Yet I have always felt that the story’s not the thing. Pace Hamlet, not even the play’s the thing. Hamlet the prince, Hamlet the play, the play within the play, the Ghost, Elsinore, Denmark, the great Globe itself: language was always the thing that all those other things were made of.
A blessing, then, that we are still close enough, for now, to know and love this writer in the original English. (Translations into contemporary—read: simplified—language abound, a running crib for English-class summaries.) What is to be found in abundance here is not to be found elsewhere, in spite of the writer’s having gathered disciples in every subsequent generation.
In short, the textbooks paint a picture of a cellular ‘assembly line’ where genes issue instructions for the manufacture of proteins that do the work of the body from day to day. This textbook description of the cell matches, almost word for word, a social institution. The picture of the cytoplasm and its organelles performing the work of ‘manufacturing’, ‘packaging’ and ‘shipping’ molecules according to ‘instructions’ from the genes eerily evokes the social hierarchy of executives ordering the manual labour of toiling masses. The only problem is that the cell is not a ‘factory’. It does not have a ‘control centre’. As the feminist scholar Emily Martin observes, the assumption of centralised control distorts our understanding of the cell.
Major changes upend one’s life, but a cancer diagnosis turns that shift into an ongoing, full-time endeavor. If only it were as easy as having surgery to excise the tumor away – and yes, sometimes that’s the case. But when you are in your early 40s, as Catherine is, or late 30s, as I was when I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2016, you are involuntarily removed from everyday society and thrust into the alternate universe that is Cancerland.
Percival Everett’s novels seem to ward off the lazier hermeneutics of literary criticism, yet they also have a way of dangling the analytical ropes with which we critics hang ourselves. His latest novel follows the misadventures of a runaway named Jim and his young companion Huckleberry in the antebellum American South. As in another novel featuring those protagonists, Jim has fled enslavement in the state of Missouri, and Huckleberry, Huck for short, has faked his own death to escape his no-good abusive Pap. As in that other novel, the two are both bonded and divided by the circumstances of their respective fugitivity as they float together on a raft down the Mississippi River. As in that other novel, the narrator of Everett’s book is setting down his story as best he knows how, but—rather differently—the narrator here is not the boy but the man who has been deprived of the legal leave to be one. “With my pencil, I wrote myself into being,” Jim writes. The novel is titled, simply, “James,” the name Jim chooses for himself. In conferring interiority (and literacy) upon perhaps the most famous fictional emblem of American slavery after Uncle Tom, Everett seems to participate in the marketable trope of “writing back” from the margins, exorcizing old racial baggage to confront the perennial question of—to use another worn idiom—what “Huck Finn” means now. And yet, with small exceptions, “James” meanders away from the prefab idioms that await it.
For a writer who often plays by few rules, Everett has drawn on what he knows best here — that freedom can be won, one word at a time. Add levity and serious intent and you have a novel that’s a class act.
If the googly eyes on the cover didn’t make it apparent, Ferdia Lennon’s knockout debut novel “Glorious Exploits” is hilarious. In fact, it’s loaded with dark humor literally from page one. Never before has history been such a riot, and so indelibly endearing.