Percival Everett by Virgil Russell by Percival Everett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Reading this I was reminded of some other novel Everett wrote where some writer complained that his books, academic and impenetrable, where nevertheless shelved in the “African America” section of the bookstore. Which at the time was a send-up of political correctness—but now we’re in this post-ironic age and I feel like more he(the character) was complaining about First World Problems. After all, if Everett’s a writer’s writer, then for every book he writes that’s put on a shelf, there’s thousands and thousands of others written by writers who will never even be shelved at all.
I’m not calling Everett a whiner or a hypocrite, but I am going to paint him with the same brush I paint Joyce, which is to say, he’s got to be, at least, messing with us. I plowed through this impenetrable novel of his in a day, half a day, actually, and I don’t know what I got out of it—but I don’t feel like my time was wasted.
This is a novel that deconstructs itself as it goes. It’s for people who like Everett. It’s for people who smugly thought they were in on the joke, in Glyph, when he made fun of intellectuals, and who now must know they’re the joke’s sole source of irony. This is an ambitious novel, or would be if a lesser writer tried it, but Everett’s been to more than a few rodeos, so let’s swap ambitious for inevitable.
Math and Philosophy and Western Sensibility and Pharmacology and Radical Sixties Politics and Race and Geriatrics and Infidelity and Photography and Zeitgeist and … and you know what, I can’t recall any kind of existential angst. How is that even possible in a novel written after 1980?
Linguistics, Meta-Linguistics, Russell’s paradox. I guess that’s how.