Impossible Chess, Close Reading, and Inattention as Disability in Percival Everett’s Telephone

Abstract

Percival Everett’s Telephone (2021) is a novel published, by deliberate design, in three very different versions. Ostensibly, the author has claimed in interview, this choice was to test the boundaries of authorial authority and to delegate interpretative control to the reader. In this article, I argue that such a stance is disingenuous. Telephone is, instead, a novel that continually withholds information from the reader and that ultimately frustrates close reading techniques. In doing so, the text casts the reader into the mental viewpoint of the terminally ill child in the novel, Sarah, who suffers from the progressive neurological condition Batten disease. The outcome is that Telephone should be read as a novel that pathologizes readerly inattention but that, as a result, passes innovative comment on disability narratives in fiction more broadly.