Mark Twain

Percival Everett is a professor of English at the University of Southern California, and the author of numerous works of fiction published over the past forty years. Throughout his oeuvre, he has explored the ways in which texts engage with other texts, and has vigorously critiqued the persistent stereotyping of African Americans in the cultural history of the United States. His best-known novel is probably Erasure (2001), a complex satire directed at the publishing and media industries. Cord Jefferson’s recent adaptation of that novel, American Fiction, which won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for 2023, has drawn further attention to Everett’s whole career. However, James, Everett’s reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), from the perspective of the escaped slave Jim, may prove to be his most critically and commercially successful work thus far.

Reading Mark Twain on Australia in the 1890s is a bit like watching Shane Warne bowl these days: you sense the playing up to the audience and an undignified element of hustle; a tendency to rely on the old tricks to fill the space and manufacture the laughs/wickets. And yet there’s no doubting the copiousness of the art, no resisting the tarnished genius on display. Sure, it would be nice to have more of the early Twain’s concentrated wit, and less reliance on showmanship, but to unwish this account of his antipodean travels would be aesthetically, emotionally, even morally wrong.