James by Percival Everett is narrated by Jim, the escaped enslaved man who accompanies Huck Finn when the two flee down the Mississippi River in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At the opening of James, Jim has overheard his owner telling someone that they are planning to sell Jim and separate him from his wife and children. He flees to a nearby island to avoid this fate and come up with a plan to somehow rescue his wife and daughter. While on the river, James narrates his version of the events with which we are familiar from Mark Twain’s seminal text.

A significant difference between the two tales is that James writes in what would be considered by white, educated people of his time to be ‘perfect’ English and he speaks in the same style when he is with other enslaved people. Yet when speaking with or in front of white people, he and others who are enslaved adopt the dialect to avoid attracting attention. James has secretly taught himself to read and write; he has internal conversations with philosophers such as John Locke and Voltaire. James is also the recipient of a precious, stolen pencil, and as he states, ‘With this pencil I write myself into being.’

This book encapsulates the feeling we have as readers: that we have discovered a secret power, and we are both empowered and defined by what we read and write. This book somehow avoids all smugness, while bestowing upon the reader a feeling of being blessed, somehow, to encounter a work this special. Everett has written over 30 books, including Erasure, which is the basis of the tremendous film American Fiction, and The Trees, a blistering satire of Southern literature which could almost be a collaboration between Flannery O’Connor and John Kennedy Toole. Normally, I would be daunted by the task of attempting to review a book by an intellect this towering, but in this case, I feel most of us are underqualified. I finished this last night, but I feel that this haunting novel will linger in my memory for a long time. It’s definitely an early contender for book of the year.