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James: A Novel. Percival Everett. Doubleday, 2024. 320 pages.
I must admit that I was apprehensive about reading James. I had tried reading Everett's previous critically acclaimed novel, Trees, and honestly didn't like any part of it. I only read a few dozen pages. I also have a general aversion to hugely popular things, usually steering clear. Finally, I have had mixed reactions to "re-tellings" of classic stories. I recently enjoyed The Good Wife of Bath but found Demon Copperhead lacking. Nevertheless, I decided to plunge into James, and I'm glad I did.
Mark Twain has always been one of my favorite Americans, and there's no doubt that his incredible insight into Americans and American hypocrisy and foibles is in a class by itself. Whether it's Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn or any of his other stories, speeches, travelogues, or novels, Twain pulled back all the coverings and painted astonishingly accurate portrayals of the American zeitgeist, the "spirit of the time." In James, Percival Everett proves that he also has that gift. James is a retelling of the story of Huck Finn and Jim, his escaped slave friend and companion. True, Everett's Jim is not Twain's Jim, but that's ok; Everett makes him better. He is now older, with a wife and child, he's literate, and he teaches the enslaved people in his world the essentials of language and behavior that allow them to survive in slavery. The enslaved people in Jim's world are all at least bilingual, wearing metaphorical masks around whites - speaking and acting ignorantly - while using correct grammar and speech to discuss sometimes deep issues amongst themselves. Jim and the other enslaved people in his world offer a brilliant look into slavery and race. Many of Jim and Huck's adventures are captured in this book, and there are new adventures, and tragedies, along the way. There's a major surprise twist and a "Django" like twist at the end, but I found neither jarring. Jim - rather, James - emerges as a brilliant character and hero, and it's a great novel. I think Twain would have approved.
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The Nazi and the Psychiatrist. Jack El-Hai. PublicAffairs, 2013. 304 pages.
Filming has just recently ended on the adaption of this book as "Nuremberg," starring Russell Crowe, Rami Malek, and Michael Shannon. Guessing release in 2025?
The book tells the story of Dr. Douglas Kelley, the U.S. Army psychiatrist who found himself charged with supervising the mental well-being of 52 men accused of being complicit in the greatest evil ever perpetrated, the top surviving Nazi officials at the end of World War II. The men were imprisoned in Nuremberg awaiting the first trials of their kind, trials conducted by an international court following a war to determine their guilt in crimes that didn't even really exist before the war. It was Kelley's job to ensure that they were competent to stand trial, but he went above and beyond, making it his job to try to understand how these men could have done believed and done what they did and how they could get a nation to go along. He wanted to know if these men were really different from any other men, and, if so, how.
Kelley was a rising psychiatric star in the 1940s. Soon after enlisting in the army, his techniques revolutionized the psychological treatment of soldiers traumatized by war, and his methods were quite successful. Always driven to excel and to climb to the top in his profession, he seized the Nuremberg opportunity as a means to achieve professional status. He spent hours and hours building relationships with men like Albert Speer, Rudolf Hess, and the highest-ranking prisoner of all, Hermann Goring, administering batteries of psychological tests. The relationship between Kelley and Goring was the deepest; Goring even liked Kelley enough to ask him to raise his only child if anything happened to both of her parents. The book is based on Kelley's voluminous records, and is an incredibly interesting look into the minds of the Nuremberg defendants. It's also a look into Kelley's mind and the tragic ending of his life and the impact on his family.
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Wild Women and the Blues. Denny S. Bryce. Kensington, 2021. 384 pages.
1920s Chicago: speakeasies, bootlegging, gambling, Al Capone, mob wars, numbers running - the backdrop for this historical fiction work, but with a difference. The action takes place in black Chicago, the section called Bronzeville, so it's a 1920s story that's both different and familiar simultaneously. The center of the story is centenarian Honoree Dalcour, a sharecropper's daughter who moved to Chicago as a child, telling her life story to an aspiring young filmmaker, Sawyer Hayes, who has discovered a possible unknown film by the successful black filmmaker of the era, Oscar Micheaux. Honoree had a role in that film, and Sawyer can't resist tracking down the last living link. Honoree tells him her story. Abandoned as a teen by her mother and by her first love, she becomes a dancer in a speakeasy at 19, but she has dreams of bigger things, even stardom on Broadway. She gets a break when she's hired to dance at Chicago's most prestigious black-and-tan (club that allows integrated audiences) speakeasy, the Dreamland Cafe. Her revelry is cut short, however, when she is unwittingly involved in murder and mob double-crosses that forever alter her life. The result is page-turner revealing a well-researched world and multiple family secrets that had been hidden for nearly a century.
An entertaining read.
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Burma Sahib. Paul Theroux. Mariner Books, 2024. 400 pages.
George Orwell, real name Eric Blair, was one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century, and his books Animal Farm and 1984 are undeniably classics, two of the handful of books that I have read multiple times. Paul Theroux is a popular and highly respected author in his own right. The two come together in this fictionalized version of Blair's life in Burma from 1922 to 1927. At 19, he joined the Imperial Police and spent the next five years enforcing British colonial rule, stationed in various outposts during his service. His parents were products of the British colonial system themselves, his father having been an opium agent in the Indian Civil Service, a bureaucrat overseeing opium sales to China, and his mother having been raised in Burma, the daughter of a French speculator in timber and other enterprises. Blair's grandmother and other relatives still lived in Burma when he was there.
As portrayed by Theroux, Blair is a complicated muddle of awkwardness and confusion, a real loner and outsider, freakishly tall (at 6' 2"), and incredibly socially awkward, always more comfortable reading, writing poetry, and dreaming of being a successful writer than he was at personal interactions. He's pressured by his father into accepting the police job in Burma even though he always suspects that it is not his place. From the beginning, he's troubled by the brutality and hypocrisy that he's expected to uphold in his job, which is in British eyes to enforce law and order and to impose "civilization" on the deprived, and depraved, "Orientals" who are paradoxically simultaneously thought of and treated as ignorant, simple, and childlike on one hand and devious, sly, and conniving on the other. The struggle in the book is Blair dealing with all of this and trying to keep his sanity.
The novel is an interesting take on Blair's life and how it shaped his future work, It is also a searing indictment of British colonialism. The reader may well come away with the impression that the British are the most evil, vile, disgusting, and perverted people who ever lived. and not just for the horrors committed in the name of Empire, but also for the soul-crushing abuse that was a daily part of life in British public schools and the larger British class system.
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