Percival Everett by Virgil Russell: A Novel by Percival Everett

I mean, you’ve grown up to be
successful and well adjusted and,
of course, unhappy, the way a man is
supposed to feel in this world.

It’s worth book-ending this review with a simple fact – in 2010, Percival Everett’s father died. How and where I can’t tell you, but I suspect it was something along the lines of an ignominious and undignified end in the crunchy starched, boiled white linen of a care-home bed. I think you’ll probably reach the same conclusion if you ever make it to the end of this novel, published in 2013. It is, in theory, the story of a father and son, the father in care and the son coming to visit. They write and tell stories to one another.

Here ends the simple bit.

I wrote a book once. It wasn’t very good and that’s partly due to the fact it wasn’t one thing, or another, but lots of separate things and also none. It was bits of other things stitched together into a Frankenstein’s monster, a terrible chimera which refused to die but wasn’t ever destined to live.

You may think I’m lining up a savaging, but I’m not. Before I go into a half-baked analysis of the form, and without even touching on the titular Virgil and Russell, throughout the book there are narrative ideas, stories dropped in like the precis of a Kilgore Trout sci-fi magazine short story in a Vonnegut novel. These unresolved situations feel like they could be the fruit of a story picked prematurely from the imaginative vine, with characters you could picture in one of Everett’s more conventional narratives. They grip like good short stories do, and add rather than detract from the whole, unlike my own threadbare patchwork. However, they exist perhaps only to be subverted by the confusion of the larger part of the book, with names slipping, situations evolving into others, and with no idea who is telling the story at any given point.

Not helping matters is the fact the traditional markers and guide ropes are missing - it’s broken up into three parts, and each part bears a title which is a synonym for each of the other parts: Hesperus, Phosphorus and Venus. Make of that what you will.

In essence, the book could be a dream. Percival Everett (the character) or Virgil Russell (the writer writing the character?) starts the book by saying, in one or other voice, “Let me tell you about my dream, my father said.” I’ve added the parenthesis, for there is little to be found to aid clarity throughout. As we move forward, and sometimes backwards, and often sideways, it works towards an ending which, accompanied by some rather prosaic black and white daguerreotypes, reveals that the father figure is dead, and this could all have been imagined by the son. Or, that the father is imagining that he is dead and is writing what his son might write on learning that fact.

Yay, metafiction!

Before you thrown down your phone/tablet/laptop in disgust, fear not! Challenging though this form can be, where confusion reigns and the reader is never sure what is going on without the usual support structures offered by a conventional novel, it is still funny, and biting, and self-parodic, and wink-winking at its audience. And for all that, it has at its core a hole, the loss of a father, and is elegiac for the relationship between a father and son. If all novels are experiments, then perhaps this is an experiment in rationalising grief, an effort at unpicking a relationship peppered with regret and misunderstanding. If you manage to follow it through to the end, I would you hope that you feel, as I do, the tenderness behind the satire:

I’m dead, son.

I know that, Dad. But I didn’t know you knew it.

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