Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

November 12, 2012
It is a testament to Everett’s brilliance as a writer (I Am Not Sidney Poitier) that his latest novel, so damnably frustrating and more than occasionally tedious, is also so humanely adept at getting to the heart of the human condition. What story there is concerns an aging writer as he dictates his life’s story to his son, Virgil, “words finding the full theater of his mouth.” This writer, who may be named Percival Everett, lives in an assisted living facility, where he becomes involved in a hilarious scheme with other residents to retaliate against the mean-spirited staff. He relates other peculiar, often dubious tales, as well as family memories, some apparently true, others seemingly dreamed or imagined. In fact, everything we hear may have been invented by the fictional Everett, or it may not even be coming out of his mouth at all, but rather from his guilt-ridden but loving son. Everett has created much more than an exercise in unreliable narration, an exploration of the nature of language and the rationales we create to keep ourselves going as we grow old. By the conclusion, every sentence, indeed every word, has come to seem like a valuable key, not just to this puzzle of a novel, but to the meaning of existence.

November 15, 2012
Over the course of a prolific career, Everett (Assumption, 2011, etc.) has conditioned readers to expect the unexpected, but this novel is not only his most challenging to date, it sheds fresh light on his previous work. The title would seem to suggest that this is a novel about the author by a fictitious pseudonym, but the main significance of "Percival Everett" is the dedication to the author's father, who died in 2010 at the age of 77. And there is an unnamed character in the novel of that age, whose son is an artist. Or a doctor. And who has different names over the course of the novel. And who may in fact be writing the narrative about his father. Unless it is the father writing about the son. Or one of them is imagining what the other would write. Or, as the novel explains, "I'm an old man or his son writing an old man writing his son writing an old man." Within that narrative labyrinth, the novel is much more than an academic exercise (the author is also a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California), as it searches for the possibility of meaning in life as well as narrative and meditates on the process of aging and the inevitability of death. "This whole process of making a story, a story at all, well, it's the edge of something, isn't it? Forth and back and back of forth, it's a constant shuttle movement, ostensibly looking to comply with some logic, someone's logic, my logic, law, but subverting it the entire time," writes the author (or someone). It's audacious for such literary playfulness to engage such serious themes as meaning and mortality, but the novel proceeds to try the reader's patience with some extraordinarily long sentences and dense chapters. An ambitious novel in which the formalistic chances taken by the author are often stimulating and occasionally exasperating.

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November 1, 2012

An elderly man pens the novel he thinks his son would write--or perhaps it's the novel his son thinks his father might write were he writing like the son--as a contractor dreams about Nat Turner imagining the life of William Styron. A meditation on old age, truth and illusion, and the meaning of life from the PEN USA award winner.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2012
This new novel by the prolific and always inventive Everett will, with its odd title alone, bedevil librarians, booksellers, and bibliographers. It is, however, an innovative exploration of the outer limits of narrative ambiguity, and it's also a deeply felt book about a father and son. Our initial narrator, visiting his elderly, invalided father, is handed an autobiographical manuscript presumably written by the elder as if the son had composed it, but even that narrative, this novel's core, changes shape from segment to segment. Along the way, there are interpolations, dialogues, and speculations about narrativefor example, what if Nat Turner were to have written a memoir of William Styron?as Everett proceeds, in his customary manner, to amuse and provoke his readers. An intriguing and intricate puzzle of a novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

February 1, 2013

This latest novel by prolific writer and PEN Center USA Award winner Everett (I Am Not Sidney Poitier) showcases his versatility and erudition (the title's Virgil Russell echoes references to the poet Virgil and the philosopher Bertrand Russell). The author serves up the beginnings of plotlines so intriguing we wish he would resolve them; instead, he casts them aside and turns to fascinating disquisitions on philosophy and semiotics. The fragmented, almost hallucinatory narrative sometimes seems to be Everett's own voice, sometimes that of his deceased father (the novel is dedicated to Percival Edward Everett, born in 1931). For much of the novel, this uncertain narrator gives us a view of nursing home confinement that resembles the inner circles of hell, as an elderly man pens a novel that challenges his son. Everett anticipates and mocks the reader's confusion, drily noting that some readers "may require a certain specificity concerning the identity of the narrator." VERDICT This is a challenging book, but well worth the read; you won't think about popular fiction, the world of ideas, or old age in the same way again.--Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Lib., VA

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.