Maya Binyam’s profile is ostensibly pegged to the release of James, Percival Everett’s latest novel, but the stars aligned in a wondrous bonus: at the Academy Awards the night before, Cord Jefferson won Best Adapted Screenplay for American Fiction, which stems from Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure. None of that bears even remotely on the profile itself, which is an exemplar of what can come when a very smart writer comes to the table with an encyclopedic knowledge of her very smart subject’s very smart work. There’s scenework, and there’s dialogue, but the real joy is how Binyam gets inside Everett by getting inside his prodigious output—teasing out his leanings and pressing him on them. She gets him; he gets her. It seems like a friendship in the making, and I sincerely hope that comes to pass.
When asked if an interpretation was his intention, Everett almost always says yes. He knows that his books depend on an audience to achieve significance, and he seems to encourage that dependence. In 2020, he published three versions of his novel “Telephone,” a move that he knew would emphasize the authority of his readers—and piss them off. (The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.) “He plays with the reader,” his longtime editor, Fiona McCrae, told me. “Part of his subject is our reaction to his work.”
Because Everett refuses to analyze his fiction, he is popularly regarded as a “difficult” author, a distinction he wears with pride. “I am a famously difficult interview,” he told me more than once. He acknowledges that he can be spacey when his interest isn’t held, and he often splices amusing non sequiturs into conversation. (“If you were going to be an animal, which animal would you be?” “Do you think there’s a Sasquatch?”) He believes that awards are “offensive,” and describes them as “invidious comparisons of works of art.” His books have won many. “I’ve never met somebody who gives less of a shit,” the director Cord Jefferson, who recently adapted “Erasure” into an Oscar-nominated film, “American Fiction,” told me.
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