In a narrow, windowless room at the University of Southern California, a group of graduate students is workshopping a short story. Its author is silent as her classmates deliver gentle feedback. Some suggest minor improvements of pacing, setting, and tone. One student would appreciate a more robust description of the protagonist’s emotions, but enjoys the sparseness, too. “I like this version,” another adds. “I don’t think I have much in the way of critique.”
While they speak, their professor, the novelist Percival Everett, sits quietly at the head of a too-large table, one palm steadied against it, his body swivelling almost imperceptibly from side to side. His head, decorated with errant coils of dark gray hair, is framed by a gargantuan television that hangs behind him, its screen a black expanse. He wears the uniform of a professional Everyman: slacks, button-down, glasses. He talks at a low volume, but the sounds he makes have the electric quality of speech being filtered through a mike.
“I think you guys must be a whole lot smarter than me,” he says, pushing his glasses to his forehead. “Because I’m just a dumb old cowboy, and I can’t figure out what’s going on.”
Everett, who is sixty-seven, deploys negative hyperbole with abandon, especially when describing the capacities of his own mind. He has published two dozen novels, four collections of short stories, six collections of poetry, and one book for children, all of which he summarily casts off as “shit.” “I’m pretty sure everything I’m writing is shit,” he told me the first time we met. “I’m just trying to make the best shit I can.” After a few meetings, he seemed worried that his shit would become mine, too. “You don’t have to read all this shit,” he said. And: “Do you always get the shit assignments?”
Everett is American literature’s philosopher king—and its sharpest satirist. The significant insignificance of language has long been a preoccupation of his fiction, which plumbs the failures of storytelling to capture (or enhance) the experience of life. In “Dr. No,” a gonzo spy thriller from 2022, a scholar who specializes in “nothing” learns his most important lesson from his one-legged dog: “What Trigo had taught me was that pure meaning did not exist, never did and never would.” Other protagonists, among them a Derrida-obsessed baby, a philandering painter, and a down-and-out gambler, take for granted that meaning-making is a dance of false promises and willful delusions. Everett himself compares it to a con: “Because we want language to mean something, it means everything.”
In class, discussion turns into a debate about whether artificial intelligence can improve a writer’s craft.
“It has no ideas!” Everett exclaims.
“Well, if you go into ChatGPT and you’re, like, ‘Write me a story about a guy who goes to a writing institute to write a novel,’ it’ll make you a story,” a student replies. “So it has some ideas.”
Everett’s brow relaxes, his voice suddenly chipper. “Did I ever tell you about John Searle’s Chinese-room thought experiment?” he asks. The students are quiet. “Imagine that I’m in a room,” he says. “I have two windows. Through one window, I receive a character. I have a vast array of characters in front of me. Through trial and error, I learn that when I receive this character, I put out that one, until I learn that when I get this message, I put out that message. I can become perfect at that. But what have I not learned?”
The students remain silent. When Everett talks again, it’s with a mischievous, satisfied smile.
“How to speak Chinese,” he says.
Everett’s fiction frequently mystifies critics, who excuse their mystification by describing his work as confounding. His novels often make fun of genres, or else invent them. He has written Westerns, thrillers, a novella in the style of a Lifetime movie, and a handbook for the management of slaves. One novel might even appear in another as an object of ridicule. “Erasure,” Everett’s 2001 satire of the publishing industry, shows up in “I Am Not Sidney Poitier,” published eight years later, when a character named Ted Turner, a founder of CNN, recognizes its author. “I didn’t like it,” Turner tells the author character, named Percival Everett. “Nor I,” Everett says. “I didn’t like writing it, and I didn’t like it when I was done with it.”
There is no single style or subject that unites Everett’s novels, but many of them feature one of two psychological settings. There are the cerebral books, the ones in which his passion for philosophy acts as a narrative engine as powerful as plot. And then there are the realist books, many of them set in the American West. The latter are no less uncanny than the former; they seem only to be drawing on a more embodied experience of life. They fixate on the cruelty of humanity, yet manage to light on its potential for love.
My first meeting with Everett was at a restaurant in South Pasadena, where he lives with his wife, the novelist Danzy Senna, and their two teen-age sons. I arrived with a long list of questions about his newest novel, “James,” a retelling of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” The book—which is narrated by Jim, a young father enslaved by one of Huck’s guardians—seemed to fuse Everett’s interests: Jim travels the Mississippi but has an imaginary argument with Voltaire. Unlike Twain’s Jim, who can’t read or write, Everett’s Jim displays an unwavering control of language, which he deploys as a means of both disguise and self-expression. Under the cover of night, he offers enslaved children lessons in translation—“Would you like for me to get some sand?” becomes “Oh, Lawd, missums ma’am, you wan fo me to gets some sand?”—so that the enslavers can feel secure in their station. But, once on the run, Jim begins to pen a narrative of his own. “My interest is in how these marks that I am scratching on this page can mean anything at all,” he writes. “If they can have meaning, then life can have meaning, then I can have meaning.”
Everett answered my first few questions politely, if briefly, but I quickly began to feel like a lawyer at an unsuccessful deposition. He told me that he didn’t remember when he began writing “James,” or when he finished it, only that he wrote it while watching episodes of Bruce Geller’s “Mission: Impossible.” He knew that he first read “Huck Finn” as a child, and that the version he read was abridged, but he didn’t remember if he liked it, disliked it, or had any reaction to it at all. Before writing “James,” he reread “Huck Finn” fifteen times. Now, he said, it was a “blur.”
Books, either written or read, are conventionally understood to be pathways to knowledge. But Everett claims to suffer from “work amnesia”; after publishing a book, he forgets its contents entirely.
“I hate the idea that I might know something,” he told me during lunch.
“But other people celebrate you for knowing things,” I countered, trying to justify our convergence over poached eggs and coffee.
“I know nothing,” he said. “Why are you asking me questions?”
I knew that Everett knew something, but I wasn’t sure if his insistence otherwise was a mark of false humility or the admission of an aspiration. He has often articulated his desire to write an “abstract novel,” a book that is about nothing but language in the same way that an abstract painting is about nothing but paint. But language, unlike paint, never exists on its own. Words on a page will always conjure people, objects, and feelings from life, and so a reader will always expect them to act as representations.
Everett’s project is bound to fail; he uses that failure as material. He doesn’t try to make words work beyond their capacities—he simply exploits those capacities, so that his readers are forced to question their expectations. He has cited Ralph, the mute baby-genius narrator of “Glyph” (1999), as having a voice “closest” to his own. Ralph spends his days reading semiotic theory, and sometimes writing notes in crayon, knowing they’ll be studied for glimmers of revelation. Before being kidnapped by his pediatrician, and then by the Pentagon, he issues a warning. “Attempts at filling in my articulatory gaps with a kind of subtext, though it might prove an amusing exercise, will uncover nothing,” he says. “At the risk of sounding cocky, my gaps are not gaps at all, but are already full, and all my meaning is surface.”
When asked if an interpretation was his intention, Everett almost always says yes. He knows that his books depend on an audience to achieve significance, and he seems to encourage that dependence. In 2020, he published three versions of his novel “Telephone,” a move that he knew would emphasize the authority of his readers—and piss them off. (The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.) “He plays with the reader,” his longtime editor, Fiona McCrae, told me. “Part of his subject is our reaction to his work.”
Because Everett refuses to analyze his fiction, he is popularly regarded as a “difficult” author, a distinction he wears with pride. “I am a famously difficult interview,” he told me more than once. He acknowledges that he can be spacey when his interest isn’t held, and he often splices amusing non sequiturs into conversation. (“If you were going to be an animal, which animal would you be?” “Do you think there’s a Sasquatch?”) He believes that awards are “offensive,” and describes them as “invidious comparisons of works of art.” His books have won many. “I’ve never met somebody who gives less of a shit,” the director Cord Jefferson, who recently adapted “Erasure” into an Oscar-nominated film, “American Fiction,” told me.
Everett’s U.S.C. class typically meets at a restaurant near his home. When I visited, it had convened on campus because Everett was scheduled to attend what he described as “some event.” It was a celebration of his recent induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. “My god, this thing is killing me,” he texted me from the luncheon.
On a clear morning in early November, I waited for Everett in his office. Through the window, downtown Los Angeles looked like a collage: the skyscrapers seemed to have been cut away from the city and pressed against the country. On Everett’s desk were a picture of a stick figure labelled “DADDY,” drawn by one of his sons; a puppet of Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan dictator, given to him by a friend; and a wooden horse figurine, sent to him by a Chinese translator.
Everett walked through the door bearing a letter. “I can’t make sense of it,” he complained, handling the envelope as if it were cursed. But when he settled into his chair and read the letter aloud it seemed entirely straightforward. An editor was asking him to contribute a piece of short criticism to a new publication. In terms of subject matter, the editor believed he would have much to choose from—there was, as the letter put it, “a boatload of African American fiction coming out this season.”
“Well, that’s a bad metaphor,” I said.
Everett didn’t miss a beat. “Right now, it’s somewhere in the Middle Passage,” he said.
For Everett, “African American fiction” is a commodity posing as a genre. In 1991, when he was perhaps more amenable to performing the duties of his profession, he published an essay on the state of American authorship. “We are at the economic mercy of a market which seeks to affirm its beliefs about African-Americans,” he wrote. In the years since, his work has been celebrated for refusing to provide that affirmation, for enabling Black characters to escape the archetypes—the slave, the Glock star, the welfare queen—to which they’ve been confined. And yet Everett knows that the only way out is in. The essay continued, “Even when our work seeks to be something else, it is a reaction to the position in which we and our works have been placed.”
Everett writes quickly, the reception of one book often seeming to forge the conceit of the next. According to him, when Norman Lear, who died last year, attempted to adapt his début novel, “Suder,” into a feature film, Lear suggested that its Black protagonist be played by a white actor. Everett went on to write two novels in which the protagonist’s race is unspecified. (The film was never made.) He read a review of the first—a novel about a Vietnam veteran who befriends a one-legged sheep farmer—that criticized him for failing to adequately represent “black life.” A decade later, he wrote a novel about a mid-career novelist who pens a parody that turns “black life” into a bite-size monolith, available for popular consumption.
It was 1996. Everett was visiting the poet Cornelius Eady, who had just received a copy of “Push,” by Sapphire. Everett read the book overnight. “I was left back when I was twelve because I had a baby for my fahver,” the narrator, an illiterate teen-ager who is pregnant for the second time with her father’s child (the first one has “Down Sinder”), announces. The book, praised widely for its “gritty realism,” didn’t enrage Everett until he learned that its paperback rights had just sold for an exorbitant amount of money. In the back of Eady’s car, Everett thought up the first line of the novel-within-a-novel that cleaves “Erasure”: “Mama look at me and Tardreece and she call us ‘human slough.’ ”
“Erasure” ’s protagonist is a middle-aged writer named Thelonious (Monk) Ellison. Monk lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches literature and writes novels that are recognized for their accomplishment, but never for their revelations. (One is a cerebral reworking of a Greek tragedy, similar to Everett’s “Frenzy.”) As a collection, they fail to satisfy the market; editors, passing on Monk’s latest manuscript, complain that it is not “black enough,” even as bookstores shelve his back catalogue under “African American Studies.” “I was a victim of racism by virtue of my failing to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression,” he reflects.
Monk believes that his obscurity safeguards his artistic integrity. But when he encounters the latest literary sensation, “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto,” a début novel written by an Oberlin graduate who once spent two days in Harlem, he has a fit of inspiration and writes a minstrel tale of his own. The novel, published under a pen name and narrated by an adolescent rapist on the run from his baby mamas and, later, the L.A.P.D., is called “My Pafology.” After it sells for six hundred thousand dollars, Monk gives it a new title: “Fuck.” Monk hates the book, believing it racist. But his mother’s Alzheimer’s is rapidly progressing, his brother is in the wake of an expensive divorce, and his sister, an abortion provider, has just been killed by pro-life fanatics. He takes the check.
Since its publication, “Erasure” has been conventionally read as an argument for the celebration of intra-racial diversity. Monk’s mother’s disease, his sister’s death, his romance with a woman who owns a beach house near his—“these issues have little or nothing to do with race,” a recent reflection on the novel, published in the Times, declared. “And their existence proves the point that Monk has been trying to make all along—that his ‘Black experience’ is just as representative as anyone’s.” But “Erasure” doesn’t tell the story of an author who successfully defies (and therefore expands) expectations for the kinds of narrative that get called “representative”; it tells the story of an author who, believing the representational claims of literature to be a farce, creates his own farcical doppelgänger, a racial double that guarantees his legibility just as swiftly as it insures his annihilation.
Although Everett is quick to disavow his ego, he is just as quick to create its simulacra: his protagonists share his preoccupations and revisit his memories. One day, over coffee, Everett began talking about his mother.
“I drove a Jeep, the oldest Jeep Cherokee you could imagine,” he said. “It would kill her to call it a truck. I’d call it a truck, and she’d say, ‘You mean your station wagon.’ ”
“This is in ‘Erasure,’ ” I responded.
“I don’t think so,” Everett said. “But I don’t remember. You’re scaring me.”
Indeed, Monk tells the same story in the novel’s first paragraph, after he identifies himself reluctantly as a writer and, more proudly, as a “son, a brother, a fisherman, an art lover, a woodworker.” Everett himself is an accomplished abstract painter; he has also worked as a jazz guitarist, a horse trainer, a tracker, and a cowboy. “If there is an actual Dos Equis man,” the novelist Chris Abani told me, “Percival is him.”
Distortion animates all writing, but it is sanctioned only in fiction. “I hate this nonfiction shit that’s out in the world,” Everett once told an interviewer. (“If you’re writing memoirs,” he continued, your mother “ought to beat you with a two-by-four.”) During our conversations, he sometimes seemed as though he was laboring to forget my task, or else to divert it. “Are you sure you aren’t my kid?” he asked during our second meeting, over breakfast at Hollywood’s Soho House. We finished eating, and Everett squinted in my direction. “Do you play tennis?” he asked. “I’m looking for a tennis partner.” We began to say goodbye. “You don’t have to write the profile,” he said as we walked toward our cars. “We could just be friends.”
And yet there were just as many moments when Everett seemed open to the duplicity involved in biographical journalism—titillated, even, by the idea of participating in it. One morning, driving to the San Gabriel Mountains, we passed Santa Anita Park, a Thoroughbred racetrack. “We should create an entire persona for me where I go gamble,” Everett said, beginning to mimic the frenzied anticipation of a racegoer. He beat the steering wheel, adjusted his pitch: “Come on, Cinderella’s Dream, come on!”
Everett grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, in a sprawling, forty-five-hundred-square-foot home built by his grandfather. His grandfather, the son of a former slave, was a doctor. His father was a doctor. His sister would become a doctor, too. Everett finds the largeness of his childhood home “embarrassing,” the preponderance of doctors “weird.” He describes his youth as “uneventful.” He attended segregated schools until he was in junior high, but, when I asked about his experience of integration, he just said that he “apparently played the flute.” At home, he spent hours reading Kurt Vonnegut and looking at maps. He took for granted that he would leave South Carolina, but did not feel for it any special dislike.
When Everett spoke to me about his home state, his tone was disaffected. But when I encountered that state in an old bit of memoir, the genre he claims to disdain, it was cast in the white-hot language of dissidence. In a two-page-long sketch titled “Why I’m from Texas,” from 2001, Everett describes South Carolina’s population as “neanderthal, pathetically under-educated, confederate-clad, so-called descendants of pathetically under-educated cannon fodder of the middle 19th century.” In “I Am Not Sidney Poitier,” the protagonist is arrested and put on a prison bus, which carries him through Georgia, where Everett was born. “There was absolutely nothing and no one there of any value,” he observes, glancing out the window. “It was a terrestrial black hole, rather white hole, a kind of giant Caucasian anus that only sucked, yet smelled like a fart.”
For Everett, geography is a tool of intervention and manipulation. “You always add an element to a story once you locate it someplace,” he has said. “It might shape the characters. It might also shape the expectations of the readers, and that’s as much fun to play with as the characters.” In “The Appropriation of Cultures,” a short story from 1996, Daniel, a Black graduate of Brown University, where Everett received his master’s in fiction, returns to his home town of Columbia, South Carolina, to occupy the house left to him by his late mother. He spends his days reading and his nights playing jazz guitar at a club. One evening, a group of drunk white fraternity brothers heckles him from the audience; they’d like him to play “Dixie,” the Confederacy’s unofficial anthem. They intend the request as a cruel joke, but when Daniel begins to play, squeezing out the melody he grew up hating, he finds that he means what he sings: In Dixie Land, I’ll take my stand to live and die in Dixie. His performance comes straight from the heart. The fraternity brothers storm out, and Daniel realizes that “he liked the song, wanted to play it again, knew that he would.”
Over lunch, Everett called “Dixie”—which was written, in 1859, by Daniel Decatur Emmett, the founder of an infamous blackface minstrel troupe—a “Black anthem.” (The troupe makes an appearance in “James,” when Emmett, admiring Jim’s tenor, buys him off a blacksmith.) After Daniel’s performance, he acquires a beat-up pickup truck with a Confederate-flag decal on the rear window. “I’ve decided that the rebel flag is my flag,” he tells a friend. “My blood is southern blood, right?” He sings “Dixie” at a banquet of Black doctors, and soon Black people across South Carolina sport the Confederate flag on their lapels and cars. Having become a symbol of Black power, the flag suddenly disappears from the state capitol: “There was no ceremony, no notice. One day, it was not there.”
When Everett was sixteen, he enrolled at the University of Miami, where he studied philosophy. To pay for his classes, he played jazz guitar in clubs and wrote other students’ term papers. One summer, he drove his lime-green Fiat west. From Florida, he took Interstate 10 through Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, and New Mexico. When he reached the canyon lands in Arizona, he was angry. He hated that he had already encountered the landscape in photographs, that his ability to see what was in front of him had been tarnished by replicas. And yet even that corroded image spun in him a new belief, as old as America: the West was his.
Everett has described this journey as a cosmic inevitability. “All things move from east to west,” he once said. “The sun does, and so should we.” He has spent much of his adult life in New Mexico, California, Wyoming, and Oregon, where he began a Ph.D. program in language philosophy and—before dropping out—started working on a ranch. While bottle-feeding a lamb, Everett watched sheep wander the green hills of the pasture, and thought of the crowds in Miami. He started to cry.
Many of Everett’s characters believe that the West is a place, not a parable. For John Hunt, the horse trainer who narrates “Wounded” (2005), the desert is a desert. “It was dramatic land, dry, remote, wild,” he reflects. “It was why I loved the West. I had no affection necessarily for the history of the people and certainly none for the mythic West, the West that never existed.” But these men also insist that the West serve as an escape: a quintessential American destination without the social trappings of America. In “Watershed” (1996), a hydrologist named Robert Hawks flees his girlfriend for the plains of Colorado, a landscape that insures his “complete removal”:
Everett describes people as “worse than anybody,” and his frontiersmen share his misanthropy: they believe that transcendence occurs in the wild, where no one is watching. But, slowly, the landscapes that enable their seclusion begin to bear the marks of the politics they’ve disavowed. In “Wounded,” Hunt finds two coyote pups in the remains of a fire, nurses one back to health, and eventually seeks revenge on the culprits, a band of hillbillies whom he suspects of kidnapping his gay ranch hand. In “Watershed,” a creek that flows onto a reservation is poisoned with anthrax. A group of Native insurgents requires Hawks’s expertise, and, by the novel’s end, he’s become a crucial agent in a movement against the F.B.I.: water, he discovers, may be a natural element, but it’s also an inalienable right. In the story that these men tell about the West, their extreme capability is proof that they are meant to live alone. But, in the real West, that capability is a calling: it forces them to play the hero.
In 1992, Everett bought a ranch in the Banning Pass, between Los Angeles and Palm Springs, where he grew more than a hundred varieties of roses and tended to horses, donkeys, and mules. Neighbors were always bringing injured animals to his doorstep. One day, he found a baby crow that had fallen out of a tree. Everett cared for the crow until it was strong enough to fly, but the crow would simply fly in a loop, land beside him, and start to walk. When Everett tried to drive to town, the crow followed his truck, flying in tandem with his moving face. Everett built a perch out of PVC and stuck it in the cab so that they could travel around together. “I kept trying to get him to go out and have crow sex,” Everett told me. “I said, ‘Listen, you’re not going to get much satisfaction here.’ ”
At the time, Everett was working on “Erasure,” and the crow would shuffle down his arm and peck at the keys. But then he went on vacation, and the bird disappeared. Everett eventually assumed he was dead. He’d named him Jim. Jim Crow.
Everett’s influences are various—Wittgenstein, Chester Himes, Bertrand Russell, J. L. Austin, Robert Coover—and he keeps them front of mind. But, when I asked if he was interested in their personal lives, he seemed to find the idea inconceivable. So I was surprised when he suggested that we go see “Maestro,” Bradley Cooper’s film about the composer Leonard Bernstein—another one of Everett’s heroes—and his vexed relationship with his wife.
We went to the Egyptian, a gaudy theatre in the style of a pyramid, complete with hieroglyphs. Onstage, an attendant introduced the film as a “great love story,” but by the end it seemed a great tragedy. Cooper’s Bernstein, absorbed in his work and in multiple affairs, had lost his wife; their love found its strongest expression during his performances, when an orchestra was between them.
As we drove home, Everett seemed more pleased by the film’s artifice than by its insight. The early scenes, rendered in black-and-white, were bold, bombastic, spectacular—conversations turned into dance sequences at the drop of a hat. “I liked that the movie accepted that it was a movie,” he said. “I liked that it wasn’t pretending to be real life.”
Like Bernstein, Kevin Pace, the protagonist of “So Much Blue” (2017), is an artist with a wife and children. At the novel’s start, he’s working on a large abstract painting that he allows no one to see, and which his best friend has agreed to burn if he dies. The painting is a secret, but it’s inspired by secrets, too—by an affair with a French woman nearly twenty-five years Kevin’s junior, and by a pair of encounters on the eve of El Salvador’s civil war. (“A picture is a secret about a secret,” reads the novel’s epigraph, from Diane Arbus.) Kevin’s feelings, like Bernstein’s, are hidden from his family and expressed obliquely in his art. But what begins as an ideal quickly morphs into an indulgence. “There is a cruelty in abstraction,” Kevin reflects near the novel’s conclusion. “My paintings were abstract and splashed with guilt as much as paint, scratched with shame as much as with the knife or spatula.” Kevin never tells his wife his secrets, but he does, in the end, show her his painting. Ignorant of its meaning, she can read only its distortions. “So much blue,” she observes. “Now you know everything,” Kevin says.
The more I read Everett’s work, the more my thoughts turned to jazz. “It is the player who, by improvising, makes jazz,” Bernstein said. “He uses the popular song as a kind of dummy to hang his notes on. He dresses it up in his own way and it comes out an original.” A jazz player may reference sheet music, but the resulting performance—animated by intuition and impulse—exceeds the descriptive capacities of the language it draws from. An elliptical expression of Black life, jazz refuses to be decoded as such. James Baldwin compared it to the talking drum, used to convey messages across distances that the human voice can’t travel: “It is a music which creates, as what we call History cannot sum up the courage to do, the response to that absolutely universal question: Who am I? What am I doing here?”
“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is the story of one boy’s escapade down the river that divides the country into East and West. Huck, having faked his own death, is fleeing his alcoholic father. Jim, a father himself, is fleeing Huck’s guardian, who plans to sell him downriver. The two become an unlikely pair, their plights strangely symmetrical. But Huck, in Twain’s treatment, is the hero: Jim’s liberation is his ultimate adventure. In the book’s final chapters, Huck and his friend Tom Sawyer hatch a plan to set Jim free, a process that they protract by requiring Jim, who’s trapped in a cabin, to pen a “mournful inscription.” They instruct him to carve it on a rock, but the rock, just outside the cabin, is too heavy for them to carry alone. They let Jim out, and he carries it with Huck. Then they lock him back up, his freedom a procedural figment of their fantasy.
Everett is not the first to reimagine Huck and Jim’s coupling, which other artists have interpreted as romantic or paternal. But he is perhaps the first to try to invert it. In “James,” Huck is Jim’s shameful appendage, the object of Jim’s resentful affection. He is the secret Jim can’t give up, the wedge that cleaves Jim’s family. At times, they get split up, and the book follows Jim, who’s both unsettled and emboldened: “I was also sick with worry over Huck and ashamed to feel such relief for being rid of him.” And yet he returns to Huck again and again, their reunions exalted and sickly sweet. “You need me,” Huck tells Jim, who hates “that what he said was true.” Their association has the cold determinism of biology, or addiction—it forces Jim into a cruel decision, a decision that seems to contain the promise of a final release but which, once made, pulls him further into the current of their impossible love.
“I’m not correcting anything,” Everett once said. “That would mean I know enough to correct.” And yet it’s difficult not to read “James” as a corrective of Everett’s previous works, if not of its source material. For Jim’s predecessors, freedom requires abstraction: the problem is other people. But Jim’s understanding of freedom is literal. He knows that his happiness depends upon the emancipation of his family. At first, he wields a pencil, but then he exchanges it for a gun.
Everett is transfixed by rivers, and finds some so stunning that he can’t look at them directly. One day, I proposed that he teach me how to fish. Everett wasn’t sure there were fish to be had. It was the end of fall, and Los Angeles hadn’t seen significant rain for months. As we drove into the mountains, things looked bleak. The reservoir was low, the yucca plants were going to seed, and discarded Starbucks cups blew across the road like tumbleweed.
At the riverbed, we set our gear down near the ashes of a fire. Everett showed me his fishing flies, displaying them like a jeweller fingering his gems. There were zug bugs, damselflies, jassid beetles, woolly buggers. Everett enjoys catching fish but is equally enlivened by the process of mimicking their prey. He compares it to writing: once you’ve attracted a reader with what they think they want, you can get them hooked on what you have.
I thought we would fish for hours. But after fifteen minutes Everett suggested that we smoke cigars. We found a rock that looked like a chair and took turns sitting on it. In the distance, the mountains were an unlikely gray. Senna, Everett’s wife, had told me that they’d toyed with a move East. I asked if he would miss the landscape.
“I’m a real Westerner,” he said, gazing at the mountains. “But they would still be here.”
Everett handled his cigar like a cigar. The river was a river. Presumably, it contained fish, even if they refused to make themselves evident.
The following week, Everett returned to the river alone. I’d sensed that he had seen in it something I couldn’t. Over lunch, he relayed what he found. A few miles north of where we had tried to fish, there was an undercut bank; from its ledge, he had been able to see trout slicing through the water.
Because I had failed to observe Everett catch a fish, I suggested we do an activity that might let me observe him read. After we finished our meal, I shuffled a deck of tarot cards and asked him to pose a question.
“How can I help my family be happy?” Everett asked.
I split the deck into three piles. Everett chose a pile, and then I drew three cards from the top of it: the Six of Pentacles, the Magician, and the Five of Cups. In the Five of Cups, a robed man stands alone by a river. Three toppled cups sit before him; two, still upright, are at his back. I asked Everett to tell me what he saw.
“You said the cups are emotions,” he said. “Well, the posture is one of dejection. But there’s a light around him, so it’s maybe not dejection as much as introspection. He’s looking at a river, so the river is time. There’s red and green coming out of those cups. . . . The red would most obviously have to be blood. . . . He’s standing in front of those two cups, protecting them.”
“Do you think he’s looking at himself?” I asked.
“I think he’s looking at the river,” Everett said seriously. “I—I have depression. I suffer from depression.”
“And this feels like a depressive card?” I asked.
“That’s my first thought,” Everett said. “What’s going on in your head while you look at these? That’s what I’m interested in.”
I told Everett what I saw in the cards. While we spoke, I checked to see whether the narrative was resonating. “We’ve made it resonate,” he said. And he was right. A few hours after we parted, I sent him a photo of the cards laid out against the red stain of a wooden table. The next day, he sent me a detail from one of his paintings in progress, a rust-colored expanse with three rectangular figures travelling across it. I wasn’t sure if the painting was inspired by the cards, or if, in my image of the cards, he had seen his painting. ♦
