Percival Everett's James and Fury
Winner of the National Book Award 2024
By: Susan Hall - Jan 07, 2025
Percival Everett’s James won the National Book Award in 2024. It is a wonderful read, often humorous in its darkest corners. A deep examination of the origins of fury, in its last chapters we come to understand the results of escalating anger.
A slave’s wife and children are sold to another master, a boy is lynched for stealing a pencil, a girl the same age as his daughter is raped repeatedly by her master and then the last straw. Repeated inhumane, cruel and power-hungry acts of one human group against another fill a slave’s experience in America.
Why more slaves did not kill their masters is surprising. Yet I’ve spent enough time in Alabama to know that the Black Americans’ fear still drives them to drive at fifteen miles an hour on long stretches of straight road.
James Gandolfini prepared to act fury in his award-winning performances as Tony Soprano by placing a rock in the sole of his shoes and walking on it for hours. Michael Jordan used his fury to drive commanding action on the basketball court.
This is not unlike the experience of millions of Americans who pay medical insurance premiums and now must deal with the decisions of laymen who know nothing about medicine and work from scripts. Insurance companies find their decisions the cheapest way to mete out treatment.
My experience with insurance has been the same as millions of others. My health problems are less severe. It always shocks me to explain that I choose, instead of four surgeries for severe osteoarthritis, the least expensive route, physical therapy. Yet my physical therapy sessions are repeatedly denied.
I am not in a fury about health care, but I understand the fury of others, among them a highly educated young man whose ability to experience sexual pleasure may have been destroyed by medical treatment. This young man may also have come to be ashamed, then angry and then furious at the quality of care in his family’s nursing homes. Whatever else we are looking at, we are looking first and foremost at fury.
Murder is not the answer, but fury may move a human beyond reasonable, legal, and moral actions.
I won’t spoil James's conclusion, but you can know, without ruining your pleasure, that all James wanted was to stay with his wife and family. We might think hard on this.