The Construction of Place: An Interview With Percival Everett

Percival Everett’s work tackles many terrains, both physical and figurative. He is the author of more than twenty-five books, including novels, short-story collections, poetry collections, a novella, and a children’s book. His latest collection of stories, Half an Inch of Water, is scheduled to be released in September 2015. For this interview, Everett and I met in a café in Los Angeles in 2013 to discuss his work’s regional resonances, as well as its categorization by literary critics and everyday readers. In June 2015, he answered additional questions by e-mail about his forthcoming story collection.

Everett sets his fiction all over the United States—from the Pacific Northwest (Suder, 1983) to the rural Southwest (Assumption, 2011); from the deserts and small towns of Wyoming (Wounded, 2005; Half an Inch of Water) to the urban and rural Southeast (I Am Not Sidney Poitier, 2009) and the likewise varied Northeast (Erasure, 2001)—so our discussion of his work as regional is perhaps both appropriate and slightly misleading. As Everett remarks early in this interview, “Any good literature has to be regional, because it has to be set in a place.” It just so happens that his work is set in many different places. His academic career has taken him from the University of Kentucky to the University of Notre Dame, and now he is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Focusing on physical place offers only a partial view of Everett’s storytelling. Much of his work investigates questions of mistaken identity and the struggle to define the one among the many. His recent novel, Percival Everett By Virgil Russell (2013), takes these questions to their extreme, examining familiar themes—love, pain, and guilt—in a narrative that causes readers to wonder whether the story is being told by a father or a son and, further, if the story is about the father or the son.

Our conversation moves around these topics, and we circle back to race—a concept that seems unavoidable for both Everett and his readers. As Everett points out, “[Race] has less to do with my work than it does with the people who are discussing it. And that’s interesting to me. If they are aware of that, then it becomes even more interesting.” His work often strikes a balance between asserting the political urgency of art and refusing to identify its own politics, revealing the complexity of sometimes oversimplified political discourse. Everett evades questions about his own stance or interest in categories like race, letting his work speak for itself. This balance is perhaps best exemplified by his 2004 introduction to The Jefferson Bible in which Everett imagines a conversation between himself and Thomas Jefferson that struggles to mediate between Jefferson’s intellectual contributions to American democracy and the duplicitous racism of Jefferson’s foundational philosophies: “So, I have shamelessly used this opportunity to make some kind of political statement, though even I am at a loss to coherently restate it.” Indeed, Everett’s writing resists obvious political coherence without sacrificing an energetic political edge, embracing the subtle contradictions that others attempt to quietly efface.

During his thirty-year writing career, Everett has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, and the Dos Passos Prize. In 2014, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and in 2015 he was awarded a fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. “Everett’s serious and realistic books have their covert strain of dark humor,” wrote Madison Smartt Bell of the novel God’s Country, “and here the wit is out in the open, as agile and as cutting as Mark Twain’s.” Few writers can hold up to such a comparison, but the immensely talented and prolific Percival Everett is one who does.

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