“I think my career has been a war of attrition,” Percival Everett says with a grin. When The Trees, his 22nd novel, was shortlisted for last year’s Booker Prize, it was a belated vindication for a ludicrously underrated author who has spent 40 years writing books that people told him he shouldn’t be writing.
He has had to fight against the notion that an African-American author should always be writing about African-American characters. When he retold the myth of Dionysus in his novel Frenzy (1997), one editor at his publisher’s asked: “What does this have to do with black people?”
“Why was that question asked of me but not John Updike? Although maybe it would have been good to ask John Updike ‘What does this have to do with black people?’ sometimes,” Everett adds with what is a near-constant chuckle.
He has also defied the publishers and agents who warned him that he wouldn’t build up a readership if he kept making each novel completely different from its predecessor. His books range from a picaresque pastiching of the plots of a succession of Sidney Poitier movies (I Am Not Sidney Poitier), to a novel narrated by a super-intelligent baby (Glyph), to a straight, no-tricks, modern-day Western (Wounded).
Does he find it stimulating to strike out into new territory every time without knowing whether he can do it? “It must be, because without good reason I keep doing it. Writing the same kind of book over and over – it’s like playing improvisational jazz, knowing all the notes. But – for lack of a better term – it’s become a part of my shtick: what will the next one be? To say all my books are different is in fact a way of pigeonholing me after all.”
Those of us who have long known that whatever an Everett novel may be about, it is likely to blow our socks off, have been delighted by the recognition afforded The Trees – a manic murder mystery in which a serial killer seeks vengeance for the real-life lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy, in 1955.
Everett’s new novel, Dr No, is, naturally, something different: a more lighthearted romp filled with nods to the Bond books – there’s a death ray, a submarine, and a billionaire plotting to break into Fort Knox, with the aid of a brilliant mathematician (soon revealed to be the baby from Glyph, grown up).
It’s a delicious book with the narrative drive of a crime caper, but also laced with abstruse mathematical and philosophical jokes and speculations. “For me, writing novels is just an excuse to study stuff. I read a lot of things I didn’t understand, which is how I like it.” He brings out the poetry of maths, I say. “I think math is beautiful. Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica is so beautiful to me that I have often wanted to teach it as a literary text.”
Everett, 66, has a day job as Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is talking to me from the studio at the back of his house in Los Angeles, where he writes his novels in glittery, unicorn-bedecked child-ren’s notebooks – “the sillier the notebook, the better; it reminds me: they’re just books. There are more important things going on in the world” – and relaxes by repairing guitars and mandolins.
One thing that does unite all his disparate novels is the sardonic humour, which is equally apparent in his conversation. “I’m pathologically ironic, so it happens naturally. But it’s also true that once you have a reader laughing, then you can
f--- with them – they’re disarmed. And you can make people laugh about things and feel bad about laughing, which is great.” He is unrepentant about the deliberately stereotyped white redneck characters in The Trees, a response to the serial stereotyping of black characters by white writers. “I love that it makes some people uncomfortable. Good – how does it feel?”
There is a disturbingly funny sequence in the new book in which the black narrator unwittingly gets the better of a racist cop who pulls him over while driving. Aged 19, Everett once spent a day in jail for refusing to give his name to a cop on the lookout for a bank robber who resembled him in no aspect except skin colour. “I was very lucky that he didn’t shoot me, because I was obviously a threat,” he deadpans.
However, racism is far from central to Dr No, which has baffled some reviewers: “I wish that Dr No zeroed in on America’s racial environment with the same comic intensity [as The Trees],” complained the Washington Post’s critic. “There are people who don’t recognise their own racism,” Everett responds. “This is not something that this reviewer would have said about a white writer: ‘They missed the suburbs this time, they didn’t hit the suburbs the way they did in their last novel!’ But – someone read the book, that’s a nice thing.”
The movement towards fiction becoming the province of “authentic voices” irritates him: “The whole idea of authenticity is such bulls---. Who will be the authenticity police?” He would not be bothered, in principle, by a white author
writing a novel about, say, Emmett Till – “everything’s in the execution and, not even in the intention, but [in] what the work does in the world”.
The straitjacketing of writers is nothing new: it’s been more than 20 years since Everett’s novel Erasure (2001) – probably his masterpiece – explored the travails of an African-American novelist who is repeatedly told his work “isn’t black enough”.
It drew on frustrations Everett has experienced since he was a book-hungry teenager. “All the books by black people – they were all in the ‘black fiction’ section – were either about the antebellum South and slavery, or a very specific sliver of the inner city, and I as a middle-class black kid – my grandfather was a doctor, my father, my uncles were doctors – where was my story in all of this? I didn’t exist.”
Even his name wrong-foots people. One of his future colleagues at USC, on being told that a Percival Everett was joining the faculty, grumbled: “The last thing we need is another 50-year-old Brit.” A colleague who knew Everett replied: “I’ll have you know he’s a black cowboy!” Everett did indeed once own a ranch on the edge of the Moreno Valley desert, but he gave it up after he and his wife, the novelist Danzy Senna, started a family: “Instead of training horses, I’ve been trained by children.”
Now his life has changed again following the Booker boost to his profile, but he praises the approach of his small-scale publishers in the UK and US. “They appreciate that any talk about marketing [makes] my eyes glaze over, and there’s a real respect for the fact that I generally don’t want to do any touring.” Why not? “I have better things to do. Someone’s gotta walk my dogs.”
Does he regret being under the Booker spotlight? “No, I’m very good at saying no to things. And it’s great to have the readers. The truth is there are 75 or 100 books that could have been on that list in any given week and I feel very lucky to be included in that group.”
Dr No (Influx, £9.99) is out March 16
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2023-03-12 12:00:00Z
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