Real, fascinating, important dramas lie buried beneath distracting passages of self-referential rhetoric: stories of adultery and abandonment, the persistence of violence in American life and time's inevitable drift away from the beginning of things toward an undesirable end. As the book moves along, the question of the narrator's identity constantly comes into play - is it the younger Everett who is narrating or is it the father? Or the painter or the physician, characters whom the father seems to have conjured up in a manuscript that the son seems to have appropriated? In this new book, Everett, a character himself, gives us a series of encounters with his father in a nursing home, where the old man has gone to go to pieces. He lives outside of Los Angeles, where he is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Southern California. Percival Everett is an award-winning author of novels and short stories. If your taste runs to the brilliant expression of contemporary nihilism disguised as intellectual inquiry, these novels may entertain you. They tend to be mainly satirical, as in, for example, his novels Glyph and Erasure.
The books composed under the thrall of this longstanding (yet apparently still voguish) tendency are not his best. In these books, he reveals just how deeply he's been seduced by the idea of metafiction, the modernist notion that all writing is really only about itself and that the writer should work in an ironic, self-reflective fashion. When Everett tells these stories in a direct manner - even in novels as varied in style as the realistic Watershed and the feverish American Desert - his work takes hold of us and won't let go.īut there's an unfortunate aspect of his aesthetic that occasionally raises its head, leading to work that seems forced and pedantic. Though at first glance we don't often take his characters to be odd, his crusading hydrologists, drug-mad western lawmen, played-out baseball stars, eccentric women, nasty politicians, muddle-headed academics and inquisitive writers make up a population both slightly crazed and utterly revealing of the American dream (and nightmare). How I wish Percival Everett looked up every now and then from his keyboard to see a sign like this.Įverett is one of the most gifted and versatile of contemporary writers, with over 20 works of fiction to his name, novels and stories that show us our own country at an angle just slightly tilted toward the antic. How?Ī friend of mine, with more than half a lifetime in the business of writing and a following of devoted fans, some years ago nailed a sign on the wall above his writing desk.
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