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Item Barcode | Collection | Call Number | Status | Item Holds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 33607002754409 | Adult Fiction | EVERETT Percival | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
"Anything we take for granted, Mr. Everett means to show us, may turn out to be a lie." -- Wall Street Journal
* Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize * Finalist for the PEN / Faulkner Award for Fiction *
A story inside a story inside a story. A man visits his aging father in a nursing home, where his father writes the novel he imagines his son would write. Or is it the novel that the son imagines his father would imagine, if he were to imagine the kind of novel the son would write?
Let's simplify: a woman seeks an apprenticeship with a painter, claiming to be his long-lost daughter. A contractor-for-hire named Murphy can't distinguish between the two brothers who employ him. And in Murphy's troubled dreams, Nat Turner imagines the life of William Styron. These narratives twist together with anecdotes from the nursing home, each building on the other until they crest in a wild, outlandish excursion of the inmates led by the father. Anchoring these shifting plotlines is a running commentary between father and son that sheds doubt on the truthfulness of each story. Because, after all, what narrator can we ever trust?
Not only is Percival Everett by Virgil Russell a powerful, compassionate meditation on old age and its humiliations, it is an ingenious culmination of Everett's recurring preoccupations. All of his prior work, his metaphysical and philosophical inquiries, his investigations into the nature of narrative, have led to this masterful book. Percival Everett has never been more cunning, more brilliant and subversive, than he is in this, his most important and elusive novel to date.
Author Notes
Percival Everett is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of more than twenty books, including Assumption , Erasure , I Am Not Sidney Poitier , The Water Cure , Wounded , and Glyph ; three collections of short fiction; and one book of poetry. He is the recipient of the Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the 2006 PEN USA Center Award for Fiction. He lives on his ranch in the mountains outside Los Angeles.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
It is a testament to Everett's brilliance as a writer (I Am Not Sidney Poitier) that his latest novel, so damnably frustrating and more than occasionally tedious, is also so humanely adept at getting to the heart of the human condition. What story there is concerns an aging writer as he dictates his life's story to his son, Virgil, "words finding the full theater of his mouth." This writer, who may be named Percival Everett, lives in an assisted living facility, where he becomes involved in a hilarious scheme with other residents to retaliate against the mean-spirited staff. He relates other peculiar, often dubious tales, as well as family memories, some apparently true, others seemingly dreamed or imagined. In fact, everything we hear may have been invented by the fictional Everett, or it may not even be coming out of his mouth at all, but rather from his guilt-ridden but loving son. Everett has created much more than an exercise in unreliable narration, an exploration of the nature of language and the rationales we create to keep ourselves going as we grow old. By the conclusion, every sentence, indeed every word, has come to seem like a valuable key, not just to this puzzle of a novel, but to the meaning of existence. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Review
This latest novel by prolific writer and PEN Center USA Award winner Everett (I Am Not Sidney Poitier) showcases his versatility and erudition (the title's Virgil Russell echoes references to the poet Virgil and the philosopher Bertrand Russell). The author serves up the beginnings of plotlines so intriguing we wish he would resolve them; instead, he casts them aside and turns to fascinating disquisitions on philosophy and semiotics. The fragmented, almost hallucinatory narrative sometimes seems to be Everett's own voice, sometimes that of his deceased father (the novel is dedicated to Percival Edward Everett, born in 1931). For much of the novel, this uncertain narrator gives us a view of nursing home confinement that resembles the inner circles of hell, as an elderly man pens a novel that challenges his son. Everett anticipates and mocks the reader's confusion, drily noting that some readers "may require a certain specificity concerning the identity of the narrator." VERDICT This is a challenging book, but well worth the read; you won't think about popular fiction, the world of ideas, or old age in the same way again.-Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Lib., VA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.