{"id":708,"date":"2013-08-05T11:04:41","date_gmt":"2013-08-05T19:04:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=708"},"modified":"2013-08-05T11:04:41","modified_gmt":"2013-08-05T19:04:41","slug":"review-percival-everett-by-virgil-russell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2013\/08\/05\/review-percival-everett-by-virgil-russell\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Percival Everett by Virgil Russell"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Percival<\/a>
\n Percival Everett by Virgil Russell<\/a> by Percival Everett<\/a>
\n My rating: 3 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

Reading this I was reminded of some other novel Everett wrote where some writer complained that his books, academic and impenetrable, where nevertheless shelved in the \u201cAfrican America\u201d section of the bookstore. Which at the time was a send-up of political correctness\u2014but now we\u2019re in this post-ironic age and I feel like more he(the character) was complaining about First World Problems. After all, if Everett\u2019s a writer\u2019s writer, then for every book he writes that\u2019s put on a shelf, there\u2019s thousands and thousands of others written by writers who will never even be shelved at all.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not calling Everett a whiner or a hypocrite, but I am going to paint him with the same brush I paint Joyce, which is to say, he\u2019s got to be, at least, messing with us. I plowed through this impenetrable novel of his in a day, half a day, actually, and I don\u2019t know what I got out of it\u2014but I don\u2019t feel like my time was wasted.<\/p>\n

This is a novel that deconstructs itself as it goes. It\u2019s for people who like Everett. It\u2019s for people who smugly thought they were in on the joke, in Glyph,<\/i> when he made fun of intellectuals, and who now must know they\u2019re the joke’s sole source of irony. This is an ambitious novel, or would be if a lesser writer tried it, but Everett\u2019s been to more than a few rodeos, so let\u2019s swap ambitious for inevitable.<\/p>\n

Math and Philosophy and Western Sensibility and Pharmacology and Radical Sixties Politics and Race and Geriatrics and Infidelity and Photography and Zeitgeist and \u2026 and you know what, I can\u2019t recall any kind of existential angst. How is that even possible in a novel written after 1980?<\/p>\n

Linguistics, Meta-Linguistics, Russell\u2019s paradox. I guess that\u2019s how. <\/p>\n

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

Percival Everett by Virgil Russell by Percival Everett My rating: 3 of 5 stars Reading this I was reminded of some other novel Everett wrote where some writer complained that his books, academic and impenetrable, where nevertheless shelved in the \u201cAfrican America\u201d section of the bookstore. Which at the time was a send-up of political … <\/p>\n

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