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.
