This year’s shortlist includes five books by women – the highest number in the prize’s 55-year history. But it’s the only man on the list who is holy tipped to win the coveted prize.
Five women, one man. Of course, it’s been noted, but less hammered than one might expect, given how much resentment there was in the days when most of the writers on the shortlists were men. Perhaps it’s because the books in question include one about astronauts and another about a secret agent, so there’s no sense that the literary world is being swamped with domestic drama.
Percival Everett is black. He writes vividly and often witheringly about the way language and storytelling shape and fabulate black experience. In, he addresses himself to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, in which a poor white boy and a slave on the run take a raft down the Mississippi. It is assumed that Everett is taking Twain apart and throwing his inherently racist work on the bonfire of history.
What Everett actually does is get inside the framework of Twain’s classic, retelling it from the point of view of James, the slave Jim. We follow his thoughts; when they are separated, we go with him; when there are no white folks around, we hear him drop the folksy Southern patois Twain gave him and speak in the language of the classics he purloined from the master’s library.
The greatest challenge for this reader, however, is that all the characters read like manifestations of a single entity, most probably the author. They do different jobs, perhaps, but they have similar thoughts about the presence of the dead among the living, or the concerns of contemporary physics; they fall in love the same way or grapple with similar emotional wounds left by unspeakable violence; there is a sense they are all infused with the same vaporous spirit.
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