Callaloo

Writing about Percival Everett's fiction, the achievement of just over two decades, is both necessary and daunting, necessary because it is so good it demands attention, daunting because Everett has parodied so many modes of recent criticism that it is scary to adopt one, knowing that he has already demolished it—or soon will. One wants, nevertheless, to write about him, for his fictions are not only immensely engaging but also deeply provocative—altogether, an accomplished body of important work.

Many of the most significant character types and recurrent motifs in Everett's extensive canon appear in his very first novel, the zany, disturbing, and finally uplifting Suder. There we find the slightly out-of-whack narrator, in this case the slumping baseball player Craig Suder, an anticipation of such later skewed characters as the racially off-base Curt Marder of God's Country, the confused Robert Hawks of Watershed, the metamorphosing Alice Achitophel of Zulus, the shape-shifting Velepo of Frenzy, and the conflicted Thelonious "Monk" Ellison of Erasure, to cite just a few. There we find the innocent female in need of rescue, in this instance, the teenaged Jincy; later versions run from the very young, Jake in God's Country, for instance, to the elderly, Butch in Walk Me to the Distance. And there, we find the ever-present complication of race, a key aspect in most, though by no means all, of Everett's novels. The appearance of such recurrent elements at the very beginning of his career marks some of his personal obsessions and culturally important concerns, but the astonishing thing is how varied their subsequent realizations are. Surely no other contemporary writer has created, as Everett has, a parody of a Western, a realistic novel (several in fact), a futuristic dystopian fantasy, a moving Greek myth, and a kunstlerroman, not to mention a novel (I'm at a loss for genre description) narrated by a baby. When Everett said casually in a recent interview, "I don't care much to write the same thing," he was surely engaged in understatement (Interview 4). His originality is as stunning as his versatility. Running through all his works, however, are the hallmarks of his style: sparse and pellucid prose, sharp dialogue, humor—both outrageous and subtle—a pervading edginess, sudden drama, deep feeling, and always a firmly controlling, sly and ironic intelligence.

The exuberant end of Suder foreshadows some of his future fictions. It creates a paradigmatic situation that loomed so strongly in Everett's imagination that he returned to its tensions in two later novels. The foreshadowing drama assumes this oddball shape: having taken a forced break from baseball (he is put on the Disabled List), developed an obsession with the rendition of "Ornithology" by The Bird, [End Page 313] Charlie Parker, picked up in demented hope a saxophone of his own, stolen some money from drug dealers, bought a mistreated elephant, moved, Thoreau-like, to a cabin in the woods, given shelter to an abused girl, and learned to correct a pedantic zoologist's pretentious Latin with good-old colloquial English, Suder then decides he wants to fly. As he races through the woods to Willet Rock (which rises above the wonderfully named "Ezra Pond"), the white local sheriff and the drug-runner Sid, a black-skinned Native American, pursue him and attack each other, darting from tree to tree, exchanging gunshots. At the same time, the rescued girl, Jincy, cheers Suder on, and at first improbably, but then, as wind currents take hold, somewhat credibly, Suder flies—careens and soars—out of, above, away from it all. When he imagines the Latin-spouting zoologist saying "Homo sapiens," the flying black baseball player announces in signifying self-definition: "Craig Suder" (Suder 171).

While Suder's flight is a recreation of the black folk-myth of the flying African American (a tribute perhaps to empowering story-telling forefathers), the scene also exploits basic elements of a very different mythos: the American Western. As comic backdrop to Suder's grand flying, the sheriff and the Indian reenact the White-Man versus Red-Man conflict at the heart of...