Henry’s severe illness and his difficulties accessing treatment prompted Green to contemplate the horrifying statistics of tuberculosis and the paradox of our extensive knowledge about it. More than one million people still die every year from this ancient disease; yet the bacterial cause was elucidated a century and a half ago, and effective treatments have been around since the 1950s. Barring eradication, the germs mutate and become resistant. Given dire living conditions, it spreads. Effective therapy can be prohibitively expensive. “The cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not” (p. 5). People die where cures cannot be obtained. 

History is woven though Henry’s story, but so are politics, culture, and economics: the discoveries, the 19^th-century romanticization of ‘wasting away,’ the hard realities of pharmaceutical development and delivery. Henry has survived, become healthy and an inveterate TikToker and youtuber. He even has an episode on the power of storytelling. But other people that we encounter through this tale have died. 

We still have tuberculosis because statistics de-personify it, and geography allows ignoring it. Green uses Henry’s story to invite us to ‘[t]hink about how rare and precious humans are, and how many of them you get to worry for and care about. Then if you can, find a way to multiply that 1,250,000 times’ (p. 189).  

The book flows easily in language that is clear and accessible, a tribute to Green’s experience in writing young-adult fiction. In the end, without denying the benefits of medical interventions, he calls for a focus on the real cause of tuberculosis: injustice—tolerated and unchallenged. ‘Ultimately,’ he writes, ‘we are the cause’ (p. 184).  

Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
John Green
New York: Penguin/Crash Course Books
2025
ISBN 9780525556572 

Web image created by Medhum.org

As the founder and director of the Centre for Health Humanities and a professor of English at the University of Reading, UK, Andrew Mangham, Ph.D., has published extensively on medicine and Victorian literature. His books include Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine, and Victorian Popular Fiction (Palgrave, 2007) and Dickens’s Forensic Realism: Truth, Bodies, Evidence (Ohio State University Press, 2016). Mangham and I exchanged questions and answers via email concerning his book, The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy (Oxford University Press, 2020).  

1, How did you arrive at the topic of your monograph? What led you to research the intersection of Victorian literature, medicine, and political economy? 

It was a bit of a circuitous route actually. At the institution where I teach, there is a key research strength in food science and food security. A few years ago, this was highlighted as an area of research focus within the University, and this got me thinking about what it was that the Victorians could bring to the table, as it were, on the question of modern food security. We’re all very familiar with the idea of the starving Victorian pauper, but I wondered what political and philosophical work this idea or image was doing on the ongoing issue of food inequity. This then set me thinking about how nineteenth-century medicine responded to the problem. Some preliminary research taught me that there was a plethora of medico-physiological works on starvation as a material phenomenon. I also noted that this side of the question had been overlooked by modern scholarship, which has tended to focus on political economy as the Victorian science of hunger. What I found, however, is that medicine spoke in very different ways about hunger and—if anything had a bearing on the birth of social problem realism as the genre of the ‘Hungry Forties’—it was this material, medical, scientific focus set against the consequentialist thinking of political economy. 

2, For readers unfamiliar with The Science of Starving, briefly sketch your main contention. Why does your study deserve attention? 

My main contention is that, in the long nineteenth century, there emerged a science of starving in which specialists in medicine and physiology spoke about what happens to the body when we starve. The realities of this process were stark and shocking, and they countered the notion, formulated mainly in the works of Thomas Malthus but swiftly adopted as ‘fire-and-brimstone’ gospel by politicians, social reformers, and authors of statutes, that those who starve are intended to do so by nature—that it is only ‘natural’ that famines sweep away large numbers of people. This propagandizing interpretation of Malthus converted the poor into a mass of immoderate and reckless burdens on the State. The physiological focus on starvation as a harrowing condition which affects individuals helped counter the conservative ideology, and it inspired the social problem fictions of Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens, which also take individual subjectivities, ways of interpreting poverty, and reactions to social injustices as key points of focus. Taken in conjunction, literature and medicine show us a world in which the well-meaning ideas of Malthus were exploited and warped into something much more sinister; they also show us the ways out of the problems the ideology has posed for us by returning to a consideration of the individual, the connections between people, and the material realities of modern life. 

I would argue that the book deserves attention on two major counts. First, it gives us a new context in which to read Victorian social problem fiction—a context in which we have an explanation for the emergence of realism as a socially-aware, politically-driven mode of writing. Looking at the forgotten context of Victorian food science, we see a lot of familiar and unfamiliar narratives in new light. Secondly, the book—and perhaps the most important issue—deserves attention because its questions are still with us. The conservative interpretation of Malthus has fed into and justified neoliberalism—a political approach tried and failed since the 1980s, and now enjoying a resurgence in the UK. At the heart of the neoliberal ideal is the idea that the many cannot be trusted to handle money and that economic responsibility is rightly placed in the hands of the elite few. The idea is that this will lead to a trickle-down effect, where the many will benefit from the successes of the few. The truth, as we see in the bloated account-books of internet trading companies for instance, is that wealth placed at the top tends to stay there, with some individuals now wealthier than some countries. My book can’t tackle all aspects of this issue, but it does show us where the idea of the ‘immoderate mass’ comes from; how it has justified political disenfranchisements of the poor for centuries, and that there is a more humane approach which concentrates on the experiences and the needs of individuals.  

3, Describe your research methodologies for this book. You use the first chapter to stage the broader historical context, describing the major theories of political economy and medical understandings of hunger, digestion, and gastrointestinal anatomy. Your subsequent chapters then situate medical texts alongside examples of Victorian fiction. What is your larger methodology? 

I suppose my methodology could be identified as a kind of new-historicism, where the powers and meanings of literature are best understood when we pay attention to their original, historical and social, contexts. But this isn’t a straightforward process of identifying where an author picks up his or her ideas. I try to read literature as actively involved in the shaping of history; ideas may begin in medicine and/or political economy, for instance, but they are soon transformed and made to do something special when they work their way into works of fiction. What this work is depends on the styles and objectives of individual authors, but it is certainly the case, I think, that ideas become bolder when they are explored in works of fiction. Zola famously had the idea that the novel was an experiment—a trial of ideas and concepts—and I think that whether an author intends it or not, their work tests the meanings, potentials, and limits of ideas within a certain historical timeframe. I therefore think it’s important to read the fiction produced by any time period we are seeking to understand fully, to go back and to see how and why ideas first emerged through the ways they are tested and dissected in the form of fiction. 

4, Some readers might naturally assume a kind of intrinsic rivalry between art and medicine, fiction and scientific rationalism. Yet your book emphasizes that Victorian writers neither snubbed medical science nor regarded it as antithetical to their literary ambitions. Why is it important that these writers transcended disciplinary borders? 

It’s important that the field of ‘literature and science’, which has become quite busy in recent years, moves away from the idea of the two cultures—the notion, that is, of warring approaches to interpreting the world. This is a modern idea, forged in the twentieth century, and is not actually representative of the work science or literature does. To those of us who spend any time with the ideas of science and/or medicine, we’re used to seeing how the intellectual work involved here is no less beautiful or imaginative than the ideas of fiction and poetry. Similarly, we can point to authors whose work has all the hallmarks of scientific rationalism. It is important to see how writers transcend their so-called disciplinary borders because this shows us how ideas evolve when they are passed from specialism-to-specialism; it also shows us how ideas were never meant to be confined in disciplines. Appreciating the true interdisciplinarity of how ideas work opens up a world of possible collaborations and curiosity.  

5, Writers, as you show, were certainly influenced by the era’s medical texts, but were physicians reading the works of these literary figures? In other words, was there a mutual exchange of influence and recognition between Victorian physicians and writers? Were physicians aware of their impact on shaping the literary texts you examine? 

Yes, certainly. This question could have formed the basis of another book—volume 2 perhaps. We know that medical figures read fiction—there is a famous account of the physiologist and surgeon Benjamin Brodie reading The Pickwick Papers in his carriage between consultations; other medics saw literature as crucial to the kind of work they did. The surgeon Anthony Carlisle perceived there to be similarities with the progress of illness and/or injury and the progress of a story. He is thought to have written a gothic novel. For other medical and scientific figures, literature was a ‘switch off’ activity. We have accounts, for instance, of Charles Darwin and Richard Owen reading Dickens in the evenings. In later psychological texts of the period, Dickens’s characters are often held up as case studies of complex conditions like dementia. Whereas we have an obvious written record of medicine’s influence on literature (we can look at specialist language working its way into fictional plots), proving the inspirations in the opposite direction is more challenging, but I wonder whether the evidence is less ‘tangible’. I think the centrality of narrative in case studies and accounts of experiments, for instance, owes much to the powerful example of literature; I also think questions of causation, biological determinism, psychological wellness or aberration have their roots in the long social and psychic studies of the novel. 

6, While these writers used medical language to ground their plots and characters in the materiality of poverty, one wonders if these descriptions would have eventually desensitized readers to the shock of starvation’s physical dimensions. That is, did the language of medical science and physiology become subsumed into what later readers may have recognized (and disparaged) as sentimentality? Did the language of physiology eventually lose its trenchancy as it became an established feature of these Victorian writers’ works? 

It’s a good question. Certainly, in respect to the long nineteenth century, I think the science of poverty offered something of a stimulant to ways of reading which had become desensitized. We often hear of social-crusade literature, or poverty tourism in the nineteenth century, as intending to jolt the Victorian reader with confrontations from a world they had chosen to ignore, or which their middle-class existences sheltered them from; but by the 1840s, the world of letters, politics, and social reform were overwhelmed with newspaper reportage, government blue books, and philanthropic pamphlets. Writings about the stock figures of the starving mother and child, for instance, were very common and it’s unlikely that these would have had the confrontational power it would be all-too-easy to ascribe to them when read out of context. In the nineteenth century, however, physiology was relatively new; people were used to medicine as the treatment of the sick, and to anatomy as the study of bodies, usually dead ones, but the science of life—the science of the processes of life—was relatively fresh. This new science had new things to say about hunger—how it operates, what causes it, and how it proceeds if it is unchecked. I think this did emerge into something confrontational, something which had a powerful political ballast. I think it still does.  

7, Readers might consider the extent to which illustrations—in Dickens’s writings, specifically—also worked to visually articulate the language of physiology. For example, John Leech’s illustrations in Dickens’s Christmas Carol depict the children “Innocence and Want.” These child figures are gaunt, shivering, and spectral; their clothes are tattered. Are readers to understand these illustrations as also reflecting Dickens’s broader efforts to draw on medical science to ground material representations of starvation? 

Yes, I think so. ‘Ignorance and Want’ was an image I originally intended to include in the book but left it out in the end because it will be very familiar to a lot of my readers. We know that Dickens exerted a pernickety attention to detail when it came to his illustrations and, as John Leech set about creating the engraving, Dickens would have overseen the process closely. What’s interesting about this image is the fact that it is set in London and yet has a mill in the background, which would have been more identifiable with an industrial town like Manchester. This is an obvious nod to the industrial context—how the inequities of the profits of capitalism result in ignorance and want. The image pays particular attention to bodies in a way that echoes how the literature develops what Terry Eagleton has called ‘corporeal materialism’; in the contexts provided by the spectacle of starvation, skinny, gaunt and raggedy bodies spoke a radical, political message against the status-quo. 

8, At the time these writers were drawing on medical science to recalibrate literary representations of starvation and poverty, did the era’s readers and literary critics observe, even minimally, this changing perspective? Did book reviews, for example, detect this shift in language and representation by responding to or critiquing its efficacy? If not, what may have accounted for this critical oversight? 

Reader response is a difficult thing to measure, but reviews are an interesting insight. These differed wildly and depended, of course, on the politics of the reviewer and the magazine or newspaper they were writing for. There certainly was an acknowledgement of the social aspects of the literature and some account of the realism as well. I think that the radical qualities of the literature can be seen in just how often it raises the heckles of a conservative reviewer. It was not uncommon, for instance, for authors to take umbrage with the dogged materialism of an author like Gaskell (which is not an entirely accurate summation—she was very much interested in religion, spirituality, and feeling); Kingsley was also taken to task for his focus on bodies—unseemly, some said, in a man of cloth. And Dickens himself was attacked for the unrelenting nature of his focuses on the poor—for his seeming preference for the characters and situations of low life. Not many critics saw this—at the time—as part of a new way of thinking about poverty, but it’s certainly the case that materialism had long been associated with radicalism. Those readers who appreciated these authors often spoke of their truth and their accuracy and I think this is part of a larger, cultural (largely unspoken) acknowledgement of the powers of social problem realism. By the time we get to the next wave of social problem fiction—Arthur Morrison, George Moore, George Gissing—we’re in different territory and there is, I think, a more critical and analytical reflection on corporeal materialities.  

9, Historians of medicine, political scientists, and literary scholars will certainly note the importance of The Science of Starving. Aside from these readers, what do you want your research to convey to today’s medical students and practicing physicians? 

I’m fairly happy leaving medical students and practicing physicians in peace. They do extraordinary work and don’t need me to tell them how to make their work more humane or socially responsible. Politicians, on the other hand, I’m very happy, in the words of Dickens, to ‘fall upon’. The emergence of the far right, the zombie-like persistence of neoliberalism, and general intolerance among conservative politicians are all things which suggest that some of our civil servants might take a leaf out of the book of the nineteenth century. I would love it if my research could convey to some individuals that consequentialist thinking, knee-jerk policies, and political essentialisms have all been tried and tested, have failed, and done irreparable damage. One thing the authors of fiction and the pioneers of science and medicine have taught us is the power of thought—the importance of keeping an open mind and being willing to abandon ways of thinking whose fixedness is preventing us from growing as individuals and societies. We can learn a lot by looking to the past and we need these lessons more now than ever. 

Andre Mangham’s most recent book is We Are All Monsters: How Deviant Organisms Came to Define Us published in February 2023 by MIT Press.  

An earlier version of this interview was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).
Web image from The Cleveland Museum of Art

The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy  by Andrew Mangham 

Sebastian Galbo Jun 2, 2025

A compelling study of how Victorian writers used medical science to expose and challenge political economy’s misconceptions about starvation.

​​​Public reactions to t​he fatal shooting of a health care insurance company executive in front of a hotel in Midtown Manhattan on December 4, 2024, revealed a deep, seething antipathy across the country directed at the health insurance industry​, an antipathy that has existed for at least thirty years. ​Its ​persistence brings to mind four movies​: As Good as It Gets, Critical Care, and Rainmaker​, released in 1997 and ​John Q ​in 2002, ​each depicting scenarios where rage against the healthcare system play a key role. ​​​​​​ 

​As creators in the arts often do, the makers of these movies were picking up on trends and signals before they were appreciated throughout society, and envisioning how they might play out in real life​ 

How it starts 

“Fucking HMO bastards, pieces of shit…sorry.”  

This is how Carol reacts to the pediatrician who tells her the HMO should have covered certain tests for her suffering, asthmatic son. “Actually, I think that’s their technical name,” is the doctor’s response. This is from a scene in the 1997 movie, As Good as It Gets, directed by James L. Brooks. The movie won major awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and Screen Actors Guild​. It​ also ​drew ​attention from the mainstream press for revealing a building rage about to boil over.  

Ruthe Stein, from the San Francisco Chronicle, sensing the importance of the scene, wrote on December 23, 1997, 

As Good as It Gets may be the first movie to take on HMOs…Brooks strikes a chord when he has Carol use four-letter words to describe the HMO that has mangled her son’s case. The audience hoots and claps its approval.  

​​Then- ​President Clinton pointed to the scene as representative of real life while speaking at an event involving the Health Care Bill of Rights. 

Movies Raging Against the Managed Care Machine 

As Good as It Gets (1997, director – James L. Brooks). The movie mostly concerns the relationship between an author with obsessive compulsive disorder and a waitress whom the author depends on for a routine set of practices around his breakfasts. A side story involves the waitress’ young son who has severe asthma. At one point he needed certain tests done, but his health plan refused coverage. This situation led to the scene in which the boy’s mother reacted to this news in a way that attracted widespread public attention. The scene lasted for less than a minute, yet its effect on the image of managed care activities continued for years.  

The Rainmaker (1997, director – Francis Ford Coppola). The movie plot involves a scam operation posing as a health insurance company. A young lawyer, fresh from passing the bar exam, takes on the company through the case of a plaintiff. The plaintiff is a young man who has a form of leukemia that can be successfully treated but will kill him otherwise. The insurance company denies coverage for the needed treatment and denies seven subsequent appeals. The lawyer eventually ascertains that the company denies all claims as a matter of course. Although a judgment is made against it, the company declares bankruptcy and goes out of business, thereby vitiating the settlement awarded. The patient dies. The movie is perhaps best-known for a line said by the lawyer’s assistant which fueled the growing public sentiment at the time: “There’s nothing more thrilling than nailing an insurance company.”  

Critical Care (1997, director – Sidney Lumet). The setting for the movie is mostly in a hospital critical care unit. As in As Good as It Gets, a particular scene feeds the fury to come about managed care. A resident physician taking care of a terminal patient who has been clear about not wanting to continue treatments that only prolong suffering, argues with a senior physician and mentor about the advisability of putting the patient through yet more futile interventions. With his guard down from a combined state of inebriation and dementia, the senior physician tells the resident that the patient is fully insured and is thus a source of guaranteed revenue. He goes on to explain the economics (and immorality) driving these decisions.  

[With HMOs] we get paid not to perform medical procedures. It’s a little like when the government pays the farmers not to grow crops. However, with insurance we get paid to perform medical procedures. Do you understand the difference?  

On that basis, and that basis alone, he demands that the resident proceed full speed ahead. 

With this scene, the moviemaker is going further than pointing to just the managed care organizations as the source of rage, but also to the health care providers who can spot opportunities for self-dealing. Viewers already sensitized to managed care activities could become even more worried, incensed, or nihilistic about the situation.  

John Q (2002, director – Nick Cassavetes). About the same time John Q. Archibald’s full-time factory job is cut in half, along with his health insurance, his son collapses from heart failure while playing in a Little League baseball game. After a cardiologist tells John about his son’s need for a heart transplant and the financial requirements which he can’t meet, a nurse he asked why his heart condition had not been detected before tells them, “HMOs pay the doctors not to test. That’s how they keep costs down.” This comes up again when John asks the cardiologist how it could be that his son’s condition had never been discovered. An accompanying intern chimes in saying,  

HMOs pay their doctors not to test. That’s their way of keeping costs down. Let’s say Mike did need additional testing and insurance says they won’t cover them. The doctor keeps his mouth shut and, come Christmas, the HMO sends the doctor a fat-ass bonus check. 

The surgeon qualifies the intern’s assertion as possible but unlikely.  

Try as he might, John Q cannot come up with the $75,000 down payment. The hospital administrator will not put his son on the transplant list, and he is released to be taken home where he will die. John pulls out a gun and takes the emergency room hostage. No one is killed, no one is shot, and a solution is found in the end. However, the movie raised the level of rage to one that produced the possibility of gun violence.  

How It Ends? 

Nearly thirty years have passed since these first movies depicted the rage that came in response to aggressive measures directed at managing health care costs, especially when they involved restrictions on certain products and services health care providers ordered and patients expected. Did these movies get it right? In large measure, they did. Management activities got more aggressive over the years and indeed many of those portrayed that were particularly egregious became a reality for some. As a medical affairs executive in a large pharmacy benefit company before, during, and after these movies were released, I witnessed (and fought against) the scenarios they depict as well as many others as bad or worse (with the exception of gun violence).  

Where the movies helped to identify the problems early and possibly stoked the existing rage by bringing attention to them, they, along with professional health organizations, news media, and consumer advocates, pushed legislatures and regulatory agencies into creating laws and rules concerning how these activities are managed. These measures helped some, but media stories, books, and movies highlighting the problems appear regularly, keeping the rage alive, and maybe even intensifying it to the level anticipated in John Q. Maybe, even, to the level that played out on an early morning Manhattan street in December 2024.  

Podcast: The Clinic & The Person

Film Trailers

As Good as It Gets Trailer

John Q Trailer

The Rainmaker Trailer

Critical Care Trailer

Web photo by Christian Harb 

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