PERCIVAL EVERETT

March 22, 2007

Percival Everett is the author of fifteen novels, three collections of short fiction, and one volume of poetry. Among his novels are Erasure, Glyph, Wounded, and A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid. He is the recipient of the Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature, and a New American Writing Award. His stories have been included in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and Best American Short Stories. In addition to writing, Everett is a painter, a woodworker and a flyfisherman. He trains mules on his ranch outside of Los Angeles and teaches at the University of Southern California.

Introduction

I’m sure it’s been said many (many) times before, but it’s difficult to decide where to begin talking about Percival Everett’s fiction. Percival Everett wrote his first novel, Suder, at the age of 28. Since then, he has written at least 15 more novels—his most recent being American Desert, Erasure, Wounded, and Glyph—along with several collections of fiction (his most recent, Damned If I Do, just arrived in late 2004). He has also embarked on a recent collaboration, an epistolary novel, the title of which will have special significance for those of you who were at the Divergent Histories Colloquium this morning: A History of the African-American People (proposed) by Strom Thurmond As Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid. Everett, in other words, is nothing less than prolific. Yet where "prolixity" is a term that is used at times to conceal a multitude of sins, in this case, it presents Everett’s readers with that rarest of all circumstances: an abundant arena in which to explore an evocative array of unusual characters who, throughout Everett’s body of work, discover they simply don’t suit the environments in which they’re compelled to exist. In Erasure, for instance, we’re introduced to an African-American fiction writer whose work is critiqued for not being "black enough." Glyph tells the tale of a baby who is astonishingly well versed in philosophy and refuses to talk. In Suder, we encounter a baseball player who is in a slump, as much at the plate as in bed. And in American Desert, we meet Ted Street, an English professor who, having lost both his wife and his tenure case, is killed in a car accident, ironically enough while on the way to committing suicide. The plot continues to take unusual turns. Three days later, the mortician’s stitches barely keeping him together, he inexplicably awakens at his funeral. His resurrection soon becomes a media sensation, and much to his surprise, as well as his family’s, Ted then tries to live his normal life. He’s the new Ted, eloquent and assertive, eminently capable of handling the media and any outside schemes to exploit his situation. Ted’s post-death existence admittedly freaks out his family--after all his skin is cold to the touch--and he doesn’t really need to breathe, but somehow the family, unlike Kafka’s Samsa family in his novel The Metamorphoses (in which Gregor Samsa famously "wakes up one morning to discover he’s been transformed into a beetle") prefers the transformed Ted to the old version.

While such plots are immediately suggestive of the complexity of Everett’s imagination, the true enormity of his enterprise begins after these core events have taken place in his novels. Everett seems to ask what happens when we encounter the conditions of alienation, isolation, and loss? Precisely how and why should we go on (to call to mind a key statement of postmodern being)? Everett’s vision is delivered with equal portions acerbic wit as cranky wisdom. It’s a fiction that simply doesn’t pull punches.

Yet Everett’s characters are not just varied in scope, but also rangy in content and experimental in form. We might begin a story, such as his short piece "The Fix," in a corner sandwich shop, yet less than a page later find ourselves with seamless energy in a far more fantastic terrain: a move that suggests the common, the domestic, is always underscored by the peculiar, the rarified, the unimaginable. Indeed, in "The Fix," a so-called "ordinary" story is transformed by the arrival of Sherman Olney, a man who has a unique capacity for fixing what’s broken. As Sherman reflects, "Fixing things is easy. You just have to know how things work"—a statement that sounds axiomatic at first until the story takes an unusual turn: Sherman can not only repair a choppy compressor or a leaky pipe. But he can also fix pacemakers, relationship woes, tax problems, and squeaky shoes. He can fix, in short, things that ought to be unfixable. Or things that simply shouldn’t be fixed. The common becomes uncommon. We discover that the ordinary is in fact absurd.

This is the condition that Everett tends to exploit, tackling a diverse range of thorny topics that are often as much about language—how language circumscribes its users—as about questions of race, gender, and sexuality that are particular to American culture. The issue might be said to be one of articulation, perhaps because Everett’s characters always seem to have the right thing to say. In fact, even when they are incapable of responding to their peculiar situations precisely, they are able to articulate exactly why they can’t respond. Or, at the very least, design an appropriate, even measured, response to the absurd situations they encounter.

In the short story "The Appropriation of Cultures," this ability to cut to the quick develops into a strategy for laying claim to the trappings and symbols of the South’s racist past. As the narrator Daniel prepares to play with his jazz band in a Columbia, South Carolina bar, several drunk fraternity boys demand that his band play the song "Dixieland" for them. The scene could at once turn very ugly by following the sad, familiar patterns of racial tension. However, Daniel’s surprising response is as unconventional as it is astute. He begins to sing the song as he's been asked, but not the way any reader would expect. As Everett writes: "He sang it slowly. He sang it feeling the lyrics, deciding that the lyrics were his, deciding that the song was his. Old times there are not forgotten. He sang the song and listened to the silence around him. He meant what he sang. Look away, look away, look away, Dixieland." It’s perhaps no surprise that Terry MacMillan has remarked that Everett is "a brilliant writer and so damn smart I envy him."

We’re very lucky to have him here with us this evening.

Please welcome Percival Everett.