‘The Fix’ by Percival Everett

Influx Press brought the American writer Percival Everett to wider recognition in the UK by republishing much of his work, including the brilliant short story collection Damned If I Do. They are one of several independent publishers who deserve a great deal of credit for championing short stories.

In ‘The Fix’, sandwich shop owner Douglas Langley rescues a man named Sherman Olney from a beating. He takes Sherman in and Sherman offers to fix Douglas’ fridge then his plumbing. Soon Sherman is fixing everything – a foot massager, a toy car, a razor. Word soon gets around the neighbourhood and Sherman is bombarded with requests. Then he brings a woman back to life. Everett’s story is a perfect example of George Saunders’ dictum about short fiction: “always be escalating”. I love how this story, which begins in a downbeat, fairly ordinary way, takes on a mythic, parable-like quality. Sherman becomes a Christ-like figure, but like Christ his gift threatens his downfall.

First published in New York Stories; collected in Damned If I Do, Influx Press, 2021

‘The Appropriation of Cultures’ by Percival Everett

This is a short, satirical story that imagines a black man ‘appropriating’ the white culture of the American South, playing ‘Dixie’ with full-throated passion and driving a pickup truck adorned with the Confederate flag – or, as he calls it, “the black power flag,” drawing the attention and confusion of his white compatriots:

‘What are you doing with that on your truck, boy?’ the bigger of the two asked.
‘Flying it proudly,’ Daniel said, noticing the rebel front plate on the Chevrolet. ‘Just like you, brothers.’

It’s a very funny story, propelled forward by its commitment to the bit – which it takes to a maximalist conclusion – but the humour is underpinned by a cool hardness and a realist style the keeps the story grounded in the social reality it satirises.

First published in Callaloo in 1996 and collected in Damned If I Do, Graywolf Press 2004, reissued by Influx in 2021. Available to read here

‘The Last Heat of Summer’ by Percival Everett

Difficult to say what this story is about, other than a fathers and sons camping trip, fishing, a first kiss, a tiger, and the repetitive slaughter of loved ones who want to save you. You tell them to stay away. But they come anyway. Everett looks like he doesn’t care, that he writes like no one is reading. But he does care. He considers the reader. And he knows us better than he lets on, better by far than we realise. It’s a large part of his power. This is a strange story, but like the strangeness in all great fiction it finds the strangeness in its reader, and embraces it. It comes anyway. And it’s a very beautiful thing.

From the collection Damned If I Do, Influx Press, 2020

‘The Last Heat of Summer’ by Percival Everett

I’ve become addicted to the work of the American writer and academic Percival Everett. He has a near-magical capacity for combining absurd humour and with trenchant political satire, and for reconciling clever literary experiment with the simple pleasures of character and plot. To attempt to summarise what happens in this unnerving story runs the risk of making it sound silly or pretentious. Let’s just say it’s set in 1962 in a small town in the American southwest and that it is divided into twenty sections, each set on 1 September. Our narrator is the only child of a black family; his best friend Errol is a Kiowa Indian. They watch coyotes, catch fish, discover a cave full of bats, try to track a mountain lion. At one point the narrator kisses Frannie Dawes, which causes some friction between the boys. Then the circus comes to town… I’m obsessed with this story. Everett has delivered a fable that builds through repetition so that by the end the resonances he creates are deafening. Our failing relationship with nature, the stain of slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, the sudden logic of violence, the fragility of family life. It’s about all these things and none of them. My kind of short story.

First published in Ploughshares, Spring 2003, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Damned If I Do, Graywolf Press 2004/Influx Press, 2021

‘The Appropriation of Cultures’ by Percival Everett

I was introduced to Percival Everett by Courttia Newland (more on him later). Since then I have tried to read as many Everett books as possible (there are over 25), but he is not very widely published in the UK, so books have proved hard to get hold of. Everett is an absolute master of storytelling and subversion. He loves to play with form and narrative and expectations and ‘The Appropriation of Cultures’ is him as his mischievous, provocative best. A black musician, Daniel is playing slide guitar in a bar one evening with his band, when some white frat boys ask him, “Play Dixie, play Dixie!” Dixie being, of course, a famous blackface minstrel song. Daniel thinks about refusing, but chooses to take on the song and repurpose it for himself, “deciding the lyrics were his”, and totally transforms the atmosphere of the room. The story develops remarkably after that, no spoilers, but it’s phenomenal.

From Damned if I Do, Graywolf 2004