Two Month Review Season 25: JAMES by Percival Everett & EMPIRE OF THE SENSELESS by Kathy Acker
Continuing our trip down the Mississippi . . .
We announced this in the last episode of last season, but in case you missed it, season 25 (wow that number!) is going to be another one featuring two sort of connected titles: James by Percival Everett & Empire of the Senseless by Kathy Acker.
And, it’s kind of short notice, but we’re starting this next week, so if you want to real along in real time, you might want to order at least James ASAP.
Although he’s been publishing for over 40 years (Suder came out in 1983), and gains fans and accolades with every book, I don’t think Percival Everett has ever had a year quite like the last one.
First, American Fiction—which is based on Everett’s Erasure, and is a truly wonderful film—was nominated for five Oscars, winning for “Best Adapted Screenplay” (over Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Poor Things) and then James came out and was a Booker Prize Finalist, the winner of the Kirkus Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award. (And the film rights have been optioned with Steven Spielberg as Executive Producer.) All of which is much deserved and builds on the successes of Trees, Telephone (all three versions), and Dr. No. This is a hell of a run!
Here’s the jacket copy for James:
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin . . .), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.
More grifters!!! And back to the Mississippi River—where we started off last season with Melville’s amazing and odd The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade.
I’m not sure how much I need to pitch this book given how much praise James received from some of the most high profile reviewers out there—Dwight Garner in the New York Times, Ron Charles in the Washington Post, and Laura Miller in Slate, to name only a few—but I particularly liked these two answers from a brief interview he gave for the Booker Prize:
The book that changed the way I think about the novel
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy taught me the importance of play as an avenue to meaning. Also, I learned that important truths don’t need and often don’t come italicised or with brassy accompaniment.
The book that impressed me the most
Again, Tristram Shandy, for its intelligence and play. It challenges how a work of fiction is supposed to mean and make meaning. An 18th-century novel that could pass for post-modern (if there were such a thing).
Tristram Shandy!!! One of my all-time favorite books, the spirit of which does seem to inhabit Everett’s novels . . .
By contrast to James, Acker’s book might need a bit more of a push . . .
Thanks to Tower Records in East Lansing—the home for strange fiction and Punk Planet—I came across Acker’s work at a pretty pivotal time in my reading experience. Not surprising to anyone who knows me, but even as a young college student, with my bright purple hair, I was all about breaking down norms and scoffing at many of the anointed classics in favor of more fringy, experimental works. And when I came across Blood and Guts in High School, I found exactly what I had been hoping for.
From a 2022 New Yorker piece on her:
The avant-garde writer Kathy Acker liked to say that she wasn’t one person but many. “I’m sure there are tons of Kathy Ackers,” she told an interviewer late in her career. A quick study of her life bears this out. She was the disappointing Karen Alexander, a self-described “good little girl” who didn’t dare challenge her parents until she was in her teens. She was the intimidating woman at the loft party, with “harsh makeup and amazing punk hair,” who nonetheless struck perceptive observers as “fragile” and “childlike.” She was a sex worker, an office temp, a college instructor, and one of the most famous writers on the London scene. Later in life, she was something of a feminist icon, a muscle-bound motorcycle rider who enjoyed being photographed topless, the better to flaunt her tattoos.
Acker made this multiplicity—what she sometimes called her “schizophrenic” quality—the main subject of her transgressive, at times alienating fiction. In fourteen novels, sundry short stories, and one essay collection, she took aim at villains large and small: neglectful parents, abusive boyfriends, hard-driving bosses, Nixon, Reagan, and capitalism itself. Influenced by the conceptual artists of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, and determined to exploit the revolutionary potential of literary language, she dispensed with the conventions of fiction (consistent characterization, intelligible plots) and replaced them with stolen texts, shape-shifting protagonists, explicit sex scenes, and hand-drawn maps of her dreams. The goal was to break through the repressive political structures that confined people to one name, one gender, one socially determined fate. Her fiction asked not “Who am I?” but, rather, in a more philosophical key, what it meant to have an “I”—or several.
Acker broke all literary conventions and created her own sort of style that’s akin to Burroughs and Jean Genet, and, similar to reading Can Xue, her work is better experienced than explained.
Even though I haven’t revisited her since my early years out of undergrad, I’ve been longing for an Acker renaissance for ages—one which kind of sort of started to happen in 2017 when Grove reissued a handful of her most well-known books (including Empire of the Senseless with a new introduction by Alexandra Kleeman), and the iconic Chris Krause released After Acker. A few years later, McKenzie Wark’s Philosophy for Spiders: On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker came out, followed by Jason McBride’s Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker generating a little more buzz, but then . . . it all sort of faded away.
Which sucks, but maybe isn’t surprising if you’ve read her work. It’s dense, yet playful, strikingly original, but also filled with plagiarisms. Plots dissolve, character is fluid—all seemingly perfect for our times, but also very complicated in comparison to the typical works of fiction that explore identity politics. Making it an excellent TMR book! One that we will valiantly try and explain and unpack.
So putting aside a general push for everyone to read and learn about Acker: Why Empire of the Senseless in particular? And why paired with James? Because she too plays with Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (a book Acker said was “one of the main texts about freedom in American culture”) plagiarizing and twisting it to her own ends.
The jacket copy doesn’t mention this directly, but does draw on the Neuromancer vibes (another text embedded in this one):
Empire of the Senseless continues Kathy Acker's brilliantly original exploration of the postmodern art of fiction with a story set some time in the future—a bleak, postrevolutionary world in which our society lies dying amid its own ruins. "An elegy for the world of our fathers," as the author calls it, the novel evokes a hauntingly familiar country of the imagination experienced by two terrorists and sometime lovers: Thivai, a young man who has wanted to be a pirate for as long as he can remember, sailing the seas to slaughter his victims in order to watch the blood gushing from their bodies; and Abhor, part robot and part human, who met Thivai when she walked into his apartment pointing a Luger at him. Abhor's father had forced her to yield to his sexual demands, and her mother had killed herself because she was unable to live without the husband she hated. Together and apart, the two undertake an odyssey of graphic and savage sexual carnage, a holocaust of the erotic painted in the fearsome colors of blood and death. In Paris, once the city of light, Algerian revolutionists take to the streets to seize power under the banner of the Third World. The terrorists and the wretched of the earth are in command, marching down a road charted by Genet to a Marseillaise composed by Sade. Empire of the Senseless demolishes literary conventions with a supercharged glee turned into ferocious violence, and a language as stark and shocking as the hellion future world it invokes. More than in any of her earlier novels, Acker here blasts away at the debris covering our senses with an audacity unmatched by any other writer of contemporary fiction.
If you’re curious—or need more convincing—part of Kleeman’s introduction is available via The Paris Review:
Terms like postapocalyptic and dystopian are too tidy for Acker’s project, which aims to draw attention to the squalor of the civilized and the unfinished, ongoing process of world death. Instead of seeing ends, we see horizons, swaths of world that shade off into the distance and finish somewhere out of view. Acker uses the scaffolding of the science-fiction novel in the same way a looter might use a rock to bash in the window of a supermarket—a convenient tool to access someplace interesting. Although it draws inspiration from the work of genre-establishing friends like William Gibson, Empire eschews conventions of science-fiction world building in favor of a visceral sense of immediacy. A luminous, transfixing description of Abhor’s cyborg body is not there to help illustrate some alternative technocratic world order but to draw the reader out of their fixed place and into another.
Sounds like the perfect thing to read in 2025 as things become more and more surreal . . .
In terms of this season’s schedule, the dates below are when the YouTube broadcasts will be available, with the podcast versions dropping at Apple, Spotify, and on this Substack the following day.
February 12: James (1–59)
February 19: James (60–123)
February 26: James (124–185)
March 5: James (186–244)
March 12: James (245–End)
March 19: Empire of the Senseless (1–62)
March 26: Empire of the Senseless (63–140)
April 2: Empire of the Senseless (141–174)
April 9: Empire of the Senseless (175–End)
We’ll be back next week with the first episode about Everett’s James! See you then!