{"id":329,"date":"2012-01-23T15:25:05","date_gmt":"2012-01-23T23:25:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=329"},"modified":"2012-01-26T15:27:03","modified_gmt":"2012-01-26T23:27:03","slug":"assumption-review-on-goodreads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2012\/01\/23\/assumption-review-on-goodreads\/","title":{"rendered":"Assumption– review on Goodreads"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Assumption\"<\/a>Assumption<\/a> by Percival Everett<\/a><\/p>\n

My rating: 4 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

Assumption<\/em> is three short stories featuring the same setting and characters, and the ending of the third story casts enough of a shadow over the main character as to make you rethink what happened in the first two stories. This last feature, I guess, is what makes this a novel. If you like. Or just call it three stories. Or look to the title and realize Percival Everett is messing with you.<\/p>\n

Percival Everett likes to mess with you. Go read Erasure<\/em>, or American Desert<\/em>. I normally don’t approve of that kind of extra-textual criticism, but I’ll be honest, Assumption<\/em> left me scratching my head. So I’m looking at Everett’s other characters to try and figure out what’s going on. He likes to write about Invisible Men (the Ellison kind) and while I apologize for lumping together two writers who are both black, I can at least tell you that for Everett it’s not just a matter of race. It might be a matter of class, or profession, or even location. And race, too. People who are pigeonholed just as soon as they’re regarded, and everything they do contextualized by that label.<\/p>\n

For what it’s worth, Thomas Berger does that too in the aptly titled Being Invisible<\/em>, but in Assumption<\/em>, the main character does not, in the end, play to type. It’s an abrupt revelation, and like I said, it forces the reader to reconsider everything that’s been read up to that point.<\/p>\n

And it’s told in Everett’s easy style. The prose is plain, almost sparse, and it flows without any apparent effort, matching Assumption<\/em>‘s setting in the New Mexico countryside and the (alleged) simple way of life out there. This, too, is part of Everett’s oeuvre, these tales told in a place we city folk would call out in the middle of nowhere. Horses and pick-up trucks, shotguns and rattlesnakes. What westerns would be if no one bothered to label books with genres at all.<\/p>\n

The thing is, I read a book by Percival Everett by random chance a long time ago, and since then I’ve been hooked. As soon as I saw Assumption<\/em> on the shelves, I picked it up without question. And once again he’s satisfied. I’d like to encourage you to read Assumption<\/em>, but I’m only doing so because I think you should try all of what Everett’s written. Even if you’re not into any kind of meta-textual analysis, I think you’ll enjoy his stuff.<\/p>\n

View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Assumption by Percival Everett My rating: 4 of 5 stars Assumption is three short stories featuring the same setting and characters, and the ending of the third story casts enough of a shadow over the main character as to make you rethink what happened in the first two stories. This last feature, I guess, is … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Assumption– review on Goodreads”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-5j","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=329"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":330,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions\/330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}