I don't think I've anticipated a book as much as - and definitely not for as long as - I've anticipated the arrival of Percival Everett’s James, which came to me in yesterday's mail from Firestorm Co-op (firestorm.coop) - in time for me to crack it open today, its official release date. As the younger brother of a Tom, from grade school on I've felt shortchanged by Mark Twain for relegating Jim to a side character or foil while giving Tom all the fame and glory that comes from not whitewashing a fence.
It's not just Twain who's scorned me.
Pretty much all of English literature has shortchanged Jameses and Jims (as I see it, anyway) with Joseph Conrad seizing on the name for a title character and then immediately destroying me and my fellow Jims with the life he imagined for Lord Jim. Robert Louis Stevenson, I’m reminded, didn’t disappoint me. All the same, for being a not uncommon name in my circles, Jims and Jameses haven't gotten the favorable notices I believe we've deserved.
Now comes Percival Everett, penning what I hope will be the new definitive Jim/James in literature, finally unseating Lord Jim. It promises to be the absurdest of liberation stories, but I have wanted this for so long, y’all.
I'm placing a lot on this novel. There are - as you may glean from this post - years of therapy I've never attended to which can at last be whisked away by this book. It holds that kind of promise for me, even though I recognize just how trivial that is as I’m expressing this thought in the open.
I know it's irrational to assign so much weight to historical and fictional namesakes. In truth, I was named for my maternal grandfather (the middle name that he went by among his friends). I should take a sufficient measure of pride in that and be done with it. The stumbling block for me were the years of my childhood spent gazing at the colorful oversized abridged and adapted picture books of Tom Sawyer and of Huck Finn that couldn't fit upright on the bookcase in my bedroom. Ill-suited for an inconspicuous residence among the appropriately-sized denizens of my bookcase, the two Mark Twain books were prominently featured up top, daily reminders - taunts by Twain, if you will - that I had drawn a short straw when it came to given name assignments.
Clever as they are, the wonderful folks at Firestorm supplemented my order, as they’re inclined to do, with a Zine that's about St. Lucy. St. Lucy, as it so happens, is the namesake for my maternal grandmother...and that's kind of trippy for me right now, as Jim and Lucy were my grandparents and the two have always gone hand-in-hand.
In any case, I have high hopes as I find time over the next day or two to get some long-awaited redemption and healing from a book that I think should be this year's bestselling and most widely-acclaimed novel, even if nobody else pays any attention to it.
"James" sounds like a terrific novel. Long live James!