Page 12 →Chapter 1 An Overview of Everett’s Life and Career

Percival Leonard Everett II was born to Percival Leonard Everett and Dorothy Stinson Everett on December 22, 1956, at Fort Gordon, Georgia, where his father was stationed as a sergeant in the United States Army. Not long after the younger Percival’s birth, his family moved to Columbia, South Carolina, and his father took up dentistry, continuing a family tradition—his grandfather, paternal uncles, and younger sister were or are also physicians (Taylor, “Art” 56–57)—from which the future author excused himself: “I had to break the chain” (Markazi 16). In addition to noting the history of doctors in his family, Everett traces his ancestry back in other ways that “dispel some of the stereotypes of the South. I have a ‘white’ great grandfather, a Jew who lived in Texas where he married a former slave. He sent my grandfather to medical school in Tennessee, which he left to eventually become a practitioner in South Carolina” (Mills and Lanco 230). His family lived “on a hill off Harden Street” near the University of South Carolina in the center of Columbia. He has described his memories of growing up in Columbia as “very pleasant” and remembers “books being around the house and accessible” during his childhood. He likewise recalls “sneak[ing] over to McKissick [Library] on the university campus and into the stacks, … [which] were so musty and the books so strange and wonderful I could read forever” (Starr, “I Get Bored” 19). His early literary experiences developed his taste for both breaking rules and solitude: “I remember quite well, early on, reading something I thought I shouldn’t be reading, Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, which I got from my father’s shelf. I think I was nine. It was fun because I didn’t think I was supposed to read it. As I look back, I think that it’s reading, probably even more than writing, that I find important. Reading is subversive because you necessarily do it by yourself” (Taylor, “Art” 69). The hook for reading and inquiry was evidently set quite profoundly during Everett’s childhood.

Despite these kind words for Columbia, Everett has also stated elsewhere that he has “a troubled relationship with the South and with the United States in general” (Mills and Lanco 230). He graduated in 1973 from A. C. Flora High School—coincidentally also the alma mater of the controversial political strategist Lee Atwater—at the age of sixteen and quickly departed for Florida, never again to live in South Carolina. After being invited in the late 1980s to address the South Carolina legislature as the recipient of the Governor’s Award in the Arts, he was outspokenly disdainful of South Carolina’s continued display of the Confederate battle flag on the State House grounds. In a 2001 essay entitled “Why I’m from Texas,” Everett renounced his South Carolinian origins while recalling his aborted speech before the lawmakers of the Palmetto State:

Page 14 →I don’t discuss South Carolina and the confederate flag anymore because I’m sick of it. Since telling the South Carolina State Legislature in 1989 that I couldn’t continue my address because of the presence of such a conspicuous sign of exclusion, I have not really considered South Carolina. I was invited to Charleston’s Spoleto Festival by my dear friend Josephine Humphreys to participate in a writers’ protest over the Confederate flag, but I could no longer generate enough concern. There were two things at work. First, the flag probably ought to be there—in the same way that a big sign saying “Land Mines!” ought to be set at the edge of a field containing land mines. If it is so hard for the government of the state to decide to remove the stupid thing, then there must be a reason and that reason can’t be good. Second, who gives a rat’s ass[?] It’s a waste of energy to fight over it. It’s an ugly flag with an ugly history becoming the emblem of a state with more than its share of ugly people. (62)

Although he has expressed his fondness for the topography of the state and for “a few people there,” there is no mistaking his vitriol toward those South Carolinians who insisted that the Confederate battle flag stay aloft at the State House until it was finally removed under protest in the summer of 2015: “the image of those neanderthal, pathetically under-educated, confederate-clad, so-called descendants of pathetically under-educated cannon fodder of the middle 19th century sticks in my head like a John Waters version of the Dukes of Hazzard” (63). Everett demonstrated that this view does not encompass all South Carolinians by accepting his selection into the South Carolina Academy of Authors Literary Hall of Fame in 2011.

Comparatively little of Everett’s fiction is set in South Carolina or in the South generally; nevertheless, three moments from Everett’s career in which he does use southern settings illustrate the ways in which his downplaying of southern and/or South Carolinian identity goes beyond his claim not to “write out of any loyalty to a place” (Dischinger 260). Everett finds it a “vacuous marker to say that someone is a Southern writer” because the “implication is that their concerns as a writer and a person are going to be different than a person somewhere else” (261). He does not, however, merely reject the “southern” label; he also actively transmogrifies what those who would affix it to a writer are intending to signify by doing so.

Everett has stated that his “entire relationship with the South has been formed by [his] family background” (Mills and Lanco 230), and his second novel, Walk Me to the Distance, is an early instance in which Everett questions the extent to which such ties actually bind an individual. Roughly two-thirds of the way through the novel, there is a brief section in which the protagonist, Page 15 →David Larson, leaves his newly adopted home in rural Wyoming for a visit to his native Savannah, Georgia, which is separated from South Carolina only by the unimposing Savannah River. David has not been back to Savannah since returning from the Vietnam War, during which his parents were killed in a car accident, and before leaving Wyoming he can articulate his reasons for wanting to go back only in formulaic terms: “He needed some distance from the ranch. Especially with winter coming. And he did feel, or thought he felt, some need to connect again with family” (139). While back in Savannah he has several brief and stiff conversations with his sister Jill and her husband, both of whom have gone from being antiwar activists to advocates helping Vietnam War veterans “adjust to the system” (38). He also encounters a high-school friend named Stan Grover, who is missing an eye and now working as a security guard in a labyrinthine and “disorienting” (148) shopping mall. Furthermore he inadvertently engages in a series of increasingly awkward interactions with three women: a divorcée named Elaine, with whom his sister attempts to set him up; Stan’s alcoholic wife Beth, who reveals that Stan is missing his eye because he mutilated himself to avoid being drafted; and a woman named Carol, who picks him up in a bar and who lives with her Parkinson’s-afflicted grandfather.

After these “quickly passing, uncomfortable days in Savannah” he hastens back to his new life in Wyoming, and the narrator remarks that his brief sojourn in Georgia had “left David with a haunting sense that something significant had presented itself to him” (163). That “something significant” seems apophatically to be the understanding that nothing significant is left for David in the city where he grew up. The novel’s opening has already rejected another possible influence related to geography, noting that David returned from Vietnam “as unremarkable as he had been when he left” (3). The narrative thus suggests that neither Savannah nor Vietnam—synecdochical analogues, respectively, for the compulsory aspects of familial and national identity—has formed David in the ways that both the human and natural environments of Slut’s Hole, Wyoming, potentially can. By the end of the novel, David decides that even though it is not true that “he was there [in Wyoming] because he wanted to be,” it is also true that “he couldn’t be anyplace else” (207).

On numerous occasions Everett has noted his belief that “truth has nothing to do with reality or facts” (Champion 166). In “Why I’m from Texas,” Everett employs this philosophy as he bypasses South Carolina entirely, eschewing factual biography in favor of emotionally truthful biography: “I’m from Texas. My grandfather was from Texas, from outside Dallas. Great-grandparents flipped a coin to determine whether my grandfather or his brother would head east to attend Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. My grandfather won the toss, I guess. And after working his way through school playing Page 16 →trombone in a circus band, he married my grandmother who was from South Carolina and that’s where they lived. That’s where my father grew up. That’s where my mother grew up. And that’s where I grew up. But I’m from Texas” (63). Although one should always beware of drawing parallels between Everett and his characters, this passage illustrates that David at least resembles his creator in recognizing his emotional detachment from the places in his past.

More than a decade later Everett published a short story entitled “The Appropriation of Cultures” (1997), which was later included in his collection damned if i do (2004). The story’s protagonist, Daniel Barkley, shares even more biographical details with Everett than David Larson does, but he departs from both Everett and David in having moved back “home” after being away for a while. In Daniel’s case, home is Columbia, South Carolina, to which he returns after receiving the “degree in American Studies from Brown University that he had earned, but that had not yet earned anything for him” (Everett, damned 91). Daniel lives a relatively idle life in Columbia at first, casually maintaining himself by spending a monetary inheritance while simultaneously becoming aware of his desire to claim a different and unusual cultural inheritance. One night while Daniel is sitting in with a local jazz band, “some white boys from a fraternity … began to shout ‘Play “Dixie” for us! Play “Dixie” for us!’” (91). Rather than being either offended or threatened by this ignorant request for “the song he had grown up hating, the song the whites had always pulled out to remind themselves and those other people just where they were” (92), Daniel performs the song in a way that reclaims it as part of his own heritage, not just that of the powerfully racialized elite that the fraternity boys represent: “He sang it, feeling the lyrics, deciding that the lyrics were his, deciding that the song was his…. The irony of his playing the song straight and from the heart was made more ironic by the fact that as he played it, it came straight and from his heart, as he was claiming Southern soil, or at least recognizing his blood in it. His was the land of cotton and, hell no, it was not forgotten” (92–93). Encouraged by his success at transforming “Dixie,” he returns home and reads about the Confederate infantry attack during the Battle of Gettysburg known as “Pickett’s Charge,” dreaming afterward about confronting rebel soldiers en route to the battle and demanding that they “give back my flag” (93).

This dream spurs him to action in his waking life, and he proceeds to answer a classified ad for a pickup truck decorated with a decal of the Confederate battle flag in the rear window. Daniel’s interest in the truck baffles the white woman selling it, especially when he claims that he feels exceptionally fortunate “to find a truck with the black-power flag already on it” (100). Later, when a pair of angry rednecks with a “rebel front plate” on their car demand to know why he is driving a truck with the flag decal on it, he coolly explains Page 17 →that he is “flying it proudly…. Just like you, brothers” (101). When a carload of young black teenagers pulls up just as the two white men begin pushing Daniel, the rednecks drive off and Daniel exhorts the teenagers to continue the symbolic expansion/undermining of the nostalgic mythology of the South that both “Dixie” and the Confederate battle flag represent: “Get a flag and fly it proudly” (101). Although the text does not indicate the teenagers’ response, the final paragraph of the story suggests the ultimate outcome of Daniel’s efforts at appropriating the previously exclusionary symbols of southern heritage:

Soon, there were several, then many cars and trucks in Columbia, South Carolina, sporting Confederate flags and being driven by black people. Black businessmen and ministers wore rebel-flag buttons on their lapels and clips on their ties. The marching band of South Carolina State College, a predominantly black land-grant institution in Orangeburg, paraded with the flag during homecoming. Black people all over the state flew the Confederate flag. The symbol began to disappear from the fronts of big rigs and the back windows of jacked-up four-wheelers. And after the emblem was used to dress the yards and mark picnic sites of black family reunions the following Fourth of July, the piece of cloth was quietly dismissed from its station with the U.S. and State flags atop the State Capitol. There was no ceremony, no notice. One day, it was not there. (102–3)

Eighteen years before the actual removal of the Confederate battle flag from the S.C. State House, Everett imagined a means of turning the “ugly flag with an ugly history” (“Why I’m from Texas” 62) into merely “a piece of cloth” by the simple act of asserting a different, idiosyncratic truth about its meaning. As Everett stated in an interview conducted not long before Gov. Nikki Haley finally decided to remove the flag from the State House, “It’s pretty obvious that if you appropriate something, you can change it” (Dischinger 262). William Ramsey has noted that the change Everett envisioned does not simply invert racial power “in the spirit of black cultural nationalism”; it achieves an alteration “through mutation rather than a rationalistic clash of abstract ideas” (129). It is, as Anthony Stewart asserted, an “opportunity to see differently an artifact so steeped in a very specific reading” (“About” 190). The incredulity of the white people in the story when faced with Daniel’s act of (re)appropriation illustrates Everett’s broader concern with any act of “specific reading” that prescribes meaning. Daniel’s act is simultaneously subversive and creative, mirroring Everett’s own stated preference.

Everett continued this mutational approach to southern history and identity by confronting the mythology surrounding one of South Carolina’s most controversial and most beloved sons in A History of the African-American Page 18 →People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid (2004). This wondrously strange book is discussed at length in chapter 3, but the basic premise is that Everett and his University of Southern California colleague, and actual coauthor, James R. Kincaid are approached via letter by a man named Barton Wilkes, apparently an overzealous, and possibly insane, junior aide to Sen. Strom Thurmond. Wilkes wants the two of them to ghostwrite a book on African American history that will be attributed publicly to the then-nonagenarian politician in an effort to articulate the “true and unmistakable understanding (ripe to the core)” of “the colored people (aka Afro-Americans, negroes, people of color, and blacks)” (7) that Thurmond has ostensibly acquired during his decades of stalwart public support for legal segregation and other racist policies. Kincaid wrote about the book’s intentions in 2005: “Strom was so brilliantly successful because he operated with so little awareness of any world but his own. He was a laughing stock and a power; a dangerous segregationist and a softie…. Strom, we decided, was an ideological marvel and we would treat him as such”; doing so entailed “mak[ing] the novel turn from satire into something more serious” (“Collaborating” 370). Everett noted, “I realized … that I didn’t dislike him as much as I thought I did. Not that I would ever champion him at all. He’s a racist asshole, but he became a little more human for me, and he became interesting to me…. Thurmond isn’t important enough for me to vilify him so greatly. He’s interesting to me historically and culturally, but he’s just kind of a sad man, in many ways, who did have a very full and strangely important American life” (Stewart, “Uncategorizable” 309, 311). This comment hearkens back to Everett’s previously noted comment about needing to “respect” the things he writes about despite not agreeing with them—as is clearly the case with Thurmond. Even in the case of a target as ripe for satirical savaging as Thurmond would seem to be, Lavelle Porter has insisted that Everett still prefers to dismantle his legacy and mutate the resultant fragments rather than simply lampoon him: “Thurmond is already a cartoon character on his own, and yet Everett manages to spin a madcap story out of this ludicrous, deadly life, all the while showing America its ugly true self sans all the patriotic bluster about exceptionalism, integrity and honor” (L. Porter).

These three moments from Everett’s career not only illustrate his relationship to his personal past in South Carolina but also shed some light on his tendency to keep moving, literally and figuratively, throughout his adult life. His lack of interest in his prospective audiences’ expectations or desires—“I write to make art…. I don’t think about the audience” (Bengali 113)—suggests his comfort Page 19 →with thinking and writing in the moment, and Everett’s connections to ideas, to places, and to people are neither absolute nor eternal, regardless of their intensity. Where some might be inclined to see instability or restlessness in Everett’s frequent physical relocations; his extreme variations in style, genre, and medium as an artist; or perhaps even in the fact that he has been married four times, it is more productive to see this penchant for vagabondage as the natural by-product of a personality that freely admits to being “pretty bored with myself” (Anderson 52) and constantly needing to discover “stuff that’s smart, stuff that challenges me and makes me think differently, that introduces me to things I didn’t know before” (Shavers, “Percival” 48). Moreover, when Everett encounters such new “stuff,” he devotes himself to it intently:

I have a novel, Watershed, which is about a hydrologist. I didn’t know anything about hydrology. So I read twenty-five or twenty-six texts on geomorphology and hydrology and went out with a hydrologist in Wyoming to do some stream studies before I wrote a word. I wanted to be able to write and sound like a hydrologist without sounding like someone who had read twenty-six books on geomorphology and hydrology. That required me to know enough to stop speaking about hydrology and start thinking about it. When I finally started working on the novel, I actually drew topographical maps of an imagined watershed in northern Colorado and wrote hydrologic reports about that watershed. I was imagining myself doing the research that the character from my novel was doing. One or two of the hydrologic reports actually became a part of the novel. (Medlin and Gore 157–58)

Whether or not such a personality makes him a difficult individual is for those closest to him to decide, but his interviewers, students, and collaborators echo one another in noting that his innate “sense of alienation” and “blessedly independent” mind-set (Ehrenreich 28) do not prevent him from being “quite gregarious and generous with his time” (Shavers, “Percival” 47). There is no doubt, however, that his attitude toward the world around him helps explain his prodigious artistic output, especially in light of how he manages the demands placed on his time by his many and varied interests. Ben Ehrenreich cataloged Everett’s days in a 2002 interview:

Everett keeps busy. He sleeps about four hours a night, but only, he says, because his wife has been encouraging him to sleep more. Left to himself it would just be two or three. He spends a lot of time painting, colorful abstract work reminiscent of Kandinsky or Klee. He reads a lot, “not so much fiction as everything,” he says…. He writes a lot too, but says he’s Page 20 →trying to figure out a way to write less. He does woodworking, and did a lot of the construction on the ranch [outside Los Angeles] himself. In Canada, during the summer months, he fly-fishes. He’s learning to slice wine bottles in half. He maintains an insect collection. Of course, he teaches, both writing and literature, last year chairing USC’s English department. (27)

Ehrenreich’s astute observation that his “work consistently betrays a deep and abiding mistrust for all human collectivities” (27) hints at Everett’s preference for the solitude of a writing desk, a fishing stream, or a mule-training corral. However, the fondness with which Everett speaks about his decades-long career as a classroom teacher—“I like to sit with these bright young people and talk about their work. I learn a lot from them. I’m privileged” (Mills, Julien, and Tissut 222)—and the fact that his colleagues in multiple academic departments have trusted him with the often-contentious task of serving as department chair mitigate the impression that his penchant for solitude is some kind of character flaw. Kincaid claimed that Everett is “very much a loner, despite being such a warm person” (Bengali 115), but Everett is no misanthrope, despite expressing the sentiment that “people are worse than anybody” (Wounded 166; Ehrenreich 27) repeatedly in his interviews and his fiction. He clearly understands the extent to which writing, especially in the manner and volume he practices it, is an isolating and possibly even damaging endeavor: “Starting a novel is like entering a bad marriage. No matter what I do, it’s going to end badly, to be full of emotional ups and downs. It’s going to alienate me and I’m going to be alienated from anyone I know, family, friends—and it’s going to last a lot longer [than] I want it to” (Mills, Julien, and Tissut 224).

Everett’s wandering began in earnest immediately after he graduated from high school, when he moved on to study at the University of Miami, from which he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1977 with a major in philosophy and a minor in biochemistry. He has specified that the presence of the logician Howard Pospesel on the faculty was among the reasons for choosing to attend Miami (Taylor, “Art” 57). He paid his tuition in part via two, among a multitude, of his curious avocations, playing guitar in various jazz clubs around Miami as well as teaching high school. Everett noted that although he “remained a Southerner there, considering that Florida is as far South as you can go in the United States,” he also felt significant—and welcome—cultural distinctions between Miami and Columbia: “It was there I got a foreign accent, in college where everyone around me was actually speaking Spanish. The character of Miami was not at all like South Carolina where the Civil War started and where I had a high school teacher who taught us the Civil War was a war of aggression” (Mills and Lanco 230).

Page 21 →The next period of his life involved a pair of gradual transformations, both from a would-be philosopher into a writer of fiction and from an ostensible southerner to the westerner he self-identifies as to this day: “I am a Westerner. I don’t think about the South. I don’t want to return and live in the South. I want to see the sun set on the ocean” (Mills and Lanco 231). In a 2013 interview he recalled driving through the West immediately after graduating from Miami and having a reaction similar to that of David Larson at the end of Walk Me to the Distance: “He passed through Utah’s Canyonlands, and then carried on into Wyoming where he beheld the Wind River Range. ‘I said, “All right, this is it; this is where I belong,”’ Everett recalls. ‘I fell in love with the landscape. I fell in love with Wyoming’” (Mernit). Everett’s first extended experience of living in the West took place in the college town of Eugene, Oregon, where he continued his study of philosophy, doing coursework for a doctorate at the University of Oregon under the guidance of the noted ordinary language philosopher Frank Ebersole from 1978 to 1980. His extracurricular connection to the region was deepened by the fact that he “worked on sheep and cattle ranches all the while” (Ehrenreich 26). Everett has continued this intertwining of academic and agricultural life since then and resists defining himself by one more than the other, often celebrating the perceived contradictions: “I’m a card-carrying member of the ACLU, and I go to the ballet, and I train mules and I write fiction for a living…. It means absolutely nothing. People live in the worlds they live in, and they’re interested in the things that interest them” (Shavers, “Percival” 49). Moreover, he has indicated that his work as an animal trainer is indispensable to his writing: “Animals teach me patience…. What working with the animals allows me is the opportunity to trust myself. As I realize they trust me, then I can trust myself. I know that I’ll get the work done” (Mills, Julien, and Tissut 226).

Although Everett abandoned academic philosophy two years into his graduate studies at Oregon, he still found inspiration of a different kind in the concepts to which he had been exposed: “I was interested in logic as an undergraduate. I seem to have a talent for mathematical logic. I started reading Wittgenstein and became interested in language. I continued to study ordinary language philosophy, and it turns out a lot of ordinary language philosophy was the construction of scenes in which people talked about or around philosophical questions. I became disenchanted with philosophy. Wittgenstein said, ‘Philosophy is a sick endeavor,’ and I realized that the patient, at least for me, was terminal…. So I started writing fiction as a better way to approach philosophical ideas” (Starr, “I Get Bored” 20). Everett has maintained this interest in and engagement with philosophy throughout his career of writing and teaching literature. Sylvie Bauer has contended that “if he claims to have made the choice of literature, it is nevertheless the voices of philosophers that Page 22 →permeate his work, both openly and more discreetly, and intersect with it [S’il affirme avoir fait le choix de la littérature, il n’en reste pas moins que les voix des philosophes traversent son œuvre, ouvertement et plus discrètement et s’entrecroisent avec elle]” (“A good place” 10). He stated in a 2005 interview that “basically, all of my books come out of a desire to explore something about language and how language works, even though I do write stories that deal with other things, maybe” (Mills, Julien, and Tissut 218). He likewise told Taylor that his writing is innately rooted in philosophical inquiry: “I start with something that bugs me, some philosophical problem, and then I look for a way to explore it” (“Art” 49). He expanded on the lingering influence of his formal training in ordinary language philosophy by noting, “I come back again and again to the work of J. L. Austin, who not only intrigues me but entertains me and calls into question what I think about language” (53).

His fiction sometimes foregrounds formal philosophy even more explicitly. For example, Glyph (1999) is not only stuffed to the point of bursting with the vocabularies of poststructuralist theory, semiotics, and continental philosophy, but it also turns such notable philosophers as Socrates, G. E. Moore, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Ludwig Wittgenstein into literary characters within parodies of Platonic dialogues. In a less comical vein, large sections of his grim novel The Water Cure (2007) consist of fragmentary observations drawn from philosophy of language, ranging from the classical to the contemporary. In a similar vein, Everett has indicated that the “working title for Percival Everett by Virgil Russell was ‘Frege’s Puzzle.’ The novel is in three sections—‘Phosphorus,’ ‘Hesperus,’ and ‘Venus,’ in other words, the evening star, the morning star, and the planet Venus. These are all the same thing, but are different things. That was Frege’s puzzle—how is it that we have these referents for different things that are the same thing? It’s one way of approaching a problem of identity, and that’s often what drives me and a lot of my work—the notion of logic and identity” (Taylor, “Art” 49).

Everett told Anthony Stewart in 2007 that he continues to use Wittgenstein in his literary theory courses at USC, albeit in ways that demonstrate his commitment to writing fiction rather than practicing academic philosophy: “I’m not teaching this to give them theories as much as I am to demystify the reasons we have them. And to teach them to make fun of it, and I do mean to make fun of it. To ask the question that Wittgenstein would have us ask of any philosophical premise or treatise or statement, which is ‘What do you mean by that?’” (“Uncategorizable” 304). Although Everett has never stated the connection himself, the formal philosophical roots of his interest in writing fiction align him perfectly with the original conception of Menippean satire as a literary counterargument to flawed philosophies (see chapter 2).

Page 23 →Everett returned to the East Coast in the fall of 1980 to study creative writing at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, albeit under somewhat unusual circumstances: “I was never a student in the workshop at Brown. I guess I tend to be a little bit cranky, and … I said I didn’t want to go to any classes. And Brown, then, was kind of interesting. They said okay. And so I just wrote and lived in Providence basically” (Allen, “Interview” 107). While there, he developed a relationship with Robert Coover, to whom Everett dedicated an unconventional short story entitled “Between Here and There” (2012), which consists mainly of a mathematical formula followed by a three-page list of gerunds. Everett repurposed this story—without the dedication—a year later in Percival Everett by Virgil Russell. Coover’s work resembles Everett’s in many ways, not the least important of which is that both are “interested in hyper-reality” (Reynolds 179). Coover is also like Everett in his erudition, his love of formal experimentation, his diversity of subject matter, and his refusal to conform to the expectations of the literary marketplace. His 1977 novel The Public Burning, about the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, was a best seller but was also widely condemned by the literary establishment for its vulgarity, in particular a scene in which Uncle Sam, the iconic American self-representation, gleefully sodomizes Richard Nixon on a golf course to consecrate the latter’s selection as an acceptable future president. Coover was in residence, though not yet teaching, at Brown in 1981, but Everett has recalled that he “liked him” (Allen, “Interview” 107). Everett also struck up an odd friendship with R. V. Cassill, another member of the writing faculty at Brown. Everett recalled “play[ing] chess every night” with Cassill and “lik[ing him] as a person” despite “not [being] a fan of [his] work” (Allen, “Interview” 107). While at Brown, Everett produced what would become his first published work, a two-page short story titled “Rose Nose” that was published in the Aspen Journal for the Arts in 1982.

The manuscript for his first novel, Suder, was originally submitted as his master’s thesis under the title “Suter.” The novelist Barry Beckham, a longtime member of the graduate creative writing faculty at Brown, is listed as the director of Everett’s thesis, though Everett had not spoken about their collaboration in any published interview as of late 2017. One may reasonably infer some degree of influence from Everett’s choice of subject matter and tone, given that Beckham’s satirical novel Runner Mack (1972) deals with the trials and tribulations of an African American baseball player who is “hoping in vain that he will one day play professional baseball and achieve the American Dream for which the game purportedly stands” (Rutter, “Barry” 74). Beckham has stated that “the main part of our relationship was friendly” and that Everett “may have been” influenced by his novel but “didn’t want to tell him that” (90n2). In the same interview he also expressed sentiments about authorship that could Page 24 →just as easily have come from Everett: “the role of the writer in general is not to solve the problem. I don’t think that is our responsibility or objective. More importantly, we bring up the issues and leave it [sic] there for the reader” (76). In her analyses of both books, Emily Rutter made a case for reading Suder in the context of Runner Mack, whether or not there was any direct or intentional influence on Everett: “Beckham originated a tradition of black baseball fiction, extended by Everett’s Suder, that critiques dominant American myths without replacing them with an alternative mythos or pantheon of heroes” (77).

Everett has indicated that Cassill’s assistance was invaluable in getting the adapted manuscript of his thesis published as a book: “It was Verlin [Cassill], who was not my professor, who took my first novel and sent it to his agent without telling me and I received a call from her. And she asked if she could represent me, and that was the start of my career. It was very generous of him” (Allen, “Interview” 107). Suder was ultimately published by Viking Press in 1983, when Everett was only twenty-six years old.

The exact details of Everett’s next three years are somewhat hard to pinpoint, but he continued to move around the country while he established his literary credentials. The dust jacket for the first edition of Suder indicates that “Mr. Everett is currently living on Cape Cod, where he is writing a new novel,” and one can reasonably assume that this “new novel” was Walk Me to the Distance, which was published by Houghton Mifflin’s Ticknor and Fields imprint in 1985. Although none of Everett’s interviews or biographical essays corroborates either detail, the dust jacket for this second novel claims that Everett was living in the West again and married at the time of its publication: “Mr. Everett and his wife, Julie, live in Portland, Oregon, where he is writing a new novel [likely Cutting Lisa, which is set on the Oregon coast].” The curriculum vitae accompanying Everett’s faculty profile on the USC Web page indicates that he received the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship from the University of New Mexico in 1984. This award provided a paid month of residence at a ranch near Taos, New Mexico, that formerly belonged to the esteemed British novelist for whom the fellowship is named. As they did for Lawrence, both Taos in particular and New Mexico generally seem to have left a lasting impression on Everett, as he set several subsequent works—for example, American Desert, The Water Cure, Assumption—there. In the fall of 1985 Everett moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where he served as a visiting assistant professor of English at the University of Kentucky for a year before taking a continuing position there that would eventually also include becoming director of the graduate creative writing program. Ticknor and Fields published his third novel, Cutting Lisa, in 1986.

Page 25 →Despite the major differences in their settings and in the basic outlines of their plots, both Suder and Walk Me to the Distance feature protagonists who seem to be questing after something. Nearly two decades after Suder’s publication, Everett spoke to Bauer about his general affinity for such narratives: “One of my fascinations is with the western figure. But it doesn’t start there but with Cervantes, all those novels of chivalry. The Bible: nothing but quest stories. Some fail, some don’t…. In my novels, it depends on what you mean by failure” (“Percival Everett” 9). In Everett’s first novel, Craig Suder is suffering from a profound slump in performance, both in his professional life as a third baseman for the Seattle Mariners and in his personal life as a husband and father. His difficulties stem in part from haunting childhood memories of his mother’s descent into insanity, and he worries that his troubles are a sign of similar problems manifesting in him. He leaves home for a cabin in the mountains and acquires an unlikely pair of companions—a precocious nine-year-old runaway named Jincy and a circus elephant he names Renoir—for his attempts at getting his head straight. The story alternates among comic tableaux, flashbacks to Craig’s childhood, episodes of profound psychological disturbance, and meditations on the power of art—most specifically Charlie Parker’s song “Ornithology”—to transcend human limitations.

Walk Me to the Distance focuses on David Larson, who finds himself in Slut’s Hole, Wyoming—ostensibly given its crude name by cowboys because “everybody comes here and then they leave” (5)—for the sole reason that he has perforated his radiator while shooting at jackrabbits during his aimless drive through the western mountains and prairies. Facing a two-week wait for a new radiator, he strikes up a friendship with an old woman named Chloe Sixbury, who runs a ranch outside town and cares for her mentally disabled adult son Patrick. David eventually moves in with Sixbury and takes a job as the caretaker of an interstate highway rest area an hour’s drive away. This job initially requires him only to dump noxious chemicals in the toilet occasionally and serve as nonsexual company for a prostitute working among the truckers who pass through. However, when a seven-year-old Vietnamese girl is abandoned at the rest area, David ends up taking her home and becoming her surrogate father, as much by default as by intention. He names the girl Butch, and a strange, decidedly nonnuclear family begins taking shape at Sixbury’s ranch, though not before a pair of violent incidents involving Patrick.

Cutting Lisa is yet another striking thematic departure, telling the story—from his own rather stodgy first-person perspective—of a widowed obstetrician named John Livesey, who leaves his home in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., to visit his son Elgin and daughter-in-law Lisa in coastal Oregon. Not long after he arrives, the young couple discover that Lisa Page 26 →is pregnant, spinning the narrative off into unexpected directions as Livesey recalls a harrowing, and foreshadowing, episode from his career as an obstetrician and as he deduces unpleasant facts about the role that infidelity played in the conception of Lisa’s baby. By the end of the story, Livesey feels entitled to dispense his personal notion of justice in response to Lisa’s betrayal of his son. With his characteristic blend of self-assurance and ambiguity he claims that “sometimes, sometimes you just have to do something” (121) and ends up doing what the book’s title foreshadows, cutting into Lisa’s womb without her consent to terminate the pregnancy. The novel is dedicated—albeit only by first name—to the visual artist Shere Coleman, who is explicitly mentioned as being Everett’s wife in the biographical blurb on the back cover of Everett’s fourth book, The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair, a collection of stories published with little fanfare by the independent August House press in 1987.

Each of Everett’s first three novels garnered generally positive reviews. Suder was hailed by his fellow novelist Carolyn See as a “mad work of comic genius, combining symbols and myths from ancients and moderns, juxtaposing heartbreak with farce to make up a narrative that has never been told before” (8); and Walk Me to the Distance led Steven Weisenburger to state presciently that Everett “gives every indication of becoming a productive, first-rate writer” (“Out West” 490). Cutting Lisa’s reviews were more varied, in no small measure because its ending involves a man self-righteously justifying a forcible abortion that he plans to perform on his daughter-in-law. Nonetheless these three books are perhaps equally significant within Everett’s body of work for the mere fact that each of them was released by relatively major publishers. With the exception of God’s Country, initially published by Faber and Faber; Erasure, first published in hardcover by University Press of New England but republished soon thereafter in paperback by Hyperion; and American Desert, published by Hyperion, all of Everett’s subsequent books have been published by small, independent presses.

As unconventional as Everett’s first three novels were, he was also moving in thematic and stylistic directions that conflicted still more severely with the limitations that he saw as by-products of both the unhealthy intellectual environment of the United States and the market-driven mind-set of mainstream publishing: “The problem that economic censorship presents is a hushing of ideas and indeed the censorship itself is merely a symptom of the insidious political disease which infects our culture” (“Signing to the Blind” 9). Not surprisingly, Everett chose to move his work to venues in which his ideas would not be “hush[ed],” a decision that in itself becomes part of a Menippean critique of the metastasis of this cultural “disease.” The negative effects of this choice on his potential sales and renown have presumably been offset many times over Page 27 →in Everett’s view by his books finding their way into the hands of the kinds of conscientious readers he desires.

In 1989 Everett moved north to South Bend, Indiana, where he began a two-year stint as professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Although he has never commented on it directly, this must have been a somewhat uncomfortable situation, given that institution’s conspicuously Catholic identity and Everett’s complete disconnect from religion: “My grandfather was an atheist, my father is—was—an agnostic and I am what I call an ‘apath.’ I simply don’t care” (Mills, Julien, and Tissut 224). During his time at Notre Dame, he published two novels that moved him still further away from the comparatively realistic style and contemporary settings of his first four books.

As his only long-form foray into science fiction, Zulus remains distinct within Everett’s motley output to this day. As Darryl Dickson-Carr noted, it has more in common with the linguistically complex and formally challenging science fiction of Samuel R. Delany—best known for his epic 1975 novel Dhalgren—than with the works of such mainstream SF writers as Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke (103). The novel is set in the fairly distant aftermath of a nuclear war, and the plot is interspersed with short poetic fragments corresponding to the letter denoting each alphabetically sequenced chapter. It tells the story of Alice Achitophel, a massively obese woman who also has the distinction of being perhaps the only fertile female remaining in her society, a fact that becomes immeasurably more significant after she is raped in the opening pages of the book and instantly becomes convinced that she is pregnant. She lives in a quasi-normal urban landscape that evokes the dystopian underground community of Topeka depicted in Harlan Ellison’s postapocalyptic masterpiece A Boy and His Dog (1969). The literally and figuratively sterile remnant of American society is kept docile with government cheese and crackers, horrendously vapid television, and an intrusive bureaucracy, within which Alice works as a minor cogwheel in a massive clockwork. As the novel progresses, Alice falls in with a group of rebels who offer her not only the rarity of fresh fruit but also protection for her unborn child and a means of escape from the oppressive world she inhabits. Alice undergoes a literal and figurative transformation among the rebels, who end up caring more for the potential of her baby than for the reality of her, and the novel ends with the newly thin but disillusioned Alice and her lover/collaborator Kevin Peters seemingly about to release a gas that will kill off what remains of human life on earth. Everett’s fellow novelist Clarence Major reviewed the book for the Washington Post, praising Everett’s “gifts as a lyrical writer” and the novel’s “display of [his] interest in language and its relation to the activity of the imagination” (4). Again, Everett’s choice of publisher—Permanent Press, a small press based in the Long Page 28 →Island seaside community of Sag Harbor—limited the novel’s potential audience, but even so it received the New American Writing Award for 1990 from the influential California literary magazine/press Sun & Moon.

For Her Dark Skin (1990) regresses Everett’s temporal focus from the dystopian future to the mythic past. Everett again mutates an existing narrative to serve his own artistic goals, retelling the Greek story of Jason and Medea. He has declared that the idea for the novel arose “out of my long-standing dissatisfaction with the slant of the existing story—that the excuse for [Medea] killing her children was that this woman had gone mad. That seemed too simple…. She is a hero in my estimation” (Mills, Julien, and Tissut 219). Published by Owl Creek, a now-defunct small press in Seattle, the novel received far less notice upon release than his previous books. Nevertheless subsequent readers have praised its wit and inventiveness: “With its use of modern slang and humorous literariness, Everett’s novel, for the most part, emerges as an aesthetically charming retelling of the Medea myth that is, boldly, not totally reliant upon Euripides’[s] version of it” (Flota 90). For Her Dark Skin also serves as a real-life analogue for one of the books authored by “Monk” Ellison, the protagonist/narrator of Everett’s subsequent novel, Erasure (2001). Ellison finds a copy of his novel The Persians shelved in the “African American Studies” section of a chain bookstore and expresses his frustration with this categorization: “Someone interested in African American Studies would have little interest in my books and would be confused by their presence in this section. Someone looking for an obscure reworking of a Greek tragedy would not consider looking in that section any more than in the gardening section. The result in either case, no sale” (28).

Also in 1990 a made-for-television movie called Follow Your Heart was produced by the NBC network, ostensibly as an adaptation of Walk Me to the Distance. Everett was not directly involved in writing the screenplay or in the production of the film, but he still described the entire process as a “terrible experience” (Mills, Julien, and Tissut 227). The story of Walk Me to the Distance was altered superficially to make David into a veteran returning from military duty in Panama, rather than Vietnam, and he comes to Wyoming from New York rather than Savannah. The story’s overall tone is considerably softened, even if it somewhat surprisingly retains many of the book’s more memorably grotesque elements. Anne-Marie Pacquet-Deyris cataloged and analyzed all the “drastic cuts and ‘alterations’” (168) that make “the book’s specific sense of place virtually disappear … in the film” (161); given that the producers rather curiously chose to alter the two places from David’s past that Everett explicitly makes insignificant, the diminution of Wyoming’s symbolic role in the story is particularly baffling. Although the reviewer for the New York Times praised it for being “among this year’s better television movies” (O’Connor), Everett has Page 29 →little regard for the end product: “Even if you read my novel and then watch that film, you will not recognize it.” He has succinctly stated his lack of interest in further film and television adaptations by referring to Hollywood as “a bad neighborhood [that] I don’t feel like going in” (Mills, Julien, and Tissut 227). His attitude toward Follow Your Heart echoes and amplifies the misadventures—including turning down Sidney Poitier as a director, trying to cast Eddie Murphy or Richard Pryor in the lead, and trying to convince Everett to rewrite the screenplay to make the lead character white—concerning a proposed adaptation of Suder that he describes in his 1991 essay “Signing to the Blind.”

After two years at Notre Dame, Everett departed the Midwest in 1991 to return to Wyoming, having accepted the William Robertson Coe Chair in American Studies at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Judith Lewis Mernit noted the peculiar circumstances under which Everett accepted the position:

He did so on one unusual condition: that he could live among the Arapahoe and Shoshone on the Wind River Reservation. To this day, he doesn’t know why. “I had no connection with the reservation, and I had no prior interest in Plains Indians,” he says. “I just wanted to be there…. The university had a pilot who had a plane, a Cessna like the one in [the 1950s television series] Sky King … and every Thursday they’d fly me in to teach my class and then fly me back to the reservation.” He stayed for a year and a half, slept on sofas, made friends. Before he left, he helped a Cheyenne elder document two ceremonies, the Arrow Worship and Sun Dance, for future generations. “He was the last man alive who knew them.” (Mernit)

Although his residence in Wyoming occurred in the midst of one of the slowest periods of his career in terms of publication, he stored aspects of his experiences among the Shoshone and Arapahoe as raw material for later works. The Wind River Reservation likely provided some conceptual building blocks for the fictional Plata Indian Reservation on which most of Watershed is set, and several of Everett’s other works since that time have prominently featured Native American characters, most notably Daniel White Buffalo in Wounded and Warren Fragua in Assumption. His lasting affinity for the place is apparent in his observation that “a lot of the senses of humor I experienced on the reservation were not so different from my own, and that was part of what made me comfortable” (Taylor, “Art” 66).

The only book he published during the time he lived in Wyoming, a children’s counting book entitled The One That Got Away (1992), shows signs of having been influenced by his surroundings too, albeit in a fashion rather less Page 30 →fraught with political and cultural significance. The book was summarized in a review:

Three cowboys (one female) and a furry black dog catch “one” on their “first day out.” The one, a chunky geometric numeral, fights back with its spindly arms and legs and bares its teeth in a fierce grimace, but is duly corralled to be photographed and admired. Then, in a comic variant of Picasso’s Guernica, a whole herd of ones (different sizes and colors but recognizably of the same species) are rounded up to join the first. In the night, the tall fuchsia one escapes; while his captors are out looking for him, the rest undergo an unexpected but logical transformation [from being eight separate “ones” to being one unified “eight”]. (“The One”)

Featuring illustrations by Dirk Zimmer, the book was generally reviewed positively, although those reviewers who were familiar with Everett’s previous novels were apparently helpless to avoid noting that he was a most unlikely entrant into the field of children’s literature.

In autumn 1992 Everett moved to California, the state in which he has maintained his primary residence ever since. He accepted a position as professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside, the campus of which lies roughly forty miles inland from downtown Los Angeles. He would return to the University of Kentucky for a semester as a visiting professor of English and Honors in the fall of 1993 but otherwise remained in Riverside until 1998, serving as department chair for his final four years there. While at Riverside, Everett was married again, this time to his UC-Riverside colleague Francesca “Chessie” Rochberg, a decorated Assyriologist and historian of science who won a MacArthur Foundation grant at the tender age of thirty in order to support her study of astrology and astronomy in ancient Babylon. Possessing a capacious intellect that could match Everett’s, Rochberg evidently made a strong impression on him: “When she told me what she did, I proposed” (Monaghan 73). Everett dedicated several of his books to her during their marriage, which ended in 2005.

In 1994 Faber and Faber published God’s Country, Everett’s first novel in nearly four years. God’s Country garnered strong reviews and a considerably larger readership, partly because of its publishers’ expanded reach but also because the book is, at least on the surface, more accessible than much of Everett’s prior work. The novel parodies the familiar form of the Western, giving readers something moderately conventional to latch onto as the novel begins, although that set of conventions quickly falls away as the story develops—exemplified by the appearance of a cross-dressing George Armstrong Custer later in the book. The narrator, Curt Marder, is a comically absurd ancestor of Cutting Page 31 →Lisa’s John Livesey, inasmuch as it is his stubborn insistence on hewing to his hidebound worldview that not only estranges Bubba, the tracker whose skills Marder needs in order to find his kidnapped wife, but also constantly leads him deeper into trouble throughout the book. David Bowman’s glowing review in the New York Times insisted that the book achieves its excellence only after Everett leaves the formulaic expectations of the Western behind: “[God’s Country] starts sour, then abruptly turns into Cowpoke Absurdism, ending with an acute hallucination of blood, hate and magic. It’s worth the wait. The novel sears” (43).

Everett’s editor at Faber and Faber was Fiona McCrae. Not long after God’s Country was published, McCrae left for Minneapolis to become the director of Graywolf Press, to which Everett likewise migrated. Everett has frequently expressed his preference for working with small presses such as Graywolf and has specifically lauded McCrae for being his ideal “serious” reader:

I have the great fortune of having Fiona McCrae at Graywolf as my editor. She is my editor. That’s how I think of her. And I like being at Graywolf …. It’s an independent publisher, a non-profit publisher. Ironically, they’re under more pressure to turn a profit than for-profit publishers, but I’ve never had a talk with them about marketing…. I want to talk about books. And that’s what we talk about. When she reads my work, it’s great that she gets it. I love that. But she wants to make it the best book she can make it, and so edits it seriously…. She’s done far more than anyone in any large house has ever done as far as understanding the work and trying to understand the work. So, that means a lot to me. (Stewart, “Uncategorizable” 318).

Graywolf has published or republished thirteen of Everett’s novels and short story collections, by far the most of any press with which he has worked.

Also in 1994 Everett became the fiction editor of the influential African American arts and culture journal Callaloo, to which he had been contributing stories and essays as far back as 1986. As of late 2017 he remained a regular contributor and a member of its editorial board. Additionally, Callaloo in 2005 published a special issue that was dedicated to Everett and guest-edited by his friend, colleague, and collaborator James Kincaid.

A brief lull followed the appearance of God’s Country, but Everett made up for that by publishing four books in less than two years. The story collection Big Picture and the novel Watershed were both published by Graywolf in 1996, and the novels The Body of Martin Aguilera (Owl Creek) and Frenzy (Graywolf) appeared in 1997. Big Picture anthologizes three previously published stories alongside six new works, and the collection as a whole reinforced many of the existing critical views, both positive and negative, concerning Page 32 →Everett’s writing. Kirkus Review stated that he “returns to familiar themes with his usual subtlety and eccentric comic flourishes” (“Big Picture” 244), while Maggie Garb’s review in the New York Times added that he “uses a laconic style that sometimes seems to work against his characters’ eccentricities, but at others it feels perfectly apt, giving them a strangely appealing complexity” (30). The book won the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature in 1997 and was also selected as a finalist for that year’s Paterson Fiction Prize, which is awarded by the Poetry Center in Passaic, New Jersey.

Watershed arose partly out of Everett’s experience living on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming but also out of the extensive research in hydrology that he conducted in order to depict his protagonist, Robert Hawks, believably. Attempting to disentangle himself from a messy relationship with an unstable girlfriend, Hawks departs Denver for the solitude of his fishing cabin in the mountains north of the city on the reservation of the fictional Plata tribe. While there, he becomes entangled in an intrigue involving some of the local Plata as well as FBI agents, two of whom are discovered dead in the woods not long after Hawks has arrived at his cabin. Moreover, Hawks discovers a mountain creek on the reservation that has been mysteriously diverted and tries to piece together how this might be related to the recent violence. In his blurb on the dust jacket praising Everett and the book, fellow novelist Madison Smartt Bell offered an assessment that has become a commonplace on the covers of Everett’s books since: “If Percival Everett isn’t already a household name, it’s because more people are interested in politics than truth. Maybe Watershed, with its fine combination of humor, satire, and well-founded outrage, will do the trick.”

Like Watershed, The Body of Martin Aguilera involves an unsolved murder, in this case that of the character mentioned in the book’s title. Lewis Mason, a retired professor from Vermont, travels with his daughter to visit Aguilera, his longtime friend, at the latter’s house in the rugged backcountry of New Mexico. Upon arrival, they find his body and set in motion an investigation that involves the beleaguered local sheriff, Manny Mondragon, and a suspicious veterinary surgeon named Cyril Peabody, who is implicated in a chemical weapons storage scheme that appears somehow to be related to Aguilera’s demise. The novel received almost no attention from reviewers when it was published, again most likely because of its limited release and publicity. Anthony Stewart, one of the foremost scholars and champions of Everett’s work, even quipped to the author in a 2007 interview that he had “yet to find a copy” of the book (“Uncategorizable” 319). It has been mentioned in a handful of scholarly articles that survey Everett’s Western fiction, but it remains perhaps the least consequential of his works to date, if for no other reason than its relative scarcity.

Page 33 →Frenzy returns somewhat to the cultural context of For Her Dark Skin in reworking a story from Greek mythology. Everett focuses in this novel on the deity Dionysos and the combination of physical and emotional ecstasies—the titular “frenzy”—that he inspires in his worshipers. The story is told from the perspective of the deity’s human associate, Vlepo, who records and interprets Dionysos’s actions, words, and being without being affected by them as other mortals are: “I was there to watch his dance, just as I was there to watch all else. I was there in the midst of the frenzied Bakkhanal, watching and noting. Such a row needs an unfrenzied observer. I was there to exercise proper remonstrance and askance-looking. I was there to tell the participants what it was they enjoyed or did. My usual place was at the side of the god … as his aide, his chronicle, his mortal bookmark” (3). Both the positive and the negative reviews of the novel accentuated its unconventional approach to storytelling. Irving Malin’s review of the book claimed that it was “surely mad” but also that “it makes other novels seem lifeless.” George Garrett called it an “altogether indescribable accounting” of the Greek myth but also urged the reader to “let it happen and it will work for you.” In contrast, Maria Simson felt that the “choppiness of the narrative … prevents any real tension and saps the book’s effectiveness.”

Everett’s short story “The Appropriation of Cultures” too received recognition in 1997, being named as one of roughly seventy stories published in the previous year to receive the Pushcart Prize. As a result the story was included in the anthology Pushcart Prize XXII: Best of the Small Presses.

Everett moved his workplace from suburban Riverside to the center of Los Angeles in 1998, accepting a position as professor of English at the University of Southern California, where he has remained on the faculty since. He served as chair of the English department at USC from 1999 to 2002 and was promoted to the rank of distinguished professor of English in 2007. He also directed the doctoral program in literature and creative writing from 2009 to 2012. Despite his scholarly job in the city, Everett initially chose to retain his residence on a ranch more than an hour’s drive east of the city near the community of Moreno Valley, and he later added a summer home on Vancouver Island in British Columbia: “when George W. Bush became president I went to Canada and bought a house” (Mills and Lanco 231). In the late 2000s he moved into central Los Angeles, where he lives with his fourth wife, fellow novelist/teacher Danzy Senna, and their two sons, Henry and Miles.

Everett has called Glyph, the first novel he published after his move to USC, “perhaps my favorite, only because it was the easiest for me to write as it is Page 34 →closest to my own voice. I didn’t have a lot to do to change the rhythm of the thinking” (Mills, Julien, and Tissut 225). For an author given to provocative and offbeat statements, this one is especially noteworthy, inasmuch as the “voice” and the “thinking” of the novel are—superficially, at least—those of an infant named Ralph who opens the novel by remarking that “by the age of ten months I not only comprehended all that [my parents] were saying but that I was as well marking time with a running commentary on the value and sense of their babbling” (6). His parents become aware of Ralph’s remarkable intellectual talents while he is still only a year old. His father, an academic specializing in poststructural theory and mockingly nicknamed “Inflato” by his unimpressed son, initially doubts the reality of the boy’s talents, but Ralph’s mother, an artist by trade, cultivates them immediately: “She gave me magazines and novels and philosophy books and history texts and volumes of poetry. I consumed them all, trying at once to escape myself and stay as close to my own thought as possible, feeling more pure and freer with each turned page” (9). By the time he is four years old, Ralph’s IQ is measured at 475 and he becomes the object of obsessive and criminal curiosity by a host of characters, including his academically ambitious psychiatrist, an unhinged couple who want to turn him into an asset for military intelligence, a security guard in search of a child to raise as his own, a corrupt priest, and a set of bumbling television journalists.

The novel’s structure is an elaborate parody of contemporary academic prose incorporating diagrams, copious footnotes, dialogues, and formulas amid Ralph’s already digressive and hyperintelligent first-person narrative. George Needham lauded Ralph as “an amazing creation, a narrator who can imagine conversations between Wittgenstein and Nietzsche but who hasn’t quite mastered toilet training” and rather charitably claimed that the novel “can be enjoyed by almost anyone” (417). Although he generally praised the novel, David Galef’s observation that “if the novel has a shortcoming, it’s … that you probably had to have been in the academy in the 1970’s and ’80s to appreciate the infatuation with literary ‘big theory’” (20) contradicted Needham’s assertions regarding the universality of the novel’s potential audience.

Everett’s next flurry of book-length publications proved to be his most successful in terms of mainstream attention. This fact remains a source of moderate exasperation to the author, given what he has identified as the stimulus for writing Erasure, the book that briefly catapulted him into the broader public consciousness. He published both Erasure and Grand Canyon, Inc. in 2001, the latter being a relatively brief satire of a mind-set summed up by “Rhino” Tanner’s relentless desire to be “a real American, a real success story, a boot strap kind of guy, a man’s man, a ladies’ man, a hero, a mover, a shaper, a visionary” (105–6). Tanner’s means of accomplishing this self-conception is by turning the Page 35 →Grand Canyon from a natural wonder into a sterile amusement park that will bear his name and celebrate his mastery of life—and, by extension, the living. Published by Versus, a small start-up press in San Francisco, the book received relatively little notice and was furthermore drowned amid the tidal wave of attention that Erasure received not long after its publication.

Although Everett has taken great pains to resist overly close associations with Erasure’s protagonist “Monk” Ellison—“despite the glaring similarity between that character and myself, he’s not me. It’s not an autobiographical novel” (Mills, Julien, and Tissut 219)—there can be little doubt that the book arises substantially from Everett’s experiences in academia and in publishing. The bulk of Erasure consists of a set of parodies and metaparodies of various literary and scholarly discourses with which Everett is intimately familiar from firsthand exposure to, and use of, them. Most prominently among these is a grotesque parody of stereotypically “black” fiction entitled My Pafology, the title of which is later changed to simply Fuck. The text also includes Monk’s curriculum vitae, which overlaps with Everett’s in a number of tellingly close, if not exact ways—such as the fact that both received the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, albeit three years apart. As Everett frequently points out, though, Erasure also features a series of nonparodic and nonautobiographical plot elements, such as those involving Monk’s Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother, his father’s infidelity and suicide, the murder of his obstetrician sister by an antiabortion protester, and his brother’s simultaneous processes of getting divorced and coming out as gay.

Despite these obvious departures from Everett’s own family history, most critics of the novel have seized upon the fact that Monk prominently shares Everett’s oft-stated objection to being categorized as an African American writer. Neither the fictional character nor his creator objects to such labeling because of being African American; they object because that designation applies to their person, not their writing, and confusing the two establishes an unwanted limitation to both their artistic and their personal means of expression. In an interview with James Kincaid, Everett described the significance of his blackness to his writing: “I am a black writer the way you are a white professor or that man over there is a fat banker. You might point me out as a black writer when trying to betray me to the KKK or the Bush administration. If I get lost and you’re trying to tell the police what I look like, you will say ‘He’s devastatingly handsome, tall and black.’ You might then add, ‘Look for him in office supply or bookstores; he’s a writer’” (Kincaid, “Interview” 379).

Elsewhere he has troubled this racialized labeling further: “I don’t have any problem with identifying myself with any number of groups, races, people, and Page 36 →I suppose, given [that] my great-grandfather was Jewish, I’m a Jewish novelist” (Allen, “Interview” 104). In the opening pages of Erasure, Monk expresses similar sentiments while lamenting audiences’ reactions to his novels: “Some people in the society in which I live, described as being black, tell me I am not black enough. Some people whom the society calls white tell me the same thing. I have heard this mainly about my novels, from editors who have rejected me and reviewers whom I have apparently confused and, on a couple of occasions, on a basketball court when upon missing a shot I muttered Egads” (2). Given that Monk mentions being told that these problems of identification would go away “if I’d forget about writing retellings of Euripides and parodies of French poststructuralists and settle down to write the true, gritty real stories of black life” (2), it is not much of a leap to believe that the seed of this novel comes from Everett’s own experience, even though the novelistic tree that grows from it eventually departs drastically from his biography.

The novel garnered overwhelmingly positive reviews, although Everett has complained that it “is getting attention for all the wrong reasons … the race stuff” (Ehrenreich 26). Moreover, after its initial publication by the University Press of New England—about which Rone Shavers has noted, “It was hilarious seeing your book among titles about reconstructing womanhood in eighteenth-century New Hampshire” (“Percival” 51)—a number of major publishers approached Everett about reprinting it: “All the other houses ran away from it because they were afraid of some backlash. It turned out there was no backlash…. And so then the same people who had been afraid of it lined up to see the paperback run” (Shavers, “Percival” 51). Everett has singled out one publisher in particular for ridicule: “The first in line was [Doubleday] … and they wanted it to be the inaugural book of an imprint called Harlem Moon. And my first question to my agent was ‘Have they read this book?’ And I briefly toyed with the idea that, you know, it would be great to have a press publish a book that immediately invalidated the press itself…. But forever my book would have ‘Harlem Moon’ written on it, and I couldn’t do it” (Allen, “Interview” 105). For the paperback edition, he ultimately settled on Hyperion (with another later reprint by Graywolf), which would also publish his novel American Desert (2004).

Erasure received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, was named one of the year’s ten best novels by the American Library Association, and was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Although it was given in recognition of his career’s work, he also received the 2003 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction in the wake of the buzz surrounding Erasure. Everett has pointed out the irony of the literary establishment’s readiness to bestow awards upon a novel that mocks the process of the literary Page 37 →establishment bestowing awards, especially when it gives them to demonstrably awful books such as My Pafology was intended to be: “Everett was puzzled recently after being given a book award sponsored in part by Borders [the same chain in which Monk finds his novel The Persians objectionably shelved]. Sitting at the ceremony, observing the Borders executives all around him, he says, ‘I turned to one of the judges and said, “Have they read this book?” I seem to be asking that question a lot’” (Ehrenreich 25). Everett summed up his feelings about Erasure’s status as his “most successful novel” by telling one interviewer, “I can’t tell you how much that pisses me off” (Allen, “Interview” 105).

Everett again took a break from book-length publishing after Erasure, but he returned with three books in 2004. As sole author he published the darkly comic metaphysical novel American Desert and his third collection of short stories, damned if i do, the lead story of which, “The Fix,” had previously been included in The Best American Short Stories anthology for 2000. With Kincaid as coauthor, he also published the epistolary novel A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid. The two novels continued a trend toward more explicit and frequently metanarrative satire that began with Glyph and has remained prominent in Everett’s work ever since. By the time American Desert was published, Everett was beginning to be identified as a satirist regularly in reviews and criticism. For example, Alan Cheuse wrote in the Chicago Tribune that “Everett has leapt into the front ranks of that small group of first-rate American satirists who keep us laughing at ourselves as we jog along toward oblivion” (“Satirical” 1), and Peter Monaghan referred to him as “a satirist whose frame of mind will not permit him to keep that topic [of race] out of his novels” (72). Not all of his works fit the conventional parameters of satire as well as those from the 1999–2004 period do, but Everett’s assertion that “all of my novels are subversive and militant, but none is social protest” (Mills, Julien, and Tissut 223) further opens the door to interpreting his overall authorial project, to the extent that he has one, as an inherently Menippean one.

The reaction to American Desert was for the most part approving, as evidenced by its inclusion on lists of 2004’s best novels compiled by the New York Public Library and the San Francisco Chronicle. Everett’s collection of shorter works likewise received extensive praise, with Jim Krusoe writing in the Washington Post that damned if i do “creates the happy effect of never hearing the same chord progression twice … as the stories shift from naturalistic to philosophic to surreal” and celebrating Everett’s “free-flowing generosity that engages not only the heart but the mind.” The critical reaction to A History Page 38 →of the African-American People (hereafter this shorter form of the book’s serpentine title is used) was similarly positive, though as is frequently the case with Everett’s work, the unconventional form of the book led to a wide range of views about its intentions and whether it accomplished them. Jeffrey Renard Allen read the book not as a satire on Thurmond and his racial politics but rather as a metafictional satire on publishing akin to Erasure: “Our nation’s publishing industry is the novel’s true subject, an American institution … [in which] the most gifted African-American intellectuals would willingly ghostwrite a black history that champions white supremacy, a master narrative that would put men like Strom Thurmond at the center of the struggle for racial equality” (“Percival” 4).

Writing in the New York Times, Sven Birkerts called Everett “one of the wilder of our wild-card satirists” but lamented that “we never get into the deeper absurdity promised by the title. Is this meant to be a sendup of the hypocrisy and inertia surrounding American race relations? It’s not clear.” Birkerts also noted at the outset of his review that Everett “happens to be African-American,” a comment that caused Everett to suspend his stated policy of disregarding reviews and write a letter to the Times in response. In this letter Everett chided his reviewer for specifying his race superfluously: “I feel confident in stating that the color of my skin has little to do with that novel. I also feel confident in stating that I am sure that Birkerts in previous reviews has not found it necessary to identify other authors as European-American or white.” He continued by calling out “this kind of insidious racism” as a blind spot among “those who in all things else would consider themselves liberal, progressive and intellectual,” and he finished with the blunt assertion that it “makes one appreciate the overt brand of bigotry practiced by the likes of the late Strom Thurmond” (Everett, “Color” 4).

Everett’s unmistakable frustration with this particular form of labeling helps explain a noteworthy development in his more recent publications. Everett has claimed that he does not “write anything autobiographical. I’m private, and I hate this nonfiction shit that’s out in the world” (Shavers, “Percival” 49), and none of his works contradicts the essence of this assertion. Nevertheless, in many of the works he has published since the early 2000s, he has intentionally and consistently tantalized readers with such characters as Monk in Erasure and Theodore Street in American Desert who share obvious biographical details with Everett, practically daring the reader to (over)identify these characters with their creator. Everett raises the stakes on this dare in three of his later books: A History of the African-American People; I Am Not Sidney Poitier; and perhaps most curiously, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell. In each of these he inserts a character who shares his name, his profession, and/or Page 39 →other extensive autobiographical details into a scenario that is unmistakably counterfactual and bordering on the absurd, a technique that has likewise been used by such varied contemporaries as Kathy Acker, Paul Auster, John Barth, J. M. Coeztee, Philip Roth, David Foster Wallace, and Charles Yu.

Everett was already satirizing simplistic correlations—as well as overly simplistic correctives such as Monk’s unrecognized satirical novel—between an African American author’s racial identity and the meanings of his/her works in Erasure, and Birkerts’s comments seem only to have reaffirmed and amplified for him the reprehensibility of such a mind-set. Everett’s overtly reflexive strategy of naming characters in these three books thoroughly disrupts such reductive associations: “If you remember the name on the front of the book when you get to it, then it has a dual effect. One is a chilling effect, where it will pull you out of the text. The other is antithetical to that. It brings the text into a circle, into perhaps a reality that you haven’t imagined” (Dischinger 262). By keeping the reader simultaneously conscious of Percival Everett as the name of the real-life author and as the name of a fictional character, he calls into question the ways that a reader’s presumptions about a writer’s identity distort or otherwise hinder that reader’s ability to interpret the work, a topic that has fascinated him since his study of ordinary language philosophy during his collegiate years. The shift to a somewhat more metafictional mode became predominant when I Am Not Sidney Poitier was published in 2009; prior to that, though, Everett published four distinct books at the rate of one a year between 2005 and 2008.

Published in 2005, his novel Wounded hearkens back in both geography and tone to Walk Me to the Distance. John Hunt is a widower who has become fairly content living in the relative isolation of rural Wyoming with only his seventy-nine-year-old uncle Gus and the mules and horses he trains for a living as company. Hunt has some friends and acquaintances scattered through the countryside around the sleepy town of Highland, none more significant than another rancher named Morgan Reese, whose obvious signs of attraction he has been attempting to ignore for some time as the book opens. Within ten pages of the novel’s opening, a young gay man is found murdered nearby. His body is described as being “strung up like an elk with his throat slit” (12), evoking the brutal killing of Matthew Shepard near Laramie in 1998. Highland soon becomes the center of media attention, and Hunt’s recently hired ranch hand Wallace is the prime suspect in the killing. Hunt’s life becomes increasingly complicated as David, the gay son of a college friend, arrives on the scene. David’s initial impetus for coming to Wyoming is a protest rally, but he eventually decides to stay and work on Hunt’s ranch. Hunt gives in to Morgan’s advances, and the two of them begin a romantic relationship, his first since the Page 40 →death of his wife. Furthermore his beloved and cantankerous uncle is diagnosed with cancer and several of the animals in his care—including a fire-scarred coyote pup, an escape-prone mule, and a wild young horse named Felony—begin demanding considerable attention just as winter is setting in. To top it all off, the cattle of one of his Native American neighbors are being killed by unknown individuals who are leaving behind neo-Nazi messages scrawled in the slaughtered animals’ blood. Hunt’s blackness becomes an issue against his will at this point, because he finds himself—in a manner reminiscent of Robert Hawks’s impromptu comradeship with the Plata in Watershed—somewhat reluctantly sympathetic to the plight of the various groups and individuals targeted by the wave of hate crimes. In the end he is forced to abandon his isolation in order to protect those he loves and do something about the perpetrators. As with Sixbury’s homestead in Walk Me to the Distance, Hunt’s ranch becomes the site of unconventional kinships that transcend categories such as race, sexuality, and even species by demanding an unambiguous and conscious demonstration of solidarity in place of a simplistic label.

Although the novel received the PEN Center USA Literary Award for 2006 and its French translation by Anne-Laure Tissut received the Prix Lucioles in 2008, the critical reception was mixed. For example, Tyrone Beason praised Everett in the Seattle Times “for even attempting to simultaneously plumb this nation’s complexes over race and sexuality” but felt the novel’s ending to be “a disappointment, given the social tensions Everett takes on.” Jane Yeh of the Village Voice was more positive, writing that Everett “creates a complex portrait of a man desperately struggling to maintain reason in the face of chaos [and] lures us into the cozy world of his characters only to pull the rug out from under us at the last, exposing a reality so harsh that it can barely be expressed in words.” In an interview with Everett, Kera Bolonik expressed a criticism about the novel’s gay characters that was echoed in several other reviews: “all of the gay men in the novel … are represented as physically defenseless. They need a burly straight man to come to the rescue.” Everett replied that he “only meant it as a function of youth, not of their sexuality” (95), but Christopher Bell discerned a similar lack of compassion in Hunt’s characterization: “given the ever-present risk of physical violence that haunts the narrative, one would expect the protagonist and his cast of supporting characters to be more interested in the outcome of this bashing” (46).

The frontier realism of Wounded disoriented readers familiar only with the absurdist and comic voices that Everett uses in Erasure and American Desert. This reaction emphasizes a perceived schism among Everett’s works that Zach Vasquez articulated in 2011:

Page 41 →Percival Everett has been writing novels since 1983, and in the intervening years it seems as if he’s split off into two different writers. First there’s the Everett … who etches out simple—but not simplistic—morality tales involving stoic narrators, who, by book’s end, will have to test the limits of their wills when confronted with hard truths and harder remedies…. That’s one Everett…. Stoic, stolid, and lean, though without being mean-spirited. Serious in mood, though not without bits of humor usually made in passing observation…. Then there’s the other Everett. The one who’s fucking hilarious. The one who fucks with structure and narrative …[, t]he Everett who toes the line of what’s real and not, before he rubs it the hell out…. Though still interested in moral decisions, this Everett does not present easily distinguished choices. This second Everett … turns his stories over to blusterers, fools, and mad-men (though he’ll often center the stories by making the protagonists the last sane ones in an insane world). Everett in this mode is excitedly experimental. (Vasquez)

This dichotomy is more useful as an observation of a somewhat elusive trend rather than as an attempt at strict classification; after all, Everett’s next novel, The Water Cure, and earlier works such as For Her Dark Skin and Frenzy do not align particularly well with either of these descriptions—or perhaps they align with both of them to an extent that belies the dichotomy they supposedly represent. Moreover, Assumption, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, and So Much Blue, the three novels Everett has published since Vasquez made his observation, almost seem intent on refuting this theory of there being two different Everetts by (con)fusing both tendencies to a greater extent than most of his prior works do. Nevertheless, there is considerable, if also provisional, use in dividing Everett’s works along these lines, if for no other reason than to note the frequency with which such a perception recurs, implicitly and explicitly, in his readers’ and critics’ reactions.

Everett’s next publication was a departure not in tone or theme but in genre. His first collection of poetry, re: f (gesture), was published in 2006, with the second, Abstraktion and Einfühlung, following two years later in 2008. Both were published by the independent Red Hen Press in the Black Goat series edited by Chris Abani, a former student of Everett’s in USC’s doctoral program in creative writing and literature and an award-winning poet in his own right. Everett has been typically modest in discussing his poetry, telling Bauer in 2012 that it “is meant to prove that I can’t write poetry, and it’s pretty effective. Most Page 42 →people will agree with me” (“Percival Everett” 2). The collection re: f (gesture) is in part an anthology that recontextualizes poems that previously appeared as the lyrical and alliterative chapter headnotes from Zulus and the poems that the hyperintelligent infant Ralph wrote in Glyph. The third section of re: f (gesture) is made up of new poems that reflect Everett’s signature brand of wordplay and philosophical musing to such an extent that Brigitte Félix suggested they could just as well “have been borrowed from another textual space in the writer’s work” (“Of Weeds” 6). The small print run coupled with Everett’s lack of reputation as a poet assured that re: f (gesture) received relatively little critical attention, but Kelly Norman Ellis praised it in Black Issues Book Review, writing that “Everett is at his best in the simple, lovely poems that muse on the frailties of the modern world.”

Abstraktion und Einfühlung shares its title (translated into English as Abstraction and Empathy) with an early twentieth-century book by the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer that extols the virtues of nonrepresentational art, a concept that crosses boundaries of medium and genre in Everett’s work, as he has noted: “I was very much attempting to employ my method of painting in writing these poems. I love non-representational art. I avoid the term abstract, because I find it misleading. I think non-representational paintings are realistic, perhaps more realistic than literal representations…. For me non-representational work is an extension of my vision rather than a replication of my perception” (Brown 161). Sarah Wyman further explained the synaesthetic relevance of Everett’s various artistic and intellectual practices to the creation of poetry:

As poet-painter, novelist, and wood-carver, Everett moves skillfully between various modes of creativity and expression. As an artist well-versed in language, paint, and wood, he investigates the relation between linguistic and formal structure and the production of meaning. As a scholar, he studies the play of signification, as words and paint splotches gesture toward meaning, as sounds and felt forms suggest sense to the one who reads, views, or touches. His poems become paintings of sorts, neat squares of eight lines, like his minimalist and highly abstracted paintings that invite our interpretive commentary. (126)

Reviews of the book were predictably scant, but Fred Muratori hailed “Everett’s piercing focus on his subject [and] … his desire to distill and to clarify the conceptual dimensions simultaneously exemplified and hidden beneath the surfaces of canvases by painters we think we know.”

Everett engages in a formal, highly complex, and often bewildering play with words and sounds in these poems, often testing the boundary between Page 43 →sense and nonsense: “What I love about nonsense is that it has to adhere more rigidly to form than sense. Because that’s how the trick works. You’re tricked into believing that it means something because you recognize the structure. So I only figured out recently that I’m not so much interested in writing sense that sounds like nonsense, what I really want to do is write nonsense that actually does make sense” (Bauer, “Percival Everett” 2). This impulse to delve deeply into the semantic capacities of nonsensicality is also central to The Water Cure, helping to make it perhaps Everett’s most challenging novel to read. Part of the challenge comes from the book’s subject matter—a father driven insane by grief taking revenge on the man who raped and killed his eleven-year-old daughter by repeatedly waterboarding him in the basement of his house—which is remarkably grim, even among the catalog of deaths and deformations in Everett’s works. An equal measure of the difficulty, though, stems from the book’s extreme play with language and conventional structure, which Everett described in an interview with the French journal l’Humanité: “My intention was to write a book in which there is no logical connection visible from one paragraph to another, so that the structure reflects the way in which we receive the world. We receive a set of stimuli, and given that perceptions are indistinct, each person chooses those that are necessary for the construction of the narrative that gives meaning to one’s world” (“The Water Cure” 182). He once again crossed not only literary genres but also artistic mediums in describing how he saw the book’s structure functioning: “Throughout the novel, the reader constructs the story as if looking at a photograph, choosing a particular angle or detail. It is impossible for the designer to introduce a hierarchy and to guide the reader. My plan was to destroy the fourth wall of the theatrical stage and immerse the spectator and the actor in the same moving stream of illusion” (183). The Water Cure may be as close as Everett has yet come to achieving a goal he playfully articulated a decade after the novel’s publication: “I want to write a novel that even I don’t understand” (Taylor, “Art” 52).

Published in 2007, the novel is “the undertaking” (Everett, Water Cure 7) of a man named Ishmael Kidder, who writes romance novels under the pseudonym Estelle Gilliam because a “black man wasn’t going to sell many romance novels to … middle-aged perm-headed nail-decaled bus drivers, beauticians, and trailer parkers” (202–3). It consists of a series of fragments detailing—among other things—his daughter’s death and the revenge he takes on it, as well as flashbacks, philosophical dialogues on the nature of language, conversations with Kidder/Gilliam’s agent, direct (sometimes hostile) addresses to the reader, illustrations and paintings, and quasi-poetic passages in which Kidder’s language begins to devolve visibly toward gibberish, while still Page 44 →fulfilling Everett’s desire to “write nonsense that actually does make sense.” For example, Kidder describes the police arriving to deliver the bad news about his daughter’s death: “Gnarly the nixt mourning, a defective, a wombman, keyme to Carelot’s dour and we call thaw this as a bid sighn and din pact twasm as the mwes she deviled was that a jung guirrel matchking Lane’s dyscryption had beleaf sound kin a ravene bedsighed a parque by twooth bouys and fir daweg” (214). Even the most garbled of such passages are still comprehensible, though they tax the reader’s patience and interpretive faculties immensely. As is the case with a series of simple drawings included within the text that gradually move from being a single mark on a page to being a simple picture of a cat, they also allow Everett to explore the question “How many elements are necessary to recognize an object, and how many can be taken away before the object is no longer recognizable,” which Everett has stated is “a metaphor for the text [of the novel] itself” (“The Water Cure” 183). By removing or obscuring many of the usual devices of novelistic prose, The Water Cure dramatically ups the ante on Everett’s insistence that the reader do the work of making meaning out of the narrative.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier is more superficially familiar in its form as an apparent bildungsroman but nevertheless presents the reader with substantial complexities in regard to representation and signification. Not the least of these is the main character, who is “tall and dark and look[s] for all the world like Mr. Sidney Poitier,” which he claims his mother could not have anticipated when she named him “Not Sidney Poitier” after a two-year pregnancy that may or may not have been the result of sexual intercourse (3). Much like Craig Suder’s mother and Robert Hawks’s girlfriend Karen in Watershed, Not Sidney’s mother “was absolutely, unquestionably, certifiably crazy” (6). She proves wise, though, in being an early investor in a company that would eventually become the massive Turner Broadcasting Corporation. This investment has allowed her to become “filthy, obscenely uncomfortably rich” (6) and to pass that money—as well as her friendship with the company’s eccentric founder and CEO, Ted Turner—on to Not Sidney upon dying when her son is only eleven years old. Among the many people Not Sidney meets during the course of his unconventional coming-of-age story is a bumbling, grouchy professor named Percival Everett, who (quite unlike his namesake) teaches at the historically black Morehouse College in Atlanta and is prone to speaking in mystifying aphorisms. Not Sidney becomes a student at Morehouse between misadventures in such fictional southern havens of bigotry as Peckerwood County, Georgia, and Smuteye, Alabama. Turner and Everett both become surrogate fathers of a sort for the young man as he goes through life constantly answering questions from others and from himself about the significance of his unusual name.

Page 45 →Everett has insisted that he “was not interested in Sidney Poitier” as a real-life person but was interested rather in the cultural role that Poitier was assigned: “I was interested in the name. None of the novel has to do with Sidney Poitier. It has to do with the fact that there existed a character who assumed that place …[,] a station of acceptability to one member of a group” that allowed mainstream, that is, predominantly white, American culture to “feel good about itself” (Dischinger 262). The disclaimer that appears between the title page and the start of the book echoes Twain’s notice at the start of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot” (n.pag.). Rather than facetiously threatening legal action or violence, Everett’s disclaimer cautions the reader against reading significance into characters’ names, especially those with particularly significant names, such as his own: “All characters in this novel are completely fictitious, regardless of similarities to any extant parties and regardless of shared names. In fact, one might go as far as to say that any shared name is ample evidence that any fictitious character in this novel is NOT in any way a depiction of anyone living, dead or imagined by anyone other than the author. This qualification applies, equally, to the character whose name is the same as the author’s” (n.pag.).

The critical reactions to the book frequently referred back to Erasure, suggesting that the idea that parody and satire were Everett’s “normal” modes of authorial discourse had taken root. Laird Hunt praised I Am Not Sidney Poitier for its similarity to Erasure in being both “frequently, gut-grabbingly hilarious” and “more [a] serious meditation on the exigencies of the self than [a] comic send-up of an America gone wildly off the rails.” Other reviewers were less taken with Everett’s return to the comic-satiric mode. For example, although Carolyn Briones generally praised how “the novel humorously investigates the fuzzy boundaries between reality and media without cluttering the narrative with complicated ideology,” she also contended that it “does not achieve the brilliancy (and complexity) of some of Everett’s other works” (553). Gretlund felt that the novel “is liable to irritate quite a lot of today’s established black Americans” in implicating them even more directly than Erasure did in the continuation of racist presumptions about blackness (“Black” 7).

In terms of public recognition for his work, 2010 was a banner year. I Am Not Sidney Poitier garnered for its author a second Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Believer Book Award, presented by the editors of Believer magazine to reward otherwise underappreciated works of literature. Marco Rossari’s translation of Wounded into Italian won the Gregor von Rezzori Prize for best work of foreign fiction from the Santa Maddalena Foundation in Florence, Page 46 →Italy. Everett also received the Charles Angoff Award from the Literary Review, which selected his story “Confluence” as the most outstanding contribution to the journal that year. In addition he received the Dos Passos Prize in Literature from Longwood University in Virginia, joining an illustrious list of American writers who have been singled out for “an intense and original exploration of specifically American themes, an experimental quality, and a wide range of literary forms” (“Writer”). His one new publication for the year was a collaboration with Chris Abani entitled There Are No Names for Red, for which Abani wrote poems and Everett contributed several paintings that were reproduced within the book.

Everett returned to both poetry and the West in his next two publications. Swimming Swimmers Swimming (2011) is his third collection of verse, about which Walton Muyumba wrote that “the strongest [poems] artfully demonstrate Everett’s fascination with American English’s refractive qualities—a trait Everett has inherited from Gertrude Stein.” He went on to suggest that the poems are a useful tool for interpreting Everett’s Assumption, a triad of intertwined novellas that was published at nearly the same time: “These new poems backlight the novel’s ideas, helping detail Everett’s narrative and linguistic aesthetic and offering some direction for understanding his choices” (Muyumba). Assumption works in a manner similar to God’s Country or My Pafology—the novel-within-a-novel in Erasure—in its conspicuous play with a literary form. However, Everett’s method is much less comic and/or exaggerated in Assumption than in those previous works: “this novel isn’t really a parody…. I am toying with the assumptions we have when we enter into that kind of story. You assume that your protagonist is a certain way, and you take some things for granted that maybe in real life you wouldn’t. And you also have some assumptions about the writer and the space that you’re entering” (“Author Percival” 188). Deputy Ogden Walker and the remainder of the police force of Plata, New Mexico, are not perceptive, streetwise sleuths like the protagonists of the detective fictions written by James Ellroy and Walter Mosley; nor are they technologically savvy crime fighters like those featured on televised police procedurals such as CSI. They are not ridiculed for their inadequacies in dealing with the series of murders, frauds, and general criminality that descends on their previously sleepy town. They are all limited yet likable individuals, more obsessed with food and fishing than forensics in ways that are chided gently, if at all. The general sense is that they are caught up in a violent world whose motives remain inscrutable beyond some fairly clichéd presumptions on Walker’s part: “Three lives for twelve thousand dollars. I mean, I just can’t wrap my mind about it. I guess it wasn’t about the money …. I don’t know. Power, maybe” (172). If Walker is, as the voice of his dead Page 47 →father says to him on the book’s opening page, “a fool for working as a deputy in that hick-full redneck county” (3), Everett does not suggest that it is a folly for which he should be condemned. Assumption undermines two of the most reassuring aspects of conventional detective fiction, specifically the linked ideas that truth is discoverable and that justice will follow from such a discovery. Each of the three novellas ends not only with a surprise but also without the logical resolution that the genre demands.

Despite being designed to confound readerly expectations, the book was widely praised. Roger Boylan wrote in the New York Times that “Everett casts his line, as it were, pretty far, and some of the things he reels in, along with a few red herrings, are weighty indeed: racism, anomie, disillusionment, the meaning (or lack thereof) of one man’s life—the American nightmare, in brief, at the end of the line.” Not everyone was as taken with it, though, including some longtime devotees. For example, Rone Shavers claimed that the book “falls flat, like most other books written these days, … [because] it assumes a simple story, told well, is enough,” and Shavers ultimately believed that it would be “judged as one of his lesser, and less important, works” (“Assumption and Erasure”).

The years 2012 and 2013 helped support Everett’s contentions that “I make my money in France and Italy” (Reynolds 179) and that “I get recognized on the street in Paris,” a situation he calls “the oddest thing” (Mernit). Unlike such predecessors as Ernest Hemingway or James Baldwin, Everett has never expatriated himself to Paris, but there is no doubt that his work has received, until recently, considerably greater critical attention from such French scholars as Sylvie Bauer, Jacqueline Berben-Masi, Michel Feith, Claude Julien, Claire Maniez, and Anne-Laure Tissut—his primary French translator—than it has in North America; for example, the first two collections of critical essays about Everett’s work were published in France in 2007, whereas comparable North American volumes were not published until 2013. He has fostered a considerable audience for his works—mostly the novels published since Glyph—in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Greek, and Russian translations. Adding to the two previous prizes that translations of his work had won, Tissut’s French translation of I Am Not Sidney Poitier received the Lucien Barrière Literary Award at the Deauville American Film Festival in 2012. Everett served as a visiting faculty member at Paris-Sorbonne University (Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV) during the 2012–13 academic year and participated in a number of conferences about and celebrations of his work around France during that year as well. Everett has stated that the series of Western-themed short fiction that was published in 2015 as Half an Inch of Water began while “I was living in Paris, and for some reason I started writing ranch stories” (Rath).

Page 48 →Upon returning from France, Everett published his nineteenth novel, which fuses the overt play with names found in I Am Not Sidney Poitier, the narrative fragmentation found in The Water Cure, and the frustration of expectations found in Assumption into a single novel that features most of the major developments of his career to this point. Percival Everett by Virgil Russell is perhaps the quintessential Percival Everett novel, not because of its quality or even its subject matter but because of how it gleefully thwarts the notion that this book will reveal something more about its creator; after all, the novel’s title suggests not only that the book is about Percival Everett but also that it is by someone else, neither of which turns out to be accurate, at least not literally. Despite a narrative filled with elaborate details about a son and his father, the novel never reveals which of them is Percival Everett, instead leaving open the possibility that it could be neither, either, or both of them. Nor does it provide an explanation of who the titular Virgil Russell might be, beyond an allusion to the Latin poet/Dantean guide and the British analytic philosopher, both of whom are mentioned on numerous occasions in the novel.

Everett had the philosophical concept of Frege’s Puzzle squarely in mind while writing Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, and he embeds one formulation of that concept into the novel early on: “according to the truth A = A is not the same thing as A is A” (8). In pointing out both that two things can have the same name and not be the same, and that two things can be the same thing yet be identified by different names, Everett elaborately plays with the reader’s assumptions about storytelling and literary representations. His narrators, narratives, and characters oscillate in and out of phase throughout the book, with the conversation between the father and son frequently being supplanted by snippets of stories that are likewise narrated in the first person. Some of these are fragments of quintessential Everett “horse stuff” (56), such as the story of a man named Murphy who becomes involved with a pair of drug-dealing brothers while simultaneously kindling a flirtatious relationship with a veterinarian who is treating his Appaloosa named Trotsky for a gunshot wound. Others are provocative literary parodies, such as Nat Turner’s efforts “to tell William Styron’s story, The Confessions of Bill Styron by Nat Turner” (16), the name of which not only alludes to the intentionally convoluted title of Percival Everett by Virgil Russell but is also first referenced by the father-son narrator as possibly being a dream that Murphy from the aforementioned story might have had. As if that were not enough allusion and reflexivity, Nat Turner also literalizes the Barthesian impulse at one point, noting that “he understood that he had to murder the authorial presence and to do that he’d have to find the author and kill him” (78). In the second part of the novel, Everett confounds Page 49 →his readers still further by seemingly abandoning most of these established narrative threads without resolution in favor of a sustained story that focuses on the abused residents of a nursing home, one of whom appears to be the father from the novel’s first part.

Everett jams his narrative full of seemingly significant pieces—and there are far more than can possibly be summarized here—and then undercuts efforts to reassemble them conclusively: “All the details. Everything in the details. Details, details, details. Of rooms, meals, walks, and gardens. Details telling us who we are, where we are, and why. Telling us everything. Telling us nothing. Because we live inside our heads. So much bullshit? In the middle of the middle of middle America. So much bullshit? In the details” (42). Recognizable characters’ names suddenly change without altering their significance to the story in which they appear, and the narrative voice intrudes on many of these occasions to muse about the irrelevance of nominal identity: “I’m not so much confused now by the person as I am by the names. It’s clear that I have no descriptive material to connect to their respective names and so I have no idea as to which is who and who is what. I used to think they were identical, but disabused of that I believed that they were both simply fat, but it turns out that one, my patient, Douglas or Donald, is quite a bit fatter than his brother, Donald or Douglas…. Is his name a defining attribute of the man who is my patient? Does it matter whether he is Donald or Douglas? Would having one of these names or the other alter who he might be?” (92–93). Everett has described the book as being a game of “pin the tail on the narrator; you don’t know who’s telling the story,” making the title’s seeming attribution of names and roles into even more of an unfulfilled tease (Cruden). The fact that the book is dedicated to Percival Leonard Everett—the author’s father and namesake, who died three years before the book’s publication—only deepens the confusion about identity in this “impossible-to-describe-or-summarize ouroboros about parents, death, and aging” (Taylor, “Art” 42) and what any of it might mean. Everett’s narrator drops a possible hint when he verbosely alludes to one of his creator’s favored notions: “This is what I want all of this to do, to be. I want it to sound like nonsense, have the rhythm of nonsense, the cadence of nonsense, the music, the harmony, the animato, the euphoniousness, the melodiousness, the contrapunctality, lyrphorousness, the marcato, the fidicinality, the vigor, the isotonicity, lyriformity, of nonsense” (56).

Not surprisingly, reviews of the novel were fairly polarized. Lydia Millet, another contemporary writer with a propensity for conspicuous oddity, glowingly reviewed it for the Los Angeles Times in a manner that captured its essential strangeness as well:

Page 50 →When I read Percival Everett’s new book … I found that I liked not only the book but also Percival Everett. He wasn’t there at all, that interesting professor and novelist, that attractive, often humorous, middle-aged black literary stylist who lives and writes in Southern California, experimenting with the structure and conventions of fiction. I liked him anyway…. You never know who’s telling what in “Percival Everett,” … but to me there was much that was pleasurable about that fluidity, that openness, there was something that allowed me to get in there, intruding myself pleasantly and even productively into Percival Everett, or, in any case, the fictional impostor pretending to be him. (“Meet Percival Everett”)

Despite being a longtime admirer of Everett’s work, Alan Cheuse was unenthusiastic in his review of the book for National Public Radio. Believing Everett to be “seduced by the idea of metafiction” and “under the thrall of this longstanding (yet apparently still voguish) tendency,” Cheuse contended that the book is marred by the fact that “real, fascinating, important dramas lie buried beneath distracting passages of self-referential rhetoric” and, as a result, “seems forced and pedantic” (“Lost”). The novel was named a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Publishers Weekly “Best Books” list for 2013. If there were any remaining doubt that Everett means it when he tells interviewers that he does not consider, much less cater to, the wants and needs of his audience, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell put it to rest.

Each of Everett’s next two book-length publications returns to a shorter form of literary expression. He published his fourth collection of poetry, Trout’s Lie (2015), the working title of which, according to Everett’s curriculum vitae, was “Against Sense.” The book’s description on the Red Hen Press Web site suggests that Everett is using these poems to play—much as he does in The Water Cure and Abstraktion und Einfühlung—with the notion of nonsensical language: “[He] explores the semantic relationship between sense and so-called nonsense—and questions whether either is actually possible.” He also published Half an Inch of Water (2015), which collects the stories that he wrote while living in Paris. Kelsey Ronan called the stories “magical realism for the American West” and praised the manner in which the stories first tantalize with and then deviate from literary conventions: “All the expected features of the landscape are here…. In these small Western towns, waitresses don’t have to ask for your order at the town’s one diner. Their inhabitants are laconic, pragmatic people firmly rooted in place. Everett forces them to confront the incredible, the inexplicable, and the surreal, forever changing their sense of the familiar.” Tobias Carroll similarly noted this tension as a strength of the collection: “While stories of plainspoken men and women living in stark, sparsely Page 51 →populated towns are familiar, Everett finds new ways to enliven the setting and the characters.”

He published his thirtieth book in 2017, a novel entitled So Much Blue, which once again features a protagonist who shares a significant biographical trait with Everett—Kevin Pace is, like his creator, a painter of nonrepresentational art, as well as an artist comfortable in stating his disregard for the critical opinion of his audience—but whose story veers sharply away from autobiographical correspondence soon thereafter. He received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2015 to help complete the research for this novel.

Everett also won a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) creative writing fellowship in 2014, enabling him to travel to Algeria and the Mediterranean island of Corsica to do research for “a screenplay he is writing … about the celebrated French Navy submarine, the Casabianca, which joined the Free French Forces during World War II and participated in the liberation of Corsica” (S. Bell). In additional to being his first foray into screenwriting, or at least the first publicized one, this project represents yet another departure in geographical and, to a lesser extent, temporal setting from Everett’s past work, suggesting strongly that his drive to find new subjects and new forms of artistic expression is far from exhausted.