crush into submission, I have little time for meviews these daze. So—this is the best Percival Everett so far—a mind-boggling mix of unreliable and confused narrators exploring a father and son at the time of the father’s death—both personae writers whose stories and inventions mingle with cunning digressions and forkings tipping the fedora to Barthes and Derrida as in Everett’s other postmodern (and you are, Percy) romp, Glyph. This is a more mature and touching and exciting novel than his others—those that lapse into a silliness that undercuts the emotional intention. Stunning.
March 24, 2022
CRITIQUE:
The Nonchalance of Nonsense
This novel negotiates a short and winding road between nonchalance and nonsense.
The nonchalance recalls the (apparently) easy-going fiction of Richard Brautigan and Kurt Vonnegut, touched as it is by romance and familial regard.
The nonsense is embraced and explicated, in almost postmodern terms, in this statement of intent:
The Transit of Venus
Structurally, Everett divides his novel into three sections, all named for a rendition of Venus, as it appears to traverse the sky:
* Hesperus (the Evening Star);
* Phosphorus (the Morning Star); and
* Venus (the entirety of the planet itself).
Although these renditions are separate, they are performances of the same object or entity.
Shifting Narratives
In the first part of Everett's novel, a son writes a novel that features his father, while, in the second, his father writes the novel he thinks his son would write, if he could write.
In the second section, the narrator asks:
In the first section, the son asks similar questions:
Straight away, we don't know whether the novel has been written by the son, or the father, or both (whereas, of course, it has been written by Percival Everett, the author).
Son and father offer a partial solution in an exchange:
So the son might be a fabrication, a fiction or an invention of the father, not just a biological creation. He lives only within the realm of fiction.
The son confirms this possibility, when he describes the novel (or this part of it) as:
The father speculates:
Retained Ambiguity
On the other hand, Everett wants to retain and perpetuate the narrative ambiguity:
Towards the end of the novel, the father says to the son, in a mirror image exchange:
Everett uses this ambiguity to question and explore the traditional roles of the narrator and the protagonist:
So, the novel or the world might be little more than the narrators who personalise and entify the process of telling the story. And just as there might be one narrator, there might be two or more, who integrate and unify (and, in some cases, bewilder and confound). What matters is that the result is a story (or a novel).
The Irksomeness of Postmodernism
This novel is a modernist work that adorns itself with the insignia of postmodernism.
From the depths of metafiction, the son asks the father:
Paradoxically, Percival Everett investigates literary possibilities in the postmodernist vein, though he does so without indulging in or succumbing to its parochial aspirations and conventions (e.g., the belief that all possibilities can be attained [only] within the scope of maximalism).
For all its ambiguity, this novel remains an exemplary work of brevity, sophistication, playfulness, humour and clarity. At the same time, it manages to achieve the agenda of postmodernism within a work of modernist fiction, precisely because postmodernism is, and always has been, a subset of modernism.
META-VERSE:
Write Through You
Mother, I was born
Right through you
Author, you
Write through me
Reader, I
Write through you
Father, you
Write through me
SOUNDTRACK:
The Nonchalance of Nonsense
This novel negotiates a short and winding road between nonchalance and nonsense.
The nonchalance recalls the (apparently) easy-going fiction of Richard Brautigan and Kurt Vonnegut, touched as it is by romance and familial regard.
The nonsense is embraced and explicated, in almost postmodern terms, in this statement of intent:
"...now I know that we're supposed to make sense that sounds like nonsense and then call the sense nonsensical. That's what I think now. I've had a long life of thinking, if not nonsensical things, then particularly useless and annoying things. Like this..."
The Transit of Venus
Structurally, Everett divides his novel into three sections, all named for a rendition of Venus, as it appears to traverse the sky:
* Hesperus (the Evening Star);
* Phosphorus (the Morning Star); and
* Venus (the entirety of the planet itself).
Although these renditions are separate, they are performances of the same object or entity.
Shifting Narratives
In the first part of Everett's novel, a son writes a novel that features his father, while, in the second, his father writes the novel he thinks his son would write, if he could write.
In the second section, the narrator asks:
"...just who the fuck is telling this story?"
In the first section, the son asks similar questions:
"Is this supposed to be my story? The story I'm supposed to write or would write if I were a writer?"
Straight away, we don't know whether the novel has been written by the son, or the father, or both (whereas, of course, it has been written by Percival Everett, the author).
Son and father offer a partial solution in an exchange:
"Dad, you realise that I'm dead."
"Yes, son, I do. But I wasn't aware that you knew it."
So the son might be a fabrication, a fiction or an invention of the father, not just a biological creation. He lives only within the realm of fiction.
The son confirms this possibility, when he describes the novel (or this part of it) as:
"Your old man posing as you in a voice that is at once yours and at once mine and at once neither."
The father speculates:
"Maybe this is close to, but not what you want to write."
Retained Ambiguity
On the other hand, Everett wants to retain and perpetuate the narrative ambiguity:
"I'm an old man or his son writing an old man writing his son writing an old man. But none of this matters and it wouldn't matter if it did matter."
"One of us, or both, as we were and are equally present and, more or less, equally culpable, answerable, if not out of duty then at least by way of sheer good taste or decency, should have taken it upon my or yourself or ourselves to be more observant of what we were about, what we were doing when we put me here..."
Towards the end of the novel, the father says to the son, in a mirror image exchange:
"I'm dead, son."
"I know that, Dad. But I didn't know you knew it."
Everett uses this ambiguity to question and explore the traditional roles of the narrator and the protagonist:
"I call this entification, I mean, as subjective as all this business is, at a point, it is, the story is, the world is, and there it all is, entified...
"It all starts at arm's length, points here are there falling into focus, coming together or separating and becoming distinct. The process is not all that unusual, it's all happening under rather obvious inter-subjective circumstances."
So, the novel or the world might be little more than the narrators who personalise and entify the process of telling the story. And just as there might be one narrator, there might be two or more, who integrate and unify (and, in some cases, bewilder and confound). What matters is that the result is a story (or a novel).
The Irksomeness of Postmodernism
This novel is a modernist work that adorns itself with the insignia of postmodernism.
From the depths of metafiction, the son asks the father:
"What was the thing in your career that irked you the most?
"Funny you should have me have you ask me that question...son, it was being called a postmodernist. I don't even know what the fuck that is! Some asshole tried to explain it to me once, said that my work was about itself and process and not about objective reality and life in the world...I told him to fuck himself and the horse he rode in on...then I punched him."
Paradoxically, Percival Everett investigates literary possibilities in the postmodernist vein, though he does so without indulging in or succumbing to its parochial aspirations and conventions (e.g., the belief that all possibilities can be attained [only] within the scope of maximalism).
For all its ambiguity, this novel remains an exemplary work of brevity, sophistication, playfulness, humour and clarity. At the same time, it manages to achieve the agenda of postmodernism within a work of modernist fiction, precisely because postmodernism is, and always has been, a subset of modernism.
META-VERSE:
Write Through You
Mother, I was born
Right through you
Author, you
Write through me
Reader, I
Write through you
Father, you
Write through me
SOUNDTRACK:
December 9, 2016
This is an odd work, and while I mean that in a good way, it can be tough to process just how out-there Everett gets with this thing. What we have here is the classic metafiction "story-within-a-story" trick, except with the added curveball that it's not evident what the "top narrative layer" is. Is this Percival Everett (character) writing Virgil Russell (his dying father?), or is this Virgil Russell (character) writing a book about him dying from Percival Everett (character)'s perspective? That name "Virgil" might remind you of Dante, and indeed this novel is littered with references to and parodies of the Divine Comedy's first canto, where Dante meets up with Virgil, his guide. Except Virgil Russell isn't such a clear guide, he's just as confused as Percival Everett (character and writer - based on the epigraph, which holds that Percival Everett [author]'s father died, I have to assume that Everett wrote this novel as a way of coping with his grief) as to how to manage his impending death, whether it is in fact "really" impending or...
Look, you can get caught in a labyrinth with this shit, so if you want to enjoy this book your only course of action is to accept the ambiguity of it as a natural part of how it works. There is Percival Everett, character, there is Virgil Russell, character, and one of them is writing the whole thing, although really of course Percival Everett, author is pulling all the strings. The point is, the lack of a topmost layer and the metaphor of the confused guide-through-the-afterlife are the twin engines of this book's tension, which is, in my head at least, the big question-mark after death. I vaguely recall reading somewhere that Everett's spirituality is on the atheist-agnostic spectrum, and while I may be wrong about that, I do indeed wonder if he isn't confronting the terror of the nothing-after-death that sure goes through my head, which is also on the atheist-agnostic spectrum, so it's entirely possible I'm projecting here. Moves like this are the reason why less charitable readers dismiss postmodernism as nihilistic (a classmate of mine in grad school once used this as a springboard to discuss how postmodernism was anti-God, which is like um okay maybe you're laying it on a liiiiiiitle thick there), and while this is not a nihilistic book, when you look past Everett's signature humor it's definitely a grim work.
Consider: images of decay and death are all over this thing. In the first section, a horse gets shot. In the second, Everett launches on a One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest-type story in a nursing home, and while it's some of his funniest stuff - dig the grotesque orderlies! - it's also preoccupied with the changes in the body as it ages, the loss of the glory years, deteriorating parent-child relationships, boredom, and of course death. And in part three, Virgil Russell takes over to narrate the death of his own father at the hands of the KKK, ponders his own comatose state, and of course slip-slides toward his own inevitable death. Pretty grim for all the humor, but then Everett twists it again, Everett lends Virgil Russell a breath of life on page 224, one that shows he's still got a little spirit despite slouching toward the inevitable: "Put my ashes loose on the ground, in a broad shallow ditch where I might feed something, what planet there is left. Say nothing over what was me, just sprinkle me, I said. Maybe even put a small bit of me here and a smidgen of me over there. Just spread me about. But for devil's sake, don't set me on a table and pretend to converse with me." It's so sad and so funny and so real, thrumming with the Virgil Russell we've gotten to know over these pages. Like Dylan Thomas sez, "rage against the dying of the light," and even if you don't love meta-shenanigans (n.b.: I do), such a great moment for such a great character might be a reward for even the realists in the audience.
Look, you can get caught in a labyrinth with this shit, so if you want to enjoy this book your only course of action is to accept the ambiguity of it as a natural part of how it works. There is Percival Everett, character, there is Virgil Russell, character, and one of them is writing the whole thing, although really of course Percival Everett, author is pulling all the strings. The point is, the lack of a topmost layer and the metaphor of the confused guide-through-the-afterlife are the twin engines of this book's tension, which is, in my head at least, the big question-mark after death. I vaguely recall reading somewhere that Everett's spirituality is on the atheist-agnostic spectrum, and while I may be wrong about that, I do indeed wonder if he isn't confronting the terror of the nothing-after-death that sure goes through my head, which is also on the atheist-agnostic spectrum, so it's entirely possible I'm projecting here. Moves like this are the reason why less charitable readers dismiss postmodernism as nihilistic (a classmate of mine in grad school once used this as a springboard to discuss how postmodernism was anti-God, which is like um okay maybe you're laying it on a liiiiiiitle thick there), and while this is not a nihilistic book, when you look past Everett's signature humor it's definitely a grim work.
Consider: images of decay and death are all over this thing. In the first section, a horse gets shot. In the second, Everett launches on a One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest-type story in a nursing home, and while it's some of his funniest stuff - dig the grotesque orderlies! - it's also preoccupied with the changes in the body as it ages, the loss of the glory years, deteriorating parent-child relationships, boredom, and of course death. And in part three, Virgil Russell takes over to narrate the death of his own father at the hands of the KKK, ponders his own comatose state, and of course slip-slides toward his own inevitable death. Pretty grim for all the humor, but then Everett twists it again, Everett lends Virgil Russell a breath of life on page 224, one that shows he's still got a little spirit despite slouching toward the inevitable: "Put my ashes loose on the ground, in a broad shallow ditch where I might feed something, what planet there is left. Say nothing over what was me, just sprinkle me, I said. Maybe even put a small bit of me here and a smidgen of me over there. Just spread me about. But for devil's sake, don't set me on a table and pretend to converse with me." It's so sad and so funny and so real, thrumming with the Virgil Russell we've gotten to know over these pages. Like Dylan Thomas sez, "rage against the dying of the light," and even if you don't love meta-shenanigans (n.b.: I do), such a great moment for such a great character might be a reward for even the realists in the audience.
Read
July 30, 2022There's a lot of the child is father to the man going on here, or so I think. The narrator, maybe, is an old man in a nursing home, maybe, telling his life story to his son who may have predeceased him, or the story his son should be writing, if he could write. Or as the author himself clarifies:
I am a comatose old man writing here now and again what my dead or living son might write if he wrote or I am a dead or living son writing what my dying father might write for me to have written. I am a performative utterance. I carry the illocutionary ax.
This is Everett at his most experimental, a mishmash, a farrago of vignettes one might hope could turn into the main story, but he'll stop, re-tell, maybe kill the protagonist this time, maybe save him.
Here, Nat Turner writes The Confessions of William Styron. Is that Billy, another character?
Someone once said that wordplay is to wisdom as foreplay is to . . . Wait, no one ever said that. But what to make of this, then:
Never keep your allusions in one basket. And never assume there is not a fish at the end of your line.
I never have, I don't think.
There is so much going on in this work that I would have to seriously study it to truly rank it. But whether Everett annoys or thrills, invariably his dialogue sparkles. Here's two parts of a dialogue between the old man and a younger nurse:
Do you believe in time travel, I asked her.
I guess not.
It's just as well. Apparently, given that the occurrence of time dilation, whether based on velocity or gravity, doesn't allow backward travel, we could only hope to get you as old as me and that would sort of defeat the purpose, wouldn't it?
You're an interesting man.
I was once, I think. I'm pretty sure I thought so then. More fool me.
- - - -
What do you see when you look at me?
This was a great question and it took me completely off guard. I looked up at the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling of the hallway. I see a river in Iowa, I said. The first place I saw my wife naked. All we did was swim that day.
That's sweet.
I'm a sweet man.
Emily Kuratowski is another patient/resident/inmate, 99, wheelchair bound, with only occasional dementia to interrupt a profound clarity. Our less elderly narrator asks her about her husband:
You must have loved him, I said.
I suppose I did for a while. Then we just got wrapped up in life and work and love and the idea of it just fell away.
That's sad.
If it hadn't been for my constant affairs it would have been.
There's Race too, of course. There's a memorable vignette of the protagonist eating a roast beef sandwich (you want to arrest me for that, it does have mayo) near the Washington Monument when coincidentally Martin is about to give a speech. Later, father and son take a wrong turn on a dirt road and run into a burning cross and men and women in white garb. The protagonist tells how they got away. The son tells how he didn't. Father to the man.
I am a comatose old man writing here now and again what my dead or living son might write if he wrote or I am a dead or living son writing what my dying father might write for me to have written. I am a performative utterance. I carry the illocutionary ax.
This is Everett at his most experimental, a mishmash, a farrago of vignettes one might hope could turn into the main story, but he'll stop, re-tell, maybe kill the protagonist this time, maybe save him.
Here, Nat Turner writes The Confessions of William Styron. Is that Billy, another character?
Someone once said that wordplay is to wisdom as foreplay is to . . . Wait, no one ever said that. But what to make of this, then:
Never keep your allusions in one basket. And never assume there is not a fish at the end of your line.
I never have, I don't think.
There is so much going on in this work that I would have to seriously study it to truly rank it. But whether Everett annoys or thrills, invariably his dialogue sparkles. Here's two parts of a dialogue between the old man and a younger nurse:
Do you believe in time travel, I asked her.
I guess not.
It's just as well. Apparently, given that the occurrence of time dilation, whether based on velocity or gravity, doesn't allow backward travel, we could only hope to get you as old as me and that would sort of defeat the purpose, wouldn't it?
You're an interesting man.
I was once, I think. I'm pretty sure I thought so then. More fool me.
- - - -
What do you see when you look at me?
This was a great question and it took me completely off guard. I looked up at the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling of the hallway. I see a river in Iowa, I said. The first place I saw my wife naked. All we did was swim that day.
That's sweet.
I'm a sweet man.
Emily Kuratowski is another patient/resident/inmate, 99, wheelchair bound, with only occasional dementia to interrupt a profound clarity. Our less elderly narrator asks her about her husband:
You must have loved him, I said.
I suppose I did for a while. Then we just got wrapped up in life and work and love and the idea of it just fell away.
That's sad.
If it hadn't been for my constant affairs it would have been.
There's Race too, of course. There's a memorable vignette of the protagonist eating a roast beef sandwich (you want to arrest me for that, it does have mayo) near the Washington Monument when coincidentally Martin is about to give a speech. Later, father and son take a wrong turn on a dirt road and run into a burning cross and men and women in white garb. The protagonist tells how they got away. The son tells how he didn't. Father to the man.
June 11, 2022
Rating: 4.6745
Everett's unusual jaunt defies description or genre due to what appears at first to be a dialog between father and son.
At 78, Virgil lives with other seniors in an assisted living facility, but he stands apart from the group in all ways. A novelist with Mensa level intelligence, his life views and sarcasm are highlighted as he pontificates and waxes poetic sharing an encyclopedic knowledge in first person POV. And while he loves his son, Virgil insists he should write rather than play doctor. What follows is completely unexpected.
The son's parallel story which while unique, is brought to halt half way through. From that point on, the reader is engaged through Virgil's stream of consciousness banter, poetry, scheming and back story using a variety of narrative POV's. To say it keeps the reader on their toes is a vast understatement. Virgil is not only unique, funny and unusual, his compassion and worldly knowledge of literature, science and history creates a memorable, engaging character; one that is rare above all else. As I reflect on Virgil's youth and unfathomable knowledge of books, authors and art, he defies stereotype, much as the author. Furthermore, its difficult not to reflect on Greek literature due to its poetic nature and metaphor.
Since Percival Everett is both author and esteemed English professor at USC, the reader is exposed to his wisdom, writing skill and extensive knowledge. And while black, his use of racial issues takes a back seat to story and characters; and for that I am deeply grateful. This being the fifth or sixth book I've read, to say he defies stereotype is an understatement. While most authors stick with one genre, Everett swings his bat at variety using creative characters, plot and POV, and humor that's off the charts. And if humor is something you enjoy, make sure to add "I am Not Sidney Poitier" to your list.
So when/if you pick up one of his books, remember the Forrest Gump line, "Life's like a box of chocolates..." And that's why he's risen to the top of my list!
Everett's unusual jaunt defies description or genre due to what appears at first to be a dialog between father and son.
At 78, Virgil lives with other seniors in an assisted living facility, but he stands apart from the group in all ways. A novelist with Mensa level intelligence, his life views and sarcasm are highlighted as he pontificates and waxes poetic sharing an encyclopedic knowledge in first person POV. And while he loves his son, Virgil insists he should write rather than play doctor. What follows is completely unexpected.
The son's parallel story which while unique, is brought to halt half way through. From that point on, the reader is engaged through Virgil's stream of consciousness banter, poetry, scheming and back story using a variety of narrative POV's. To say it keeps the reader on their toes is a vast understatement. Virgil is not only unique, funny and unusual, his compassion and worldly knowledge of literature, science and history creates a memorable, engaging character; one that is rare above all else. As I reflect on Virgil's youth and unfathomable knowledge of books, authors and art, he defies stereotype, much as the author. Furthermore, its difficult not to reflect on Greek literature due to its poetic nature and metaphor.
Since Percival Everett is both author and esteemed English professor at USC, the reader is exposed to his wisdom, writing skill and extensive knowledge. And while black, his use of racial issues takes a back seat to story and characters; and for that I am deeply grateful. This being the fifth or sixth book I've read, to say he defies stereotype is an understatement. While most authors stick with one genre, Everett swings his bat at variety using creative characters, plot and POV, and humor that's off the charts. And if humor is something you enjoy, make sure to add "I am Not Sidney Poitier" to your list.
So when/if you pick up one of his books, remember the Forrest Gump line, "Life's like a box of chocolates..." And that's why he's risen to the top of my list!
July 18, 2024
Secularly, I say this is some holy shit. All of Everett’s considerable achievements crest here, and for all of its humor it is, at its core, a book written in the grievous shadow of the recently-passed Percival Everett SENIOR. It belongs in the small literature traded under ‘Dead Dad’ alongside Roth’s Patriarchy and the first book of Knausgård’s My Struggle, two books that are inviolable to me. Its beauty is absolutely crushing, I imagine all the more so if, like myself, you’d a father whose death is yet to scab over almost two decades on. I will not vitiate its insides by separating and weighing its organs, diving entrails in pursuit of meaning. I know what it means all too well, and I leave the body wholly intact for you to discover unmolested by my inadequate butchery.
August 23, 2022
A witty, challenging book from the ever-versatile Everett about fathers and sons, aging and dying, American racism, narrative structure, and more. Parts of the second half were too dense for me, but overall, I enjoyed the book and am grateful to the Tournament of Books team for introducing me to Everett a decade or so ago.
June 3, 2015
Quelle cose eterne
“E allora cosa voglio? Morire, figlio. Morire bene. Morire in modo gagliardo, vigoroso, fare fuoco e fiamme, gettare scompiglio mentre assolvo la mia missione di morte, congiungere la morte alla vita, al vivere, al respirare, congiungerla alla luna e alle stelle, renderla luce e buio e pioggia e foschia e venti secchi”.
Non cerca una morale la favola labirintica e metafisica che propone con attenzione linguistica e narratologica la sapiente voce di Percival Everett: la sua riflessione metanarrativa strutturata in episodi, frammenti e meditazioni ripercorre allusivamente e metaforicamente i sentieri conosciuti e insieme inediti che conducono ai grandi temi della vita e della morte, della coscienza e del linguaggio, del rapporto tra chi genera e chi è generato. L'intelligenza e la profondità del romanzo inseguono modelli ibridi e molteplici di racconto, ma nell'indagare l'inaccessibilità del mondo si sviluppano spesso in una trama rarefatta e disinvolta, che si esaurisce nella formalizzazione e nel solipsismo, raggiunti in se stessi. Come se a rivelare l'inganno che risiede nella scrittura non ci sia altro modo che rimanerne vittime, privandosi di un senso se non compiuto quanto meno funzionale. Ecco che allora non manca certo la capacità di creare immaginazione e di emozionare con stile, in ultimo di coinvolgere amorevolmente il lettore, con le storie evocate dall'alter ego nell'entropia della casa di riposo o gli incontri coraggiosi tra padre e figlio e le avventure di affabulazione dei diversi personaggi; d'altra parte, nello scorrere della parabola astratta e della vicenda narrativa si avverte l'estremismo dell'artificio e una concessione all'esperimento che pur non compiaciuta appare in diversi brani priva di misura, trascurando le legittime e concrete aspirazioni di un generoso e benevolo lettore.
“E allora cosa voglio? Morire, figlio. Morire bene. Morire in modo gagliardo, vigoroso, fare fuoco e fiamme, gettare scompiglio mentre assolvo la mia missione di morte, congiungere la morte alla vita, al vivere, al respirare, congiungerla alla luna e alle stelle, renderla luce e buio e pioggia e foschia e venti secchi”.
Non cerca una morale la favola labirintica e metafisica che propone con attenzione linguistica e narratologica la sapiente voce di Percival Everett: la sua riflessione metanarrativa strutturata in episodi, frammenti e meditazioni ripercorre allusivamente e metaforicamente i sentieri conosciuti e insieme inediti che conducono ai grandi temi della vita e della morte, della coscienza e del linguaggio, del rapporto tra chi genera e chi è generato. L'intelligenza e la profondità del romanzo inseguono modelli ibridi e molteplici di racconto, ma nell'indagare l'inaccessibilità del mondo si sviluppano spesso in una trama rarefatta e disinvolta, che si esaurisce nella formalizzazione e nel solipsismo, raggiunti in se stessi. Come se a rivelare l'inganno che risiede nella scrittura non ci sia altro modo che rimanerne vittime, privandosi di un senso se non compiuto quanto meno funzionale. Ecco che allora non manca certo la capacità di creare immaginazione e di emozionare con stile, in ultimo di coinvolgere amorevolmente il lettore, con le storie evocate dall'alter ego nell'entropia della casa di riposo o gli incontri coraggiosi tra padre e figlio e le avventure di affabulazione dei diversi personaggi; d'altra parte, nello scorrere della parabola astratta e della vicenda narrativa si avverte l'estremismo dell'artificio e una concessione all'esperimento che pur non compiaciuta appare in diversi brani priva di misura, trascurando le legittime e concrete aspirazioni di un generoso e benevolo lettore.
November 26, 2017
The only way that I can explain how I understand this story is to say that I write fiction. I write it solo and I’ve also written with two partners. I understand how mobile identity is and, like identity, how story comes from nothing and whirls around in the void you necessarily drop into in order to “receive” fiction, and, if one is lucky, skilled, and very persistent, eventually the impulses become something cohesive. Writing story is an act of faith—as is the act of being somebody. And this book writes the raw experience of both those things (identity and story writing) via a dying father in a nursing home writing a story that his son is assigned to complete. And the two writers merge, and it’s like colors of paint whirling in a paint mixer.
That said, this story stays in the mixer, never congealing into something cohesive. The bits that are story are as good as anything Everett writes and a reason to keep reading, but, in addition to being impenetrable, the Kindle version is riddled with typos and things that may or may not have been typos (numerals in the middle of sentences with no meaning—remnants of manual page numbers in a Word document that got dumped into the Kindle format?) and no quotation marks around dialogue. Despite that, Percival Everett fans—and I now count myself as one—may appreciate it because it’s part of the canon and is a wild experiment.
In a chapter near the end called “Ontology and Anguish” there is this passage which comprises its own section:
That said, this story stays in the mixer, never congealing into something cohesive. The bits that are story are as good as anything Everett writes and a reason to keep reading, but, in addition to being impenetrable, the Kindle version is riddled with typos and things that may or may not have been typos (numerals in the middle of sentences with no meaning—remnants of manual page numbers in a Word document that got dumped into the Kindle format?) and no quotation marks around dialogue. Despite that, Percival Everett fans—and I now count myself as one—may appreciate it because it’s part of the canon and is a wild experiment.
In a chapter near the end called “Ontology and Anguish” there is this passage which comprises its own section:
There are those who understand and those who do not. The way you tell the difference is easy. The ones who do not understand have not yet killed themselves.My interpretation of this is that until you have, in a sense, died by falling into the void where all creation comes from (story, identity), you can’t understand what this book is about. I do think I understand as well as a person can, but that doesn’t mean this experiment works. I wish it did, but in my opinion, the best way to write about the void is to create real story, which Percival Everett does brilliantly in other books.
August 31, 2015
(2.5) I've been a fan of Everett's for awhile as reflected from my previous reviews of some of his books I've read, but this one...this one...hmm. I won't delve too deep into it because it does a good job itself.
The cover reminds you of M.C. Escher's 'Drawing Hands'...
...and the first 1/3 of the book made me think of...
Yes, those loveable, yet mysterious, 'Choose Your Own Adventure' from many of our childhoods. Stories interchange within paragraphs, within sentences and behooves you to focus, to be patient. Smart, witty, but ultimately over-the-top, I slowly began to be disappointed as I read on. I admire the text, but couldn't enjoy it as I had his others.
The cover reminds you of M.C. Escher's 'Drawing Hands'...
...and the first 1/3 of the book made me think of...
Yes, those loveable, yet mysterious, 'Choose Your Own Adventure' from many of our childhoods. Stories interchange within paragraphs, within sentences and behooves you to focus, to be patient. Smart, witty, but ultimately over-the-top, I slowly began to be disappointed as I read on. I admire the text, but couldn't enjoy it as I had his others.
November 18, 2023
Despite enjoying several of Percival Everett's other novels I just couldn't get on with this one. So many confusing bits and pieces and often passages that made absolutely no sense as far as I could tell.
February 16, 2013
Too clever? Anyone who has read Percival Everett knows he is one of the greatest writers of this time. And his talent is always on full display in all of his work. However, the circuitous nature of this novel makes this a difficult book to enjoy and review. Perhaps he was attempting to be too clever with the shifting narrators, is it the father, the son, or the son writing as the father would have wished? The decision to do it that way obstructs the flow of the novel and keeps it from making great sense.
Percival manages to make many statements on writing, life, death and other things. These observations are always poignant and well put, but due to the shiftiness of the story, they may not be well appreciated. There are moments that are humorous and brilliant, just not enough of them.
It seems like Percival was being clever for the sake of showing his writing brilliance, and forgot to make the novel resonate. And I'm afraid many will be disappointed by this failure to connect with the reader.
Percival manages to make many statements on writing, life, death and other things. These observations are always poignant and well put, but due to the shiftiness of the story, they may not be well appreciated. There are moments that are humorous and brilliant, just not enough of them.
It seems like Percival was being clever for the sake of showing his writing brilliance, and forgot to make the novel resonate. And I'm afraid many will be disappointed by this failure to connect with the reader.
February 2, 2020
tengo i dubbi in una scatola insieme alle cose che so
tema duro, questo e nel contempo un tema di cui non si vede la fine, se ne potrebbe parlare all'infinito senza esaurirne le possibilità...
non ha inizio questo racconto e pertanto nemmeno fine, è circolare, sbilenco e tende alla complessità che sfiora l'assurdo, si legge con una foga e una leggerezza impensabili per un tale coacervo di strati di narrazione, e tutto quello che alla fine se ne ricava è che non potrebbe mai esserci fine alla speculazione linguistica e al tentativo di allocamento temporale delle nostre radici storico/filosofiche
insomma leggetelo che di libri così si è perso lo stampo
Sono morto, figlio. Questo lo so, papà. Ma non sapevo che lo sapessi anche tu.
tema duro, questo e nel contempo un tema di cui non si vede la fine, se ne potrebbe parlare all'infinito senza esaurirne le possibilità...
non ha inizio questo racconto e pertanto nemmeno fine, è circolare, sbilenco e tende alla complessità che sfiora l'assurdo, si legge con una foga e una leggerezza impensabili per un tale coacervo di strati di narrazione, e tutto quello che alla fine se ne ricava è che non potrebbe mai esserci fine alla speculazione linguistica e al tentativo di allocamento temporale delle nostre radici storico/filosofiche
insomma leggetelo che di libri così si è perso lo stampo
Sono morto, figlio. Questo lo so, papà. Ma non sapevo che lo sapessi anche tu.
June 3, 2014
Two or three days into my second reading of Percival Everett by Virgil Russell. [I might add to or change this review in a few days.]
A friend of mine once said of the novel Terra Nostra, by Carlos Fuentes, that it was either one of literature's greatest accomplishments or it was a giant pile of excrement, and that he would never know which. My friend was a very smart guy, and he was proud of being smart, and in his comment I heard "If I can't parse this thing, who can?" That's a little bit like how I'm feeling about Percival Everett by Virgil Russell.
The thing that these two novels have in common is that they are books in conversation with other books, and not necessarily with me, the current reader. This sometimes feels like an affront. It makes me want to shake my fist at the author and say "HEY! PE! I'm the person reading this, not stupid Gottlob Frege!"
But after my initial outrage at not being the center of attention, I'm finding it very rewarding and stimulating to be eavesdropping on this conversation. A lot of it goes over my head, but just trying to follow along is a powerful experience.
A friend of mine once said of the novel Terra Nostra, by Carlos Fuentes, that it was either one of literature's greatest accomplishments or it was a giant pile of excrement, and that he would never know which. My friend was a very smart guy, and he was proud of being smart, and in his comment I heard "If I can't parse this thing, who can?" That's a little bit like how I'm feeling about Percival Everett by Virgil Russell.
The thing that these two novels have in common is that they are books in conversation with other books, and not necessarily with me, the current reader. This sometimes feels like an affront. It makes me want to shake my fist at the author and say "HEY! PE! I'm the person reading this, not stupid Gottlob Frege!"
But after my initial outrage at not being the center of attention, I'm finding it very rewarding and stimulating to be eavesdropping on this conversation. A lot of it goes over my head, but just trying to follow along is a powerful experience.
February 23, 2013
At once intensely personal and highly abstract, filled with, for the reader, both warm recognitions and dense alienating prose, Everett's new novel is a wonderful, but utterly confounding and mystifying, tale of a father and son. Channeling David Markson and Thomas Bernhard, Everett here takes many of his common themes and motifs but fractures and refracts them progressively throughout the novel. Because of the narrative ambiguity and unreliability it is difficult even to provide a summary of events. As near as I can tell, the novel follows the erosion of identity that occurs for both a father and son when a father's old age and dementia gets worse. As such, the "I" (or "I"'s) of the book is/are radically unstable, as it/they is/are trapped in the shifting sands of its/their own deteriorating consciousness(es). (See what I mean?) The sense of time and conflation of memory, history, imagination and fantasy makes much of this book discomfiting and hallucinatory. Ultimately, despite engaging and radically complex character(s), the focus of Everett seems to be language (which becomes, in a way, a character in the book in and of itself), and how language forms and distorts reality and identity. I'll be thinking about this novel for quite a while.
August 5, 2013
Reading this I was reminded of some other novel Everett wrote where some writer complained that his books, academic and impenetrable, where nevertheless shelved in the “African America” section of the bookstore. Which at the time was a send-up of political correctness—but now we’re in this post-ironic age and I feel like more he(the character) was complaining about First World Problems. After all, if Everett’s a writer’s writer, then for every book he writes that’s put on a shelf, there’s thousands and thousands of others written by writers who will never even be shelved at all.
I’m not calling Everett a whiner or a hypocrite, but I am going to paint him with the same brush I paint Joyce, which is to say, he’s got to be, at least, messing with us. I plowed through this impenetrable novel of his in a day, half a day, actually, and I don’t know what I got out of it—but I don’t feel like my time was wasted.
This is a novel that deconstructs itself as it goes. It’s for people who like Everett. It’s for people who smugly thought they were in on the joke, in Glyph, when he made fun of intellectuals, and who now must know they’re the joke's sole source of irony. This is an ambitious novel, or would be if a lesser writer tried it, but Everett’s been to more than a few rodeos, so let’s swap ambitious for inevitable.
Math and Philosophy and Western Sensibility and Pharmacology and Radical Sixties Politics and Race and Geriatrics and Infidelity and Photography and Zeitgeist and … and you know what, I can’t recall any kind of existential angst. How is that even possible in a novel written after 1980?
Linguistics, Meta-Linguistics, Russell’s paradox. I guess that’s how.
I’m not calling Everett a whiner or a hypocrite, but I am going to paint him with the same brush I paint Joyce, which is to say, he’s got to be, at least, messing with us. I plowed through this impenetrable novel of his in a day, half a day, actually, and I don’t know what I got out of it—but I don’t feel like my time was wasted.
This is a novel that deconstructs itself as it goes. It’s for people who like Everett. It’s for people who smugly thought they were in on the joke, in Glyph, when he made fun of intellectuals, and who now must know they’re the joke's sole source of irony. This is an ambitious novel, or would be if a lesser writer tried it, but Everett’s been to more than a few rodeos, so let’s swap ambitious for inevitable.
Math and Philosophy and Western Sensibility and Pharmacology and Radical Sixties Politics and Race and Geriatrics and Infidelity and Photography and Zeitgeist and … and you know what, I can’t recall any kind of existential angst. How is that even possible in a novel written after 1980?
Linguistics, Meta-Linguistics, Russell’s paradox. I guess that’s how.
Read
August 2, 2024Interestingly confabulatory and confounded at first, through the first half, and then ultimately confusing in such a way that it closed up for me and I skimmed to the end. Thought it would be more affecting than it was on the dying father front. All games, lots of stories, but only the paternity thread really held my interest. Shruggie.
June 13, 2013
graywolf, taking 2013 by storm, first of all. 2nd, everett both shows off, and boors(sp?), i think intentionally as HE writes and a non-writer (his dad, but his dad is also a writer's writer, huh? yes both at once) writing about a writer writing, and tells a few different storylines while at it, and some bio? and autobio? and of course some political opinions of current events, and tv, and the weather (can no one avoid the weather?)
so here's a short quote, percival is taking to his "dad" virgil, who's in the old folks home, practically completely paralyzed, but also writing this book i am reviewing etc etc
"What was the thing in your career that irked you the most?
Funny you should have me have you ask me that question.
Strange.
Son, it was being called a postmodernist. I don't even know what the fuck that is! Some asshole tried to explain it to me once, said that my work was about itself and process and not about objective reality and life in the world.
What did you say to him?
After i told him to fuck himself and the horse he rode in on, I asked him what he thought objective reality was. Then i punched him. That's why I had to leave my job in Iowa. That's why we moved to Providence. Well, you and I did. Your mother went to Canada and married the flyboy. And the thing about your mother was that once gone, she could not look back, if I may segue in so non sequitur a manner, not that she would have become a pillar of salt or anything so horrible or fanciful or wonderful, but because in looking back she would be admitting that she was gone, that she had left something behind, ........................." etc etc etc
this has some great and affecting illustrations too. but not sure sure where they come from, perhaps everett's.
so here's a short quote, percival is taking to his "dad" virgil, who's in the old folks home, practically completely paralyzed, but also writing this book i am reviewing etc etc
"What was the thing in your career that irked you the most?
Funny you should have me have you ask me that question.
Strange.
Son, it was being called a postmodernist. I don't even know what the fuck that is! Some asshole tried to explain it to me once, said that my work was about itself and process and not about objective reality and life in the world.
What did you say to him?
After i told him to fuck himself and the horse he rode in on, I asked him what he thought objective reality was. Then i punched him. That's why I had to leave my job in Iowa. That's why we moved to Providence. Well, you and I did. Your mother went to Canada and married the flyboy. And the thing about your mother was that once gone, she could not look back, if I may segue in so non sequitur a manner, not that she would have become a pillar of salt or anything so horrible or fanciful or wonderful, but because in looking back she would be admitting that she was gone, that she had left something behind, ........................." etc etc etc
this has some great and affecting illustrations too. but not sure sure where they come from, perhaps everett's.
dnf
November 10, 2024I have absolutely no idea what is going on
August 31, 2025
Considering a DNF. Never expected that but it's all feeling a wee bit too solipsistic.
Later: Changed my mind and finished. Processing. Some beautiful stuff ultimately. Such as in the last 10 pages, stuff you'd want to read and let roll through your mind--if you've had the fortitude to shimmy all the way up to the very edge of the father's death. One lonely question rolling through here: what is thinking without language?
Now, 3.5 + ? Book stars are a bit wacko, but let's go with that.
Not for all Everett readers. Only completists or the resilient! Best I can say.
Later: Changed my mind and finished. Processing. Some beautiful stuff ultimately. Such as in the last 10 pages, stuff you'd want to read and let roll through your mind--if you've had the fortitude to shimmy all the way up to the very edge of the father's death. One lonely question rolling through here: what is thinking without language?
Now, 3.5 + ? Book stars are a bit wacko, but let's go with that.
Not for all Everett readers. Only completists or the resilient! Best I can say.
February 5, 2023
I made a commitment to myself, several years ago, to write something on GR about every book I read but, I must say, this review is going to be a challenge. The whole time I was reading I was wondering "what the hell am I going to say?". It is, basically, about an elderly father and his son sharing stories, I'm assuming it's Percival and his father but I don't recall it saying that. It's a very confusing assortment of stories that go from one thing to another and never specifying who is saying what. This confusion, evidently, was intentional because, about 100 pages into the book, Everett expressed a feigned concern for the reader, saying he realized that we may not know who is saying what but, don't worry, it's really just him, which really didn't explain anything. He did this sort of thing a couple of other times in the book. I'm explaining all of this because, although I lack the cerebral capacity to fully grasp what he was doing, I can recognize his extraordinary talent. He has a playful sense of humor and often teases the reader in his writing, which was very apparent in this book. Also, his writing is incredible, with his sharp wit and clever twists of phrasing. I admit this book was beyond my abilities to fully grasp but I enjoyed every bit of it.
Read
February 6, 2013It is difficult to review this book. It is a satire, certainly, containing all of the academic identifiers of a satire, but absolutely barren of even black humor. It cannot be described as a story - the narrator himself, whoever that is, decries the very notion of a story. Many tales are begun, but none of them are finished. Character after character, setting after setting, is introduced, and it is worth noting how swiftly and with what a light hand the author paints each of them into vivid life. Nonetheless, every one of them is left dangling, unfinished, incomplete. By the end of the book, the reader is left wondering whether the lack of any point is the entire brilliant theme of the text or just the ultimate literary laziness. The book is overwhelmingly sad and dreary, and without any light of understanding in the end, reading it becomes a chore and not a pleasure. I appreciated the ability of the author, but much in the sense that one might appreciate a fashion show creation - fascinating to look at, impossible to wear, and unlikely to ever be taken home.
October 2, 2013
This reminded me of the card game fluxx, in which the rules change repeatedly, so that you can be on the verge of winning according to one set, when the rules suddenly change and you've lost. The experience of reading this book is similarly disorienting. And yet there are enough ways in which I found myself drawn in, in a conventional way I suppose, that the novel, or rather the novel within the novel, or maybe various of the novels within the novel, where was I, well I felt for him or them, the father as seen by the son as seen by the father, or vice versa, etc., and so forth.
I'm still amused by the idea of The Confessions of Bill Styron by Nat Turner. And by my own idiocy in not realizing I was actually reading it until well into the Darkness Visible section, despite the fact I read that book quite recently.
I'm still amused by the idea of The Confessions of Bill Styron by Nat Turner. And by my own idiocy in not realizing I was actually reading it until well into the Darkness Visible section, despite the fact I read that book quite recently.
February 15, 2013
I dunno, I liked it at times. At least during the times I understood what was going on. For some reason this was a tough read, maybe it was the word play and the different narratives. I could be I wasn't in the mood, or perhaps I am not smart enough to have enjoyed this book.
Regardless of my issues I kept thinking, "I wish Everett would get out of his own way and just tell us a great story." Which is something he is very capable of. I feel like a great story beats the writer's technical pyrotechnics any day of the week.
To my friends who've read and enjoyed this book a lot what am I missing?
Regardless of my issues I kept thinking, "I wish Everett would get out of his own way and just tell us a great story." Which is something he is very capable of. I feel like a great story beats the writer's technical pyrotechnics any day of the week.
To my friends who've read and enjoyed this book a lot what am I missing?
November 27, 2022
Harder to parse than The Trees which was a far blunter instrument of the author's frustration and righteous anger. This is a meditation of the obsolescence of the old. There are a number of strands which are never completely tied off making it a potentially frustrating read, but it barrels along, repeatedly wrongfooting the reader by obscuring who the narrator is and then changing mid-page with little indication. You need to concentrate. Not wholly successful for me, but intriguing enough to make me want to read more Everett and still more after that.
February 27, 2013
A book containing overtly sad material, overt positivity, and humor, that also plays with form. A longer review is here: http://bit.ly/13oB607
July 17, 2025
If you look to literature for engrossing and engaging stories, then Percival Everett's postmodern PERCIVAL EVERETT BY VIRGIL RUSSELL won't do much for you. It's very interesting, it's occasionally very funny, but a comprehensible narrative it ain't.
The set-up: Percival Everett goes to visit his sick and dying father in a nursing home. A writer himself, they have bitter, sardonic banter. They trade ideas for stories. The novel (I think) is made up of these exchanges. It's ABOUT death and despair and going down with two middle fingers raised.
There are several stories within this novel, most of them unresolved by the end. One is about a rancher with a sick horse who needs a vet. One is about a doctor with a patient who can only pay with rare film cameras. One is about a group of nursing home residents who revolt against the staff.
The stories shift around frequently, with intermittent interludes from Percival or his father about different ideas on how things should play out, or different techniques for telling the story. It mostly seems his father is trying to tell stories because he is too old to write them himself. But it also seems the real-world Percival Everett never wants the reader to be too sure of who is the writer or who is the protagonist.
Every story has an underlying theme or focus on death, despair, and legacy. What is despair, can you die with dignity, will anyone remember you (or care) when you're gone. Not exactly light reading, but in true Everett style, he sprinkles in plenty of jokes as well.
I can't recommend this to many readers. It will take a very specific type to enjoy it.
It's a book you can mull over for a while and appreciate, though maybe not necessarily enjoy.
The set-up: Percival Everett goes to visit his sick and dying father in a nursing home. A writer himself, they have bitter, sardonic banter. They trade ideas for stories. The novel (I think) is made up of these exchanges. It's ABOUT death and despair and going down with two middle fingers raised.
There are several stories within this novel, most of them unresolved by the end. One is about a rancher with a sick horse who needs a vet. One is about a doctor with a patient who can only pay with rare film cameras. One is about a group of nursing home residents who revolt against the staff.
The stories shift around frequently, with intermittent interludes from Percival or his father about different ideas on how things should play out, or different techniques for telling the story. It mostly seems his father is trying to tell stories because he is too old to write them himself. But it also seems the real-world Percival Everett never wants the reader to be too sure of who is the writer or who is the protagonist.
Every story has an underlying theme or focus on death, despair, and legacy. What is despair, can you die with dignity, will anyone remember you (or care) when you're gone. Not exactly light reading, but in true Everett style, he sprinkles in plenty of jokes as well.
I can't recommend this to many readers. It will take a very specific type to enjoy it.
It's a book you can mull over for a while and appreciate, though maybe not necessarily enjoy.
March 29, 2025
The most straightforward thing about Percival Everett by Virgil Russell is the dedication to the author's father, who died the year of publication. Maybe it isn't supposed to mean anything, not meant to provide a sturdy frame that the rest of the book can build on. There's certainly nothing else about the novel sufficient to provide the stable ground needed to make bold pronouncements.
It seems Percival Everett by Virgil Russell is an exploration of generational ties. How much we pass on to our children and how much we turn into our parents. The book intertwines story fragments written by a father and a son, except it often isn't clear who is who and even if that is that. It is a challenging novel, with plenty of tangents about language and philosophy and the meaning and significance of words.
I have now read all of Percival Everett's novels — there are a few short story collections still out there. His is an incredible body of work, more original and surprising and uncategorizable than any other writer that I know. Maybe someday I'll try to rank them but from where I'm standing now — far from stable ground — it feels like a daunting task, like comparing oranges and carburetors.
It seems Percival Everett by Virgil Russell is an exploration of generational ties. How much we pass on to our children and how much we turn into our parents. The book intertwines story fragments written by a father and a son, except it often isn't clear who is who and even if that is that. It is a challenging novel, with plenty of tangents about language and philosophy and the meaning and significance of words.
I have now read all of Percival Everett's novels — there are a few short story collections still out there. His is an incredible body of work, more original and surprising and uncategorizable than any other writer that I know. Maybe someday I'll try to rank them but from where I'm standing now — far from stable ground — it feels like a daunting task, like comparing oranges and carburetors.
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