Where to begin with a writer like Percival Everett? The author of more than thirty books, primarily novels, he defies easy distillation. An absurdist and a cowboy, a Westerner and an ex-Southerner, a mender of defunct mandolins and a nurse to fallen crows. At sixty-four, he is an accomplished abstract painter and an erstwhile jazz guitarist; he fly-fishes, has spent significant time considering Wittgenstein, and is a father to two adolescent sons. 

Everett’s books are similarly slippery and multifarious. They are, by and large, boundless, imaginative, exuberant works full of linguistic glee, formal ingenuity, and metaphysical comedy. But, given a closer look, the individual books elude whatever expectations one might impose on them. Take Erasure (2001), his most often recommended novel, an incendiary send-up of the publishing industry, with an entire race-exploitation novella inside. Or the caper-ish Glyph (1999), which has as its narrator an ornery baby with an IQ of 475, whose talents in philosophy, literature, and math make him a target of psychologist kidnappers who want to dissect him. And then there’s the book-in-verse The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843, Annotated from the Library of John C. Calhoun (2019), a “text on the training of our black animals” that is as diabolical as its title suggests. Even Telephone (2020), which seems more straightforwardly a Western novel about the desert, immigration, and grief, turns out to be three novels, with different endings and other elements, much to the chagrin of early reviewers who weren’t in on the conceit. (The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.)