The Power of Percival Everett: America’s Incendiary Man of Letters
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With a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle, a place on the Booker Prize shortlist, and an Anisfield-Wolf Award all in less than nine months, Percival Everett, one of the literary world’s greatest iconoclasts, is finally having a star moment. After 34 books in the 39 years since his 1983 debut, that spotlight is long overdue— widespread acclaim finally catching up with his talent.
And yet, the question remains, will audiences follow? They should. Together with the Pulitzer finalist Telephone, Dr. No and The Trees, three brilliant books in rapid succession, make a resounding affirmative case for what his devoted cult following already knows. Like a conjurer, Percival Everett has the gift of transmogrification: He transforms weighty topics some readers might shrink from into deceptively sharp entertainment. His books induce as much delight as they do insight. And even though unbidden laughter is a pervasive part of the Everett experience, his literary persona is also constantly shapeshifting.
Throughout Everett’s work, two things are apparent: First, among his more than two dozen novels, alongside wit, the greatest constant is stylistic experimentation. In 2021, he published The Trees, a disconcertingly funny yet still poignant revenge thriller rooted in one of America’s most brutal historical tragedies, the killing of Emmett Till. The follow-up, his just-released novel Dr. No, takes an entirely different path, delivering a deadpan simultaneous send-up of contemporary racism and the fiction of international espionage, even appropriating details from some of James Bond’s most famous adversaries as inspiration.
Second, though he’s too modest to acknowledge it, Everett is a true American genius, a master artist. The realities of United States life and history are his subjects, and satire, his most effective tool and medium.
As we discussed at length over eggs and tea during the Anisfield-Wolf Awards weekend in Cleveland, he uses creativity and a playful tonal variation to bridge gaps and help audiences work through the challenging subjects he presents. One form this literary magic trick takes is in absurd, over-the-top yet meaningful wordplay. In Dr. No, Wala Kitu, the self-chosen moniker of his latest main character, is a fine example. As the narrator of a quixotic billionaire-funded caper, the fictional academic explains that his name is a mashup of the Tagalog and Swahili words for “nothing” (I looked it up; this is true), and his specialization as a professor of mathematics is also the study of “nothing.”
In this contemporary riff on James Bond, a self-made, “slightly racially ambiguous” billionaire with aspirations of supervillainy (think Elon Musk in the body of Keegan-Michael Key and with Kanye’s abandonment issues ) enlists this Black mathematician for the heist of the century. Instead of taking over Twitter or running for president, though, this megalomaniac wants the professor’s help to rob the gold reserves at Fort Knox—much like Fleming’s Goldfinger tried to do in the 1960s. Except that they expect the vault to be empty, so the plot is to steal nothing.
None of this, neither Wala Kitu’s name nor his position, makes sense as he reveals rather matter-of-factly: “Wala is Tagalog for nothing, though I am not Filipino. Kitu is Swahili for nothing, though my parents are not from Tanzania. My parents, both mathematicians, knew that two negatives yield a positive, therefore am I so named. I am Wala Kitu. That is all bullshit, with a capital bull. My name is Ralph Townsend.” It’s a send-up of spies but also academia and politics and (possibly) cultural appropriation.
Here, and throughout his oeuvre, humor is the vital tool of the author as social critic—to get his point across and to shape the reader experience. But the ambiguity is also part of the beauty. And like the scholar he’s long been (at the University of Southern California, he teaches writing and literary theory), the Distinguished Professor is acutely aware of his precedents. Underscoring that humor has long been an adaptive strategy for hard times, he notes: “Humor is, historically, I think for many cultures a key element of survival. It allows you at once to relax in a moment and not have what would kill you kill you.”
In The Trees, Everett pulls off this multi-tonal survivalist storytelling maneuver to perfection, skewering the legacy of America’s deadliest sins with pitch-dark irony. Though the action takes place in the present, the atmosphere and dialogue, much like the town’s racial politics, reek of 1950s. When FBI agents are called to investigate a mysterious spate of murders of white people in a Mississippi town that suspiciously bear the hallmarks of the Emmett Till murder, they find a place stuck in time. There’s a corrupt, Klan-loving coroner named Reverend Doctor Cad Fondle and a biracial waitress named Gertrude who goes by the nickname of Dixie, a term almost synonymous with Jim Crow. The diner where Dixie works showcases “weirdly colorized photographs of Elvis Presley and Billy Graham.”
This portrayal of small-town Mississippi parodies how much the supposed New South resembles the Old South. I sensed the specter of historical popular narratives as well as events—like watching the classic Southern noir of the Academy Award–winning Sidney Poitier thriller In the Heat of the Night through a fun house mirror. Local deputies use the term colored detectives to describe the Black FBI agents, talk about “outsiders” interfering in local business, and display disdain while complaining about being treated like “rubes.”
In these scenes, it’s clear that Percival Everett has honed his gifts finely, thinking long and hard about the effect of humor as a literary device and sharpening the way he wields it. Comedy enhances his ability to balance the light and darkness in his compositions and to lure in the reader. Everett’s tools are not simple laugh lines but cultural juxtaposition—details may seem over-the-top or out of time until you remember George Floyd (whom Everett explicitly mentions). And the broad humor would almost lull the reader into complacency except that they share space with the grizzly details of murders and more than one scene of true reverence.
Everett is both thoughtful and candid about the authority that this aptitude for shading light and dark confers: “You achieve some power.… As an artist, humor allows me to put the reader, in a way, at ease so that I can do bad things to them.” For a Black son of the Jim Crow South, who often writes about race, gender, and power—Everett was born in Georgia in 1956 and raised in South Carolina—that’s crucial. And when he explained this approach, my immediate thought was, Mission accomplished.
In one of The Trees’ most shocking and effective scenes, an egregious racist dies a grizzly, expletive-laced death that is also subversively funny, as his racism is on display in his final words. It is profane and pitch-perfect. As a reader, I felt recognition and reassurance hearing this artist talk about the power of humor, as my experience of The Trees had felt like being under a spell—devastating yet mesmerizing, the book that I never wanted to put down even when it pained me. How was it possible to be so amused and so shattered simultaneously? This must be sorcery. And just try explaining your love for a satire about lynching to friends.
Much like his writing, Everett’s persona is a study in contrasts. Impeccably mannered and erudite, he has the benign, rumpled physical presentation of your favorite absentminded professor. He’s also devilishly defiant. He’s writing what he wants, without a nod to commerce. His greatest advice to young writers on how to handle criticism is delightfully irreverent, if not blasphemous: “I teach my graduate students, my mantra is ‘Fuck the audience.’” I have no doubt that this works. Though he takes no credit for this whatsoever, 2022 National Book Award nominee Jonathan Escoffery was a recent student in his seminar.
To be fair, Everett’s true position on the author-reader relationship is complex. Deeply versed in critical theory, with a firm grasp of the importance of standpoint theory (essentially how life experience and identity shape perspective), he honors his reader’s autonomy and his own: “It would be not only naive but a little dumb to think that I can anticipate some type of reader. Everyone is different. And everyone comes to the work with different baggage. So what it’s going to mean is something different every time the work is viewed.”
If you can’t anticipate the meaning a reader will make from your words, Everett reasons, “I can’t write for anyone other than myself.” So not even his wife, novelist Danzy Senna (Caucasia) has the privilege of reading drafts and providing feedback. Plus, Everett posits with a chuckle, “What’s the worst thing that happens if I’m completely out of step? No one likes the book.” That might appeal to a writer who once said he’d love to write a book everyone hated. Yet even that provocative statement is a teasing meditation on interpretation: “If everyone had the same reaction to a book, how cool would that be? If everyone hated it, what power would that be? Yeah, I would love that experience.”
There’s more than defiance at work. Forget commerce; conscious choice has little to do with his authorial process. While he doesn’t use the language of spiritual calling, the way Everett talks about writing sounds transcendental: “You start out with 500 blank pages and somehow it fills up. It’s magic.” That was especially true with The Trees. Though it’s a substantial novel, the writing came quickly. “The weird thing is, one doesn’t want to write that novel,” he says. “I had to write that novel.” When he was conceiving it, hearing (white) country singer Lyle Lovett’s cover of the historic, plaintive Southern prison song “Ain’t No More Cane on This Brazos” gave him the spiritual nudge he needed to tackle a story that involved the history of lynching. Much later in the creative process, the nation erupted in a sustained, collective outrage in response to the police killing of George Floyd, and that propelled him at the end. Lynching wasn’t the only or most difficult topic he was taking on: “The novel was not just about lynching. It’s about genocide and about culpability, about stereotypes.”
Everett’s handling of the latter—those ubiquitous social overgeneralizations we call stereotypes— is remarkable in Erasure (one of his most famous earlier novels, it was reissued in the U.K. with a startling new cover and an introduction by Brandon Taylor in 2021), The Trees, and Dr. No. The Trees has material retribution as a central theme and part of the plot, but there’s also symbolic payback in the broad yet cutting caricatures of white characters like Dr. Fondle and the deputies. Those depictions are mirrors to the degrading patterns of racialized representation of Black people and other minoritized groups in popular culture in the United States.
If that’s too heavy, Dr. No is just as incisive, but the waters feel less treacherous in a zany espionage setting rather than blood-drenched thriller. As off-kilter as ever, Dr. No is Percival Everett at his most artfully absurd and ironic, and it might be just the thing to finally propel this star into the literary ether.
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