My last memory of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is that it sparked a debate in my sophomore-year English class over whether or not white people could say the N-word. My teacher, bless her heart, wanted to encourage the discussion but did not feel comfortable saying the word herself. That did not, of course, stop the teenage Arizona white boys from throwing the horrific epithet around without a care in the world. I am thankful that Percival Everett has now provided a new memory in the form of James.

The book is, in a word, electrifying. Everett has become one of my favorite authors in no small part due to the eviscerating pace at which his novels move. Erasure (which became the recent movie “American Fiction”) demands you sprint to the end. Telephone challenges you to read the three alternate endings it was published with. And So Much Blue leaps between timelines with ease and precision. Everett is a master of language — particularly when employing as little of it as possible to make his point — and that has never been more evident than in James.

In Cree Myles’ excellent interview with Everett in Elle magazine, the author describes Huck Finn as “the first ‘modern’ novel.” “It’s great,” he tells Myles, and “doesn’t have any deficiencies that I’m addressing.”

He’s not wrong. Huck Finn is a competent and well-plotted (but slightly insane) story about American slavery, the enslaved, the enslaver, and the enduring trauma that exists among them. Race and the slave industry drive the plot: Jim/James is, after all, an escaped slave who may or may not be Huck’s father. Huck himself is a sometimes-Pollyannish character who serves Twain’s commentary on Civil War-era race relations. And Tom Sawyer is a youthful, borderline evil scoundrel who can’t help but cause problems for Black people.

Twain’s characters are caricatures, for the most part, whereas Everett’s are more fully formed. That’s because Everett’s book, says the author himself, is about “people who are slaves,” not slavery.

Perhaps the most effective evidence of this is in James’ control of the English language. He and the fellow slaves he has taught have weaponized their mastery of English to protect themselves from the insecure and violent white folks around them. When James teaches the other slaves African American Vernacular English (aka Black English) as an act of community organizing, Everett is showing us that codeswitching can be magic.

Later in the book, Josiah, an enslaved man James meets along his journey, reminds his compatriots — and the reader — that white people are prone to hysterics when they’re challenged or confronted by the reality that Black people are indeed equal. “There is telling what they will do,” he says. “There’s lots of telling what they’ll do.”

The novel’s climax is further evidence of this, with James’ treatment of Judge Thatcher left to the reader’s interpretation. We don’t know precisely what James will do, but we also do know. And that’s because we see how Thatcher has treated him. Ultimately, James is a sum significantly greater than its parts. Everett has taken a fine (if incredibly racist) book that most American schoolkids are required to read and reimagined it as a modern classic that should fuel some much-needed discussions about contemporary race relations.

Nick Havey is director of Institutional Research at the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, a thriller and mystery writer, and a lover of all fiction. His work has appeared in the Compulsive Reader, Lambda Literary, and a number of peer-reviewed journals.

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