http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i23/23a01801.htm
From the issue dated February 11, 2005
Satiric Inferno
Out in the desert, Percival Everett, a U. of Southern California professor, writes fiction that flouts categories
By PETER MONAGHAN
Moreno Valley, Calif.
Percival Everett can frame a house. He also raises mules, and breeds roses. And the strikingly trim and fit 48-year-old professor of English at the University of Southern California can also write a hell of a novel. Increasingly, his 18 published works of fiction are winning him notice in literary circles.
Mr. Everett's writing is "unapologetically intelligent," reviewer Ben Ehrenreich wrote in LA Weekly.
"He's literature's Nascar champion," wrote the fiction writer James Sallis, in The Boston Globe, "going flat out, narrowly avoiding one seemingly inevitable crash only to steer straight for the next."
With acclaim like that, why does Mr. Everett's sidelong stare on book-jacket photographs seem to say, "Don't mess with me"?
Perhaps it is the long road that he has traveled to win that acclaim. In the past, Mr. Everett earned a living as a ranch hand in the West and Southwest, a high-school mathematics teacher in Florida, and a jazz and blues guitarist while working his way through the University of Miami. He has also pursued an on-again, off-again career as a painter of abstract canvases.
The stare, it turns out, also has a lot to do with the way he feels about how his work and that of other African-American artists is categorized.
"I don't want to talk about race," Mr. Everett says, "I just want to make art." His 14 novels, three collections of short stories – the latest, Damned If I Do (Graywolf Press) is just out – and one children's book (with a first book of poems about to appear) make up a literary universe that flouts rigid boundaries and easy conventions. He has written a mock western, a semisurreal postapocalyptic tale about the last fertile woman alive (a 300-pound, oddball government clerk), a hilarious novel in letters and memos that negotiate the publication of Strom Thurmond's account of his seminal role in bettering the lives of African-Americans, and re-creations of the myths of Medea and Dionysus. He has spun stories of a one-legged rancher and her retarded son, lost Vietnam veterans, orphans who turn up from nowhere, a man who performs a Caesarean section on his wife so he can be the one to deliver their baby, and a cowboy varmint who mourns his dog's death more than his woman's disappearance.
Mr. Everett's latest novel, American Desert (Hyperion, 2004), is about a mediocre, philandering English professor whose head is lopped off in a car accident while he is on the way to his suicide, but who comes back to something like life in the middle of his funeral. With his head rough-stitched back onto his body, he is abducted into the worlds of religious crackpots, ufologists, and shadowy government scientists (who are attempting to clone Jesus). It is a scathing satire that spares neither academics nor governments – and certainly not apocalyptic nuts such as the sect leader Big Daddy, a sort of L. Ron Hubbard figure writ even larger in fictional guise.
Even though most of his work is not, on the face of it, about the subject of race, Mr. Everett is a satirist whose frame of mind will not permit him to keep that topic out of his novels. He simply resists being pigeonholed in any category, including as an "African-American" author. In today's literary and academic climate, however, that is a hard battle to win.
Ranch Hand
Interviewed at his home, 70 miles from Los Angeles, Mr. Everett, though a writer of biting wit, is genial and quick to laugh as he explains how he gets so many books written while running a small ranch. He is sitting in the house that he fashioned from a ranch building, where he and his wife, the scholar Francesca Rochberg, live. He has plenty to do, today as every day, to maintain the cool microclimate he has created with gardens around the house that otherwise sits in a parched terrain bordering 40,000 acres of waterless badlands.
He has animals to feed starting at 6 a.m. – a menagerie that includes a goat, two dogs, and a cat (Eartha Kitty), as well as two mules, a horse, and five donkeys. He also has the gardens to see to, with their 150 varieties of roses, and pepper trees, eucalyptuses, herbs, and wildflowers. Often enough, he will have repairs to make on the house or various other buildings on the property.
It is a good thing, really, that it is often scorching hot outside. The heat forces him to retreat indoors every now and then. When he takes those 15-minute breaks, he knocks out a page or two of the latest of his novels. "I work when I can," he says.
Mr. Everett found a wider audience in 2001 with Erasure (University Press of New England). That book and other works are earning Mr. Everett high praise. American Desert is "Frankenstein redone for the good old U.S.A., and another sign that Percival Everett has leaped into the front ranks of that small group of first-rate American satirists," according to Alan Cheuse, a professor of English at George Mason University, in one of his regular book reviews for National Public Radio's All Things Considered.
Mr. Everett's voyage to literary prominence and a job in academe included many ports of call. After studying philosophy as an undergraduate at Miami and as a graduate student at the University of Oregon, he headed to Brown University's writing program. There, at the age of 28, he wrote and sold his first novel, Suder (Viking, 1983), which drew the attention of The New York Times Book Review.
Since 1985, Mr. Everett has taught at the Universities of Kentucky, Notre Dame, Wyoming, and California at Riverside. These days, he calls the University of Southern California home. He says he sleeps little, but does, sometimes, relax, while thinking about work: He spends summers fly-fishing, and writing, on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Ms. Rochberg, his wife, is a MacArthur Award-winning scholar of Babylonian astronomy and astrology. The couple met at Notre Dame. "When she told me what she did, I proposed," he chuckles.
A Bad Place
Mr. Everett's good humor belies a distinctly anti-Enlightenment view of human nature. "I don't operate under any illusions about the world – it's a bad place," he says. "Always has been, always will be. Human beings aren't particularly admirable."
That attitude comes through in his writing, but humor keeps it from souring. Says Mr. Everett: "If the best I can do in this life is be entertaining in some way, then I'll be entertaining in that way. Still, I'll talk about the things that I think are vacuous and the things I think are evil, knowing that certainly not because of my pointing them out will they change."
He locates the origins of his wit in his voracious childhood reading. "It was shaped by Mark Twain, Groucho Marx, Bullwinkle, and Laurence Sterne," he says. "And I love Samuel Butler [the Victorian-era satirist]. The Way of All Flesh. I read it every year. It's hilarious."
Mr. Everett's skeptical take on human endeavor, said Mr. Ehrenreich in LA Weekly, ensures that "there is little celebration of the onward march of American culture in his work, and none of pop culture." Mr. Everett's disdain for those, he added, "shields him from the lures of commerce and celebrity."
"Not that I'm running the risk," quips Mr. Everett. As if to minimize his likelihood of stumbling onto either money or fame, he generally discourages journalists from visiting. "I find it offensive, in our culture," he says, "how people want to know about people that people want to know about." On a more personal level, he adds, "I don't really like attention. I'd rather have people just look at the work."
Award-o-Phobia
Mr. Everett is torn, then, when nominated for honors. He has received several in recent years, including a Fellowship of Southern Writers' Hillsdale Prize for Fiction, in 2001, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, in 2003. But the award that almost stumped him came in 2003 when he was chosen for the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation's first-ever Legacy Award, for Erasure.
"Right up until the time I accepted it, I thought about not accepting it," he says.
Mr. Everett's primary discomfort had to do, like so much in his life as a writer, with the impositions of American conceptions of race – and of any identification of him as an "African-American writer."
In some of his books, it emerges only in passing, or ironically, that a lead character is African-American. In Glyph (Graywolf, 1999), his sendup of postmodern critical theory, academe, and much else, Mr. Everett's hero is an 18-month-old baby with a high IQ who reads (the classics of Western literature and philosophy) and writes (observations informed by the likes of Ludwig Wittgenstein) but refuses to speak, and who reveals his race to the reader – "Have you to this point assumed that I am white?" – only after 53 pages of daunting engagement with Roland Barthes, Friedrich Nietzsche, and many more graduate-school titans. "It is not important unless you want it to be," adds brainy little Ralph. In other works, Mr. Everett obscures his protagonists' race, or makes them raceless.
Erasure, much of which he wrote with a crow he named Jim perched on his shoulder, is different. It tells the tale of Thelonious Ellison, a resonantly named writer of arcane, experimental novels – sound familiar? – who is disheartened by reviews like the one that hails one of his books as "finely crafted, with fully developed characters, rich language and subtle play with the plot," but finally objects that "one is lost to understand what this reworking of Aeschylus's The Persians has to do with the African-American experience."
Ellison refuses to be reduced to as facile a category as race. A summa cum laude graduate of Harvard, from a family of doctors, the protagonist notes that "I am good at math," "I cannot dance," and "I did not grow up in any inner city or the rural South." When a book agent assures him (as Mr. Everett himself has been told) that his books would sell well if he would "write the true, gritty real story of black life," he retorts that he is living a life "far blacker than he [the agent] could ever know."
The character also registers his disgust with the acclaim for a book titled We's Lives in Da Ghetto, by middle-class novelist Juanita Mae Jenkins. The book begins "My fahvre be gone since time I's borned and it be just me an' my momma an' my baby brover Juneboy," and is hailed for its "haunting verisimilitude." So, pseudonymously, Ellison thrashes out a ghetto novel of his own, My Pafology, whose 70 pages are reproduced in Erasure. In it, Van Go Jenkins, a 19-year-old rapist and street thug, knifes his mother to death for bugging him, and takes off on a spree of mayhem interspersed with reflections on his achievements, which include fathering, by four women, four children with names like Aspireene and Dexatrina.
Ellison intends his novel as a scathing attack on false underclass-dialect fiction and, beyond that, all the reductive stereotypes that dog African America. But it ends up winning a handsome literary prize for which Ellison is himself a judge. He shudders at the thought of revealing that he wrote the book; but, worse, he cannot persuade his (white) fellow judges that the book is not "the real thing."
Skewering Stereotypes
In Erasure, wrote Robert Macfarlane, a lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge, in a review in the Evening Standard, "Everett neatly kebabs one after another of contemporary America's race clichés." And yet, Mr. Everett insists that his book is not really about race, finally. In a review in The Observer, Sean O'Hagan agreed, saying that as "funny and provocative" as Erasure is on American race mores, it is "a much bigger book than that, and, as such, is as much about blackness as Lolita is about prepubescent female sexuality."
Erasure's real focus, he says, is the work of writing, and its multiple difficulties. Ellison has no doubt, before and after he writes My Pafology, that critical reception is a rat's nest. He also is beset by personal difficulties – by erasures: his mother's Alzheimer's disease; his sister's murder; his brother's divorce. Meanwhile, in Ellison's English-department world, writing and reading have themselves been erased, or at least smudged, by Roland Barthes and his fellow poststructuralists. Ellison delivers a conference paper in which he burlesques postmodernist obfuscation and mocks his colleagues for enshrining poststructuralism rather than taking it (as Mr. Everett does) as playful provocation. One colleague is so affronted that he punches Mr. Everett's protagonist.
The irony of winning the Hurston/Wright award for the novel "was not lost on me," says Mr. Everett. But there is no avoiding the fact that in writing about an author who is trying to assert his individuality over race, Mr. Everett draws attention to the very prejudices he wishes to dismiss. Nowhere is this more poignant than in the My Pafology section, which is an exaggerated retelling of Richard Wright's seminal 1940 novel of disenfranchised, angry black urban life, Native Son. Mr. Everett says he chose to mimic Native Son because it was marketed to a white audience as a sensational novel by a black writer, and that, he believes, "had an impact on what the market would seek after that."
Mr. Everett says he wanted My Pafology to express "the power of story." It certainly does that, as Van Go Jenkins runs riot only to end up being captured in front of evening-news cameras while exclaiming, "Hey, Baby Girl. Look at me. I on TV." The book does so well that it attracts a megabucks movie contract – and just as well, because Ellison needs money to care for his mother. (In an amusing resonance, Mr. Everett jokes that he agreed to a book tour for Erasure only because his Vancouver Island cabin needed a new roof.)
Given the way the publishing and criticism industries operate, Mr. Everett will probably be read as a "black writer" by almost everyone, despite his careful construction of reasons not to be. In a June letter to the editor to The New York Times, he responded angrily to one element of Sven Birkerts's review of American Desert and A History of the African-American People [proposed] by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid (Akashic, 2004) (he wrote the latter with a USC colleague). He objected to the "insidious racism," as he saw it, of Mr. Birkerts's identifying him high in the review as African-American: "I am sure that Birkerts in previous reviews has not found it necessary to identify other authors as European-American or white." He added: "I simply am tired of people connected with publishing and art in this culture being so amazed that anyone not white can create a work, that race is all they can see."
"These debates have been going on since the Harlem Renaissance," says Alexander G. Weheliye, an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University and one of many instructors now assigning Mr. Everett's novels to classes in African-American literature and culture. "Countee Cullen said the same thing – that he wanted to be thought of as a writer, first. People like Langston Hughes criticized him for that. Today that has a different valency. A lot of authors want to render African-American identity a bit more complex than it has been, without abandoning it."
In that sense, Mr. Weheliye agrees, Mr. Everett's stance is rhetorical: He knows, of course, that he will be defined as black, no matter what, but that makes him only more determined to challenge the definition.
Even if unhappily, he sometimes accepts that identification. He decided to take the Hurston/Wright award because he feared what observers would do with any controversy that surrounded the foundation that gives it. Last year he was even a judge.
Silent Treatment
At times, Mr. Everett is willing to engage questions of race quite bluntly. Upon winning a South Carolina Governor's Award in the Arts in 1994, he was invited to address the legislature at the State Capitol.
"I don't really like that kind of public appearance, but I really couldn't pass it up, given the Confederate flags that they had there," says the South Carolina native. "I essentially just stood up and said I couldn't talk because of the flags, and sat down. There was a reception following, and. ..."
"You went to the reception?"
"Oh, yeah. What was interesting was how many members of the legislature came up to me and said how happy they were that I had done that."
The reticent public speaker observes: "At least I finally got to say something that seemed to matter to me. It wasn't just some boring reading."
EVERETT'S OEUVRE
Percival Everett's works of fiction and awards:
* The Wall (Zefen Books, forthcoming March 2005)
* Damned If I Do (Graywolf Press, 2004)
* American Desert (Hyperion, 2004)
* A History of the African-American People [proposed] by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid (Akashic Books, 2004)
* Erasure (University Press of New England, 2001)
Won 2002 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Legacy Award
* Grand Canyon, Inc.. (Versus Press, 2001)
* Glyph (Graywolf Press, 1999)
* Frenzy (Graywolf Press, 1997)
* Watershed (Graywolf Press, 1996)
* Big Picture (Graywolf Press, 1996)
Won PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature, 1997
* God's Country (Faber and Faber, 1994)
* The One That Got Away (Clarion Books, 1992)
* For Her Dark Skin (Owl Creek Press, 1990)
* Zulus (Permanent Press, 1990)
Won New American Writing Award, 1990
* The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair (August House, 1989)
* Cutting Lisa (Ticknor & Fields, 1986)
* Walk Me to the Distance (Ticknor & Fields, 1985)
* Suder (Viking Press, 1983)
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
