Undoing and Redoing the Western

Abstract

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 impor- tant 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 astonish- ing thing is how varied their subsequent realizations are. Surely no other contempo- rary 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,