In his short story “The Appropriation of Cultures,” from 1996, a Black guitarist playing at a joint near the University of South Carolina is asked by a group of white fraternity brothers to sing “Dixie.” He obliges with a rendition so genuine that the secessionist anthem becomes his own, shaming the pranksters and eliciting an ovation. “I write fiction.”īeneath his work’s ever-changing surface lies an obsession with the instability of meaning, and with unpredictable shifts of identity. “I’ve been called a Southern writer, a Western writer, an experimental writer, a mystery writer, and I find it all kind of silly,” he said earlier this year. Everett, sixty-four, is so consistently surprising that his agent once begged him to try repeating himself-advice he’s studiously ignored. “If I can make you believe it, then it’s fair game,” he once said of his books, which range from elliptical thriller to genre-shattering farce their narrators include a vengeful romance novelist (“ The Water Cure”), a hyperliterate baby (“ Glyph”), and a suicidal English professor risen from the dead (“ American Desert”).
The author of twenty-two novels, he excels at the unblinking execution of extraordinary conceits. Percival Everett has one of the best poker faces in contemporary American literature.
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