Real Life Rock Top 10: April 8, 2024

The United States of America from Percival Everett to Bruce Springsteen

1. Percival Everett, James (Doubleday).  Everett’s new novel is a revisioning of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told by Jim, or, in the name he claims by the end, James. It follows Everett’s 2021 Trees, on the legacy of the 1955 Emmett Till lynching in Mississippi, a legacy, as he fashions it, that America may never catch up with, and his 2022 James Bond satire Dr. No, which America caught up with in about 1960. The book is many things. With Everett’s 2001 Erasure now the celebrated movie American Fiction, after thirty previous works of fiction, many of them unknown and even the better-known little read, this one will be read by growing numbers of people, for decades, and its weight will shift with time. But one of the things the book is about now is language: language as identity, disguise, weaponry, espionage, humiliation, affirmation, a performance of degradation and exclusion, a reframing of America itself and a claim to full citizenship.