The horses are easy enough to figure out. Vivid descriptions of the natural world, including bodies of water, appear in works as diverse as Erasure (a satire of academia and publishing), God’s Country (an actual western), Assumption (a mixture of the western and detective novel), and in books with titles like Watershed, The Water Cure, and Swimming Swimmers Swimming (the most recent of the two books of poetry that he has published).

I’ve wondered about the persistent imagery of nature, specifically rivers, and fishing, and horses in his books, and I don’t just mean the obvious ones set in the American West. So I’m writing about Percival Everett as a black writer, and I’m telling you that he has known rivers, ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins – a thought that occurred to me while reading his 2011 novel Assumption. Or he might write about baseball, horses, woodworking, literary theory, and hydrology if he feels like it. Sifting through his books, and the growing critical tradition around them, we find a writer who is committed to confronting, disrupting, and just plain fucking with conceptions of race at every turn. In fact, in his entire body of work one finds an ongoing meditation on all the sloppy, simplistic, lazy, and inevitable ways that we rely upon such racial signifiers.

Etc. Everett can obfuscate and complicate and subvert these designations all he wants, but to the extent there is such a thing as African-American literature, he’s one of the most important writers doing it.Ī Percival Everett novel is never just about race, never limited to race, and certainly never traffics in simplified notions of blackness through urban or rural clichés. If you haven't read Percival Everett, you are missing out on one of the greatest black writers working today. If you have read him, then maybe you understand why I would make such an audacious claim, even though I know damn well I haven’t read enough contemporary fiction to really back it up. If you haven’t read Percival Everett, you are missing out one of the great novelists of our time. Stay with me, son, there is no moral to this tale. Strictly speaking and I love to speak strictly, there are no utterances in the world but only sentences, cut off from the actual world by the beginning and their periods, question marks, or nothing but the fact that they end, cut off even from any real exchange between so-called speakers.

American Desert by Percival Everett