Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

2015 Longlist

The story unfolds inside a story as a man visits his aging father in a nursing home. Each man tells overlapping tales: A painter meets a long-lost daughter. A man named Murphy can’t distinguish between the brothers who employ him. And in Murphy’s troubled dreams, Nat Turner imagines the life of William Styron. Anecdotes from the nursing home intertwine and crest in a wild excursion of the inmates. All the while a running commentary from father and son anchors the shifting plotlines and sheds doubt on their truthfulness. A powerful meditation on the humiliations of old age, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell is an ingenious culmination of Everett’s recurring preoccupations. All of his metaphysical and philosophical inquiries, his investigations into the nature of narrative, have led to this, his most important and elusive novel to date.

(From Publisher)

About the Author

Percival Everett is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of more than twenty books, including Assumption, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, The Water Cure, Wounded and Erasure.

Librarian’s Comments

An entanglement of precise language, chimerical story and philosophic nuance.