What could possibly go wrong, right? 

This is the set-up of Dorothy Bridges’ The Expendable Man, and the answer is, of course, “plenty.” It is not a big reveal to say that the girl’s motives seem dubious, and she proves hard to be rid of, being dropped off and then repeatedly showing up again, including at Hugh’s Phoenix motel room, where he refuses to speak to her. It is not even a big reveal to say that the morning after she shows up at his motel room her body is found in a canal on the outskirts of Phoenix, and the autopsy reveals her to have been pregnant—and to have had an abortion. Unsurprisingly, the suspicion of the local police falls on Hugh, the last person—and conveniently, a physician—known to have seen her alive. It will be up to Hugh to prove his innocence despite the damning circumstances.  

Dorothy Hughes was known as a writer of noir fiction, and The Expendable Man is no exception. From the first page she creates a sense of uneasiness which pervades the entire novel. The dry airless heat of the southwestern desert, the rowdy and vaguely threatening teenagers in their jalopies who buzz about the town of Indio like so many flies, the trackless expanse of territory with the lone hitchhiker in the middle of nowhere, the local police, who seem to have had their humanity burned out by the heat—all of this contributes to the subtle but steadily mounting dread which characterizes so much of the novel.  

The book was written in 1963, when Los Angeles was very much the land of dreams, and Phoenix was still a relatively young and underdeveloped city just beginning to stretch out in the Maricopa Valley; it’s a short distance from the downtown neighborhoods to farms and empty lands where bad things can happen. And when this particular bad thing happens, people want to find the perpetrator. If it could possibly be an outsider, someone educated and from the big city, who drives a big Cadillac—someone “not one of us”—so much the better. Of course it looks too easy, but the community needs someone to blame. They need a sacrifice, and Hugh is just that: convicting him of the crime will spare the police having to look too hard in their own backyard for the culprit. Hugh is literally an expendable man. 

Fortunately, Hugh has his family and his new love interest to support him, and he enlists them in his attempt to solve the crime, because solving the crime is the only way to get him off the hot seat. How this happens is well-plotted and holds the reader’s attention.  

The fact that this is written in 1963 influences the lens through which the novel should be read; that is, with mid-twentieth-century mores and cultural referents in mind. Reaction to the news that the dead girl has had an abortion galvanizes the community—abortion is illegal, and the Arizona of the novel considers it immoral as well. The combination of people’s revulsion at the very fact of the abortion, and the thirst for punishment that accompanies it, magnifies the crime of murder; everyone talks about the heinous nature of what has happened. Also, the Cadillac was at the time a symbol of having “arrived,” and a medical school education was expensive; not all families could afford to pay for one. And golf was, and still is, an expensive indulgence. With touches like these Hughes paints a very specific picture of her protagonist.  

The Expendable Man is, however, so much more than simply a mystery. Hughes’ ability to create the setting and build the uneasiness is superb literary craft. Interestingly, it’s possible that the way she does this has partly to do with her excellent writing and partly to do with popular culture that postdated the novel’s publication—i.e., it may have as much to do with what the reader brings to the novel as (or rather, in addition to) what the author puts in it. Every film that included a hitchhiker story gone bad—and there are any number of them—contributes to the aura of dread in the early pages. And it is hard to read the descriptions of the action in Phoenix without channeling the early parts of Hitchcock’s Psycho. And we all know how that turned out.  

But The Expendable Man is also the novel as social commentary, never directly stated, but always there. The conflict between the middle- or upper-middle-class, cultured, educated, “city slicker” and the locals who think and live very differently—and are looking to hang someone—is riveting.  

There is one big reveal which comes out of left field. It happens relatively early on and changes everything in the way the reader views the story. It’s actually too good, too cleverly imagined, to give away, but watch for it (it’ll be hard to miss) and prepare to have everything you’ve thought about the story suddenly change with the breathless rapidity of a pulled-out rug. It will ratchet up the discomfort and make you re-evaluate the entire story and your reactions to it. 

Don’t say you haven’t been warned.  

The Expendable Man 
Dorothy B. Hughes 
New York, NYRB Classics, 2012 (orig published 1963), 264 pp. 

Web image by Medhum.org

Although his story opens with the establishment of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1876, Barry immediately takes a detour into the history of medicine dating back to Hippocrates, and traces the history of medical/scientific thought from Ancient Greece to the end of the 19^th century. He then introduces a series of physicians, scientists, and medical researchers who will play their parts in the story of the pandemic (this first section is called “The Warriors”) and outlines their training, research, and interactions.  

It isn’t until page 91 that he takes us to the rural Kansas county in which the story of the pandemic begins. For although it was called the “Spanish Flu,” that was actually an eponym of convenience; in fact, the first cases of pandemic flu seem to have arisen on the American prairie. However, newspaper reporting on the new pandemic was felt by the Allies and Central Powers alike to be contrary to the public interest (the war was still raging), so it was left to neutral Spain, whose king had come down with the disease, to publish the early reports. In this section, “The Swarm”, Barry also briefly reviews the basic (not to worry, very basic) microbiology of viruses and the history of some prior pandemics. He follows this with the section called “The Tinderbox,” in which he traces the events leading up to the entry of the United States into World War I, and the importance of that war and the political and social conditions surrounding it in the history of the pandemic. From here on in the influenza itself takes center stage; in sections called “It Begins,” “Explosion,” “Pestilence,” “The Race,” and “The Tolling of the Bell,” the rapid and lethal course of the pandemic is described in gripping (no pun intended) detail. The last two sections discuss the scientific advances (and some false starts) brought about by the cadre of researchers working day and night to tame the outbreak, and then Barry finally turns to the retreat of the virus and ultimate end of the pandemic. The book ends as it began, returning to the stories of the individual men and women of science who engaged in the battle to beat the disease of which it had initially been said by many that “[t]his was, after all, only influenza.”  

For anyone seeking to understand the 1918 influenza pandemic not only from a scientific and medical historical standpoint, but also with an appreciation of the political and sociocultural milieu in which it took place, you can’t do much better than Barry’s work. It is not short—it clocks in at 461 pages, with another nearly 40 pages of endnotes and a 20 page bibliography—but it is well-paced and reads smoothly; the narrative carries you along, a testament to the author’s writing style. Barry succeeds in putting a human face on the pandemic and creates a mental image of the horror of pandemic disease which can stand up alongside those we have of the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century, with which it is often compared. For those of us who know the flu as a seasonal visitor, (for most of us a major annoyance, but nonetheless a disease that kills tens of thousands each year), the images of massive and rapid death—villages abandoned except for piles of corpses, trains that “left one station with the living…[and]…arrived with the dead and dying”—seem surreal. Barry paces the book in such a way that one can almost hear the stopwatch ticking in the background; The Great Influenza is scientific and historical reporting done with great attention to detail and to getting the medical facts right, but it is reporting done with a novelist’s flair.  

Even as the pandemic begins to recede, leaving in its wake not only the dead but those living with its sequelae, such as post-encephalitic syndromes (the Woodrow Wilson/Treaty of Versailles anecdote is particularly striking), the helplessness of medical science is reaffirmed; the pandemic recedes of its own accord, because the virus mutates to less virulent forms, and the very large number of those who have survived helps to create herd immunity.   

In the book’s Afterword, added in 2018, the author discusses and compares influenza pandemics which followed the 1918 experience, talks about some of the antiviral drugs introduced over the years and how they work, and speculates about what the next great influenza pandemic might look like and how it might be prepared for. His concern was prescient, although it would be a coronavirus, rather than influenza, that would cause widespread death and societal disruption. In fact, one of the most jarring aspects of this story is the fact that, if one changes the dates and the names, the tale bears an uncanny resemblance to the COVID-19 story, right down to the attempts at minimization by the government and even the isolation and victimization of an ethnic group (in 1918 the Germans, who were the enemy in the world war, rather than Asian-Americans, as it would be during COVID).  

The Great Influenza is a detailed, highly readable, and sobering account of an episode which demonstrated once again that despite what we may think, we are not the masters of the world in which we live, and that a microbe could rapidly kill on a devastating scale and upend society—again—and there was initially little that could be done to stop it.  

THE GREAT INFLUENZA: A Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
John Barry 
Penguin Books, New York, 2004 (reissued with new afterword, 2018)
461 pages 

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database.
Web image by Medhum.org

When he arrives, he finds that the hospital is an expropriated village church overrun by rats and ravaged by typhus, and he is the only physician. The hospital is run by a nun, Sister Margarete, assisted only by orderlies, and the patient load runs the gamut from fractures and gunshot wounds to gangrenous legs and massive head trauma. The front is only a few kilometers away, and the wounded arrive continuously; the quiet and formal Sister Margarete confidently and unobtrusively guides him through rounds, surgeries, and battlefield medicine. Lucius is initially wary of her, perhaps a bit awed by her, and ultimately falls in love with her.  

The transforming event is the arrival of the “winter soldier,” Jozsef Horvath, brought in from the snow mute and shell-shocked, but with no visible wounds. For Lucius, who is fascinated by diseases of the brain and mind, this patient presents a tremendous challenge. Lucius is sure that Horvath has “war neurosis,” what the British physicians of the time were calling shell shock and what we today would call PTSD, and he is determined to understand and heal him. Lucius and Margarete make slow progress with their patient, but his attempts to care for the patient have unintended effects, and Lucius must then deal with the consequences of his actions.

The war, and the hospital routine, go on. One day, while Lucius and Margarete are relaxing in the woods, Margarete runs off; Lucius returns to the village, but Margarete is not there. While Lucius and the staff search for her, Lucius gets lost; he stumbles onto a battlefield and is dragooned into service with a regiment of the Austrian infantry. He ultimately escapes and tries to make his way back to the field hospital, and to Margarete, but Lemnowice has fallen to the Russians. The hospital has been evacuated—and Margarete has disappeared.  Lucius’ search for her will take him across the war-torn remnant of the Empire.

The Winter Soldier is a war story, a doctor story, and a romance, and it also poses a wrenching question of medical ethics. This is a lot to ask of any novel, but Mason pulls it off with aplomb. The writing is lyrical; the author’s descriptions of the variation of the seasons in the Carpathian forests are poetic and beautifully detailed, and his characterizations are finely drawn. We can not only clearly see, but also feel that we know, these people, not only the major figures of the doctor and the nurse, but also the orderlies, the Austrian soldiers, Lucius’ somewhat bemused Professor Zimmer, and Lucius’ parents (who are marvels of characterization: the retired military officer father who lives on past glory and cannot see his son for who he is, and the controlling, clever, acid-tongued society grande dame mother who can only see her son for who she thinks he should be). Lucius and Margarete feel real, and their interaction feels real…and complicated. The historical setting comes alive with detail, and the reader truly feels that they are in that place at that time, whether at a formal dinner in a Viennese mansion or treating war casualties in a Galician backwater. And the medical details are correct, not just the medical terms but even the way in which they are used in dialogue, which is not surprising, as Mason is a physician; it isn’t always easy to get this right, but Mason does.  

But the true heart of the medical story here is the ethical quandary in which Lucius finds himself—the complex nature of the doctor-patient relationship, the motivations which drive it, and the decisions we make. Although this takes up a relatively short page count, its repercussions continue throughout the novel.

The novel has a particular, though minor, resonance for the time of COVID-19 (though it was released two years before the pandemic occurred). The action of the novel is set in motion when, due to a war-induced doctor shortage, medical schools decided to allow upper-level students like Lucius to graduate early and become doctors, and then immediately posted them, often with little practical experience, to field hospitals near the front lines.  Several American medical schools took a superficially similar action in Spring 2020 when doctors were desperately needed to help staff hospital units during the coronavirus pandemic, although this only applied to fourth-years who were but a few months short of graduation and would have already had the clinical experience which Lucius lacked. So while the situations aren’t entirely analogous, the concept of students opting into a trial by fire is.

The Winter Soldier can be appreciated for its historical perspective, its story of human relationships, the ethical dilemma it poses, and the beauty of its prose. Or enjoyed for what it is—a great read.

The Winter Soldier
Daniel Mason
New York, Little Brown & Co., 2018; 318 pp.

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database.
Web image created by Medhum.org

The Eye in the Door, the second in the trilogy, turns its attention to the Home Front, and more specifically describes the rampant paranoia during the war, as the government targets two groups:  homosexuals and “conchies,” or conscientious objectors.  While it too is tethered to historical fact, it is more of a fictional narrative concentrating on the state-sponsored witch-hunt, refracted through the story of Billy Prior, a patient of Dr. Rivers.  Billy is bisexual; he also grew up with childhood friends who became pacifists and objectors, and who may or may not have been involved in a plot to assassinate the Prime Minister, and so he moves in both of these marginalized and persecuted worlds.  He also has fallen in love with a woman whom he wants to marry.  During his ongoing treatment of Billy, Rivers confronts his own repressed childhood memories.   

The Regeneration Trilogy has much to recommend it in considering works of literature in the area of medical humanities.  First—and obviously—it is about the psychological damage suffered by young men pressed into military service during wartime, and the way in which medicine approaches their resultant illness with the tools it has at hand.  Each one of these soldiers has a story, each one has a trauma, and there are no pharmacological options. Much like Freud (a contemporary whose work was well-known to him), Rivers felt that the way to treat the shell-shocked soldiers was a “talking cure,” making the traumatic events unrepressed and having the patients recognize and address them.  The stories of the soldiers’ treatments are engaging, Rivers’ warmth and compassion for his charges is unmistakable, and the nature of physician-patient interaction during treatment is explored.   

Barker also poses questions about gender; more specifically, about the nature of manhood and the role of women in a male-dominated society turned upside down by a cataclysm.  Being a man in England during the war means being in uniform and preferably fighting in France; the conchies and the gay men are seen by many, including many women, as being “less than” men, and in their otherness, as subversive.  Women, for their part, have had to step up and assume the roles in the workforce that men have vacated to go off to fight.   It is supposedly the love of their fellow men that allows the soldiers to fight as a unit, to want to enlist and to want to re-up after they are wounded, and this comradeship is trumpeted by those in command.  But it is crucial that everyone understand that this must be the right kind of love; the wrong kind of love is ferreted out and made example of. 

There are many paradoxes, and many instances of doubling or of opposites, in the novels.  Rivers wants to cure his patients, although curing them will render them fit to be sent back to combat and likely be killed.  Several bisexual men lead bifurcated lives.  And underlying all of it is a society rigidly divided along class lines, with the WC’s—the working classes—distinguished not only by their living and working conditions but also by the idiomatic speech put into their mouths by the author.   The war may be in some ways a great “we’re all in this together” moment, but it can’t erase class distinctions.   

It is worth noting that Barker’s style can range over to the gritty and realistic, as well as the graphic, whether describing the events occurring on a battlefield in Picardy or in a bedroom (or back alley) in London. The writing style is crisp, and the narrative moves along nicely.  The author’s characterizations are on point, especially William Rivers and Billy Prior.  Barker has a great feel for language, although some of the words and expressions several of the characters use are distinctly British and may be unfamiliar to American ears.  She conveys an England—or at least, a segment of England—tired of war, tired of being bombed, often living hand to mouth in cold water flats with faded wallpaper and trying gamely to carry on despite being ground down. 

And underlying it all, The Great War—its idealization, its senselessness.  The three volumes of this trilogy are beautifully written, hold the attention, and move quickly, and its relatively spare language has a lot to say. 

The Eye in the Door
Pat Barker 
Dutton: 1994, 288 pages 

Photo of Chester from  The Cleveland Museum of Art 

He was wrong.  

In Nazi Germany, sleep was a poor protection from the horrors of the external world, as Charlotte Beradt, a Berlin journalist, found out. Beradt, a Jew and a Communist—and thus an ultimate outsider in Hitler’s state—began having unsettling dreams shortly after the Nazi takeover of the government in 1933, dreams of being “chased, tortured, shot at, [and] scalped,” from which she awakened drenched in sweat. Wondering if others might be having similar experiences, she began collecting dream reports from neighbors, friends, and acquaintances, aided in some cases by a friendly physician who would ask his patients about their dreams in the context of their office visits. She recorded them in her notebook or on scraps of paper, often in coded language so they would be unrecognizable to prying eyes, especially of the police. This project engaged her from 1933 until she left Germany in 1939, ultimately winding up in New York City and settling among a community of German expatriates and refugees, including Hannah Arendt. She originally published her dream reports in 1966; this new English translation by Damion Searls appeared in 2025. 

The book is divided into eleven chapters, each reporting several dreams that are linked by a common thread. Patterns emerge and are echoed: initially, the loss of privacy and the intrusion of state policies into everyday life. There are dreams in which the dreamer is under surveillance or feel they must conform to state policies; Goebbels and Hitler appear in several of these, or exist in the background. There are Kafkaesque nightmares where household items like stoves and pillows become monitors of activity or nagging and accusatory voices (Beradt refers to the “Orwellian” sense of being watched, noting that the dream content prefigures Orwell’s 1984 by many years).  

Interestingly, after 1935 (and the passage of the notorious Nuremberg Race Laws) dreams show up in the text characterized by a preoccupation with the wish for the ideal Aryan body type (blonde, blue-eyed, tall), or, more commonly, the preoccupation with the dreamer’s falling short of this ideal and being singled out for it. Non-Jewish Germans have dreams in which their noses are too prominent and “the authorities” accuse them, directly or indirectly, of having Jewish ancestry. And in her final chapter, “Jewish Dreamers, or, ‘I’ll Make Way for the Trash, if Needed,’ ” Beradt catalogues the dreams of Jewish Germans, dreams of exile, loss, hounding and pursuit, and self-abnegation. 

The book is a relatively brief (122 pages) compendium of nightmares, some of which have the feel of surrealistic short film clips, which catalogues the increasing encroachment of a totalitarian state on the lives—and into the unconscious worlds—of its subjects. The author’s analyses of dreams bespeak her familiarity with dreamwork concepts (she is referred to in several biographical sketches—not part of the book—as a “member of the Berlin psychoanalytic community,” although she was not a trained psychoanalyst), and many of her interpretations are sophisticated and suggest significant familiarity with Freudian concepts.  

It is worth noting that Beradt has probably surveyed a skewed population; her subjects are mostly people she knows, or referred by people she knows and presumably trusts, and there is a selection bias, in that she has probably not approached, say, Nazi Party members or sympathizers for their dreams. A large number of the dreams seem to date from the early years of the Third Reich, 1933-1935/6; it is possible that in the later years it was just too terrifying to talk about one’s nighttime visions…or that the dreamers had started to leave the country. 

The Third Reich of Dreams makes absorbing and chilling reading. It is fascinating to see how dreams, the realm of the personal unconscious, become infiltrated by and reflective of societal change in real time. Sometimes “the royal road to the unconscious” leads straight to the dreamer’s front door.  

The Third Reich of Dreams  
by Charlotte Beradt, translated by Damion Searls 
c. 1966, 2025 
Princeton University Press 
122 pp. 

Web photo by Ed Wingate 

Shortly before the outbreak of The Great War, a young engineering student arrives at a tuberculosis sanitorium high in the mountains of Central Europe. Over the course of his visit there he will share many meals (and drinks) with some of the other patients, a group which will include among others a Catholic conservative and a liberal humanist; there will be long, leisurely after-dinner discussions of varied philosophical topics; temperature charts will be compared; and he will become intrigued by a mysterious woman who is also a patient.  

And no, this is not The Magic Mountain. 

The Empusium is the latest novel from the Nobel- and International Booker Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk. The author subtitles her book “A Health Resort Horror Story,” which is exactly what it is. But it is a horror story which the author has cleverly folded into not just the setting of Thomas Mann’s novel, but the setting and certain elements of the plotline, all of them slightly altered, but recognizable. In fact, recognizing them is part of the fun of this well-plotted, rather Gothic tale. 

As the novel opens Mieczysław Wojnich, a young Pole from Łwów, has arrived at the tuberculosis sanitorium at Gӧbersdorf, in Lower Silesia (currently Poland, formerly Prussia), to be treated for his illness. There is no room at the main building, so he is assigned a room at Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen, where he meets his fellow (male) patients, who come from various Central European cities and differing viewpoints, but who seem to agree on one thing: the general inferiority of women. Philosophical discussions, which often take place over or after leisurely meals and the consumption of a magic mushroom-laced liqueur called Schwӓrmerei, range widely over several topics (war, language, the nature of reality) but most of the time are intensely misogynistic—what is the purpose of women? Do women have smaller brains than men? Do women’s bodies belong to the State? Have any great discoveries ever been made by women? Should women even be educated at all? (Tokarczuk helpfully includes an appendix to the novel in which she notes that all of the quotes of her characters on this subject are paraphrased from quotes by well-known prominent authors of the past, from Augustine of Hippo to William Butler Yeats)  

Things at the sanitorium go badly from the beginning of Wojnich’s stay. He stumbles upon the dead body of a woman laid out on a table, who turns out to be the wife of the guesthouse proprietor, and his companions tell him surreptitiously that she may have been murdered. He hears noises—voices—coming from empty rooms, and cries in the night from outside the guesthouse. An art student who is terminally ill confides that “people die here,” and not just from tuberculosis; every November, apparently, a young man disappears in the surrounding woods, only to have his body turn up ripped to pieces. And what exactly is going on with those woodsmen in the forest, anyway? 

The Empusium works on many levels. It is an homage to The Magic Mountain, but it is definitely not a retelling of The Magic Mountain. The allusions to Mann’s novel are multiple: the pre-World War I setting at a sanitorium in both novels; the fact that both Mieczysław Wojnich and Hans Castorp are engineering students; the philosophies of Settembrini and Naphtha in the Mountain, analogous to the conservative and humanist positions taken in The Empusium; the close childhood relationship between Castorp and Pribislav Hippe (Mountain) and Wojnich and Anatoly (Empusium), in each case bonding over a pencil. And as in The Magic Mountain, there is a narrator who occasionally breaks the fourth wall; verb tenses in The Empusium shift repeatedly from third-person singular past tense to first-person plural present. These are not subtle, nor are they intended to be.  

Allusions aside, The Empusium is its own story, and a totally different narrative. It is a horror story, a revenge story, a wryly feminist tale of the supernatural set in a place hopefully of healing but also of chronic illness and the ever-present specter of death. Tokarczuk builds suspense slowly, bit by bit, with increasing tension. Almost from the beginning there is the undeniable sensation that something is very wrong at Gӧbersdorf, although it’s hard to pin down exactly what it is. Wojnich often has the feeling that he is being watched. The story line draws from a tradition of folk horror, and specifically from the notion that bad things can happen to “city people” when they are out in the country, among the “old ways.”  

The Empusium is also more than just a horror story, and an important aspect relates to the misogynistic attitudes mentioned earlier. Tokarczuk takes a position on the nature of male-female relations (perhaps the use of a sanitorium as the setting is meant to suggest that misogyny is an illness infecting educated society). In this book “civilization” seems to be identified with maleness, and maleness is located in the sanitorium and the guesthouse, a controlled environment with its dining rooms and drawing rooms and intellectual conversation—and in the medical world, since this is a facility for medical treatment— and it is here that women are demeaned. The forest, on the other hand, is the home of the Tuntschi, female figures created by laborers out of sticks and moss and other forest detritus. It is a place both beautiful and enchanting—and dangerous. Men venture into the (female) forest, and the forest—in the form of the Schwӓrmerei, which Wojnich describes as redolent of mushrooms, moss, and earth—is brought into the guesthouse; boundaries are porous. Male and female, the guesthouse and the forest each have their secrets…and Wojnich is the last to know. But Wojnich has a secret of his own.   

And the title? A word created by the author. Empusa, in Greek mythology, was a shape-shifting female spirit who seduced young men, drank their blood, then devoured them.  

The Empusium
Olga Tokarczuk 
Riverhead/Penguin Random House, New York, 2022 
302 pp. 

Web photo by Marek Piwnicki 

The action in James, which is told in the first person, follows a good part of Twain’s story line. James, a slave, overhears that he is to be sold to a man in New Orleans and separated from his wife and family, so he flees his owner’s home and hides on a small island in the Mississippi River to buy time and plan. Meanwhile, Huck’s father, a violent alcoholic, has returned to town, and to get away from him, Huck has faked his own death, has run away from home, and is also sheltering on the same island. Together Huck and James flee down the Mississippi on a raft. With Huck thought to be dead and the runaway James presumed to be his killer, James realizes that Huck’s safety and survival are the only proofs of his innocence.   

Many of the episodes of Twain’s novel are here, but when James and Huck become separated, James’s independent narrative begins. He is left in the service of a blacksmith, where his singing attracts the attention of a leader of a minstrel troupe, who purchases him. But to perform, James must first be made up as a white man and then wear blackface. The troupe also contains a light-skinned black man passing as white, who befriends James and runs away with him. They wind up on a crowded riverboat and James discovers that Huck is on the same boat. The ship’s boiler explodes, the ship capsizes, and James must decide to save either his friend or Huck. He saves Huck (there are multiple reasons for this) and then sets about trying to return home to find his family and get them to safety…and freedom. 

James is often funny, but it is not light. Separation of families, whippings, and killings are presented as the backdrop to daily life—which renders them even more horrible. However, Everett is not just interested in retelling the Huck Finn story from another character’s viewpoint; he is interested in telling a different story: James’s. Turning the racial dynamic upside down, Everett’s slaves speak perfect English among themselves, but purposely revert to deep stereotypical dialect when around white people. They understand that by code-switching in this way they are giving the whites what they want and expect; to do otherwise would challenge the rigid social hierarchy and thus put the slaves in grave danger. Their use of dialect keeps them relatively safe, and importantly, helps them maintain a kind of control of the situation. When you have so little, a secret is a powerful thing. 

For much of the book is about power. There is a wonderful scene early in the novel where James is holding a class for slave children in which he drills them on the way they must speak around whites: 

“White folks expect us to sound a certain way, and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” I said. “The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say when they don’t feel ‘superior.’ So, let’s pause to review some of the basics.” 

The children then proceed to enumerate the rules: don’t make eye contact, never speak first, never address any subject directly when talking to another slave. The correct way to report a fire in the kitchen is not “Fire, fire!”, but “Lawdy, missum! Looky dere.”—because “…we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.” In this and other sections Everett lets us peek behind a curtain to see Black resistance in action. He also makes us see beyond Twain’s literary stereotype to understand the enslaved Black characters as fully formed people: aware, articulate, clever, and possessed of deep emotional lives, creators of a complex society within the general society of the time and place. Everett isn’t interested in the myth of the long-suffering, infinitely patient, preternaturally wise servant, except to explode it.  

James suggests that it is the control of the tools of the intellect—primarily spoken language (though James can read and write as well)—that is ultimately the slaves’ power and their defense. Denying the enslaved an education was, of course, a way of keeping them down, and many in the South fought hard to maintain this status quo. James’s treasured possessions are a book, a notebook, and a pencil, and the code-switching mentioned above is not merely a defense, but a way in which white masters can be manipulated.  

Besides education, Everett explores another source of power (or its lack): skin color, its implications and, despite the rigid social system, its malleability. Beyond the primary black/white power implications of the antebellum South, we have in the minstrel performance section white men in blackface, a black man “passing” as white who dons blackface, and a black man who must be made up to look white before he can put on blackface. There is even a biracial character in the novel, who shows up so unexpectedly that the reader is left to wonder about the author’s motivation here; is he saying this is far more common than anyone thought? Is he sending up the Great American Novel? Saying that the black and white roots of American history—and literature— are more inextricably commingled than we could imagine? Everett doesn’t expound on this but leaves us to hypothesize. 

 Perhaps the most obvious signifier of power in the novel is in the title. The protagonist is not James, the name the white world—his enslaver—calls him. but James, the name he chooses for himself. At one point he is told to identify himself:  

He is not someone’s property, no longer to be identified by a name someone else has given him. He has chosen this name, and the ability to name (see the children’s discussion above) is a power in itself. 

James is brilliant, clever, eminently readable, a tale of personal victory and an emotionally rich yet biting commentary on the dynamics of race relations. It is also grimly serious in its portrayal of the horrors of daily life for enslaved people in the antebellum South. Everett starts with Twain’s work and takes it in another direction, with another voice heard from. James’s intelligence, humanity, and determination run through the entire novel; in Everett’s telling, James is not simply Huck’s long-suffering sidekick, the good loyal companion who is ultimately liberated—literally—by Huck and Tom Sawyer. James has his own agenda, and though he may be bought and sold, he is at no time a pawn. He is hyperaware of his situation and always searching for a way to accomplish his ends; he has agency. Near the novel’s end we even have a Biblical moment where James brings down a cataclysm upon his enslavers and leads his people to freedom.  

A retelling of Huckleberry Finn, indeed. 

James is shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. Nonso Anozie reads an excerpt:

James
Percival Everett 
Doubleday, New York
320 pp (hardcover) 

Feature image by Guille Pozzi