The Washington Post - Mark Athitakis
Novels like this tend to be described—or should I say "written off"?—as experimental. But Everett is fond of saying that all novels are experiments, and a book like Virgil Russell is part of a modern lineage that includes novelists such as Renata Adler, Gilbert Sorrentino and David Foster Wallace, all of whom have run conventional narrative through a thresher to better capture the emotions of confusion and isolation, and to show how unfit for duty mere words are…There's no question that Percival Everett by Virgil Russell is a challenge. Golf balls and silk ties have nothing to fear from this book as Father's Day gifts go, yet it finds its own way to be a potent and thoughtful exploration of the bonds between fathers and children.
Publishers Weekly
It is a testament to Everett’s brilliance as a writer (I Am Not Sidney Poitier) that his latest novel, so damnably frustrating and more than occasionally tedious, is also so humanely adept at getting to the heart of the human condition. What story there is concerns an aging writer as he dictates his life’s story to his son, Virgil, “words finding the full theater of his mouth.” This writer, who may be named Percival Everett, lives in an assisted living facility, where he becomes involved in a hilarious scheme with other residents to retaliate against the mean-spirited staff. He relates other peculiar, often dubious tales, as well as family memories, some apparently true, others seemingly dreamed or imagined. In fact, everything we hear may have been invented by the fictional Everett, or it may not even be coming out of his mouth at all, but rather from his guilt-ridden but loving son. Everett has created much more than an exercise in unreliable narration, an exploration of the nature of language and the rationales we create to keep ourselves going as we grow old. By the conclusion, every sentence, indeed every word, has come to seem like a valuable key, not just to this puzzle of a novel, but to the meaning of existence. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
Praise for Percival Everett by Virgil Russell:
"[A] stark, shattering novel. . . . The splintered stories keep their urgency even as they lose their drift. The note of sadness struck in the dedication swells and echoes through the wreckage of narrative, reaching a pitch of extraordinary anguish. This meta-fiction is deeply moving." —The Wall Street Journal
"A potent and thoughtful exploration of the bonds between fathers and children." —The Washington Post
"Everett is one of the most gifted and versatile of contemporary writers. . . . His work takes hold of us and won't let go." —Alan Cheuse, NPR.org
"Though funny, the novel also possesses a terrible and still sadness, concerning as it does not only William Styron and Nat Turner but also aging and death, the tragic hatred of racists, the depth of solitude at life's end. . . . The book, though it's frequently philosophical, is not in the least boring. Dear reader, how that impressed me! For there are times when philosophy can be less than action-packed. This is not one of them. Therefore, I heartily commend this book to you. It's like a carnival ride, but not the kind where you vomit. . . . Percival Everett numbers among his very best." —Lydia Millet, Los Angeles Times
"Funny, insightful, and unpredictable. . . . Everett is a master of his trade." —Time Out Chicago
"Possessed by a loopy, madcap energy. . . . [Everett] demonstrates that a literary work can be cerebral, emotionally affecting, and highly readable at the same time. The novel also turns out to be relentlessly funny." —Paste Magazine
"In a more perfect world the novelist Percival Everett would dominate the bestseller list to such a degree that they would need to give him his own category, Harry Potter style. . . . The man is practically A Goddamn National Treasure." —Alex Balk, The Awl
"Combines the philosophical puzzling of Beckett with the oddball discursiveness of Brautigan, and has the playfulness of both." —PWxyz, "PW Best Books of 2013"
"Witty [and] perceptive . . . Everett's writing is dazzling throughout." —PopMatters
"[Contains] scenes of great emotional authenticity. . . . Everett's metafictional reflections on identity will further solidify his critical reputation." —Shelf Awareness
"Everett gives us a work of fiction that grapples with grief, the fragility of human life, death, relationships, loneliness, and yearning for purpose. . . We are left breathless, with heartache and with the understanding we are all made of stories, nothing but products of our diverging and converging plot lines that eventually will come to an inexorable point." —ZYZZYVA
"[Percival Everett is] so humanely adept at getting to the heart of the human condition. . . . Everett has created much more than an exercise in unreliable narration, an exploration of the nature of language and the rationales we create to keep ourselves going as we grow old. By the conclusion, every sentence, indeed every word, has come to seem like a valuable key, not just to this puzzle of a novel, but to the meaning of existence." —Publishers Weekly
"[Percival Everett by Virgil Russell is] an innovative exploration of the outer limits of narrative ambiguity, and it's also a deeply felt book about a father and a son. . . . An intriguing and intricate puzzle of a novel." —Booklist
"The heart of storytelling and the heart of a complicated man beat together in this extraordinary meditation on love, language, and the irrevocable action of time. Who tells whose story when and why and how do we know when it's over? For Everett, it's never over, and it's never enough, and it's the very best thing we've got. A novel of surpassing intelligence, grief, and tenderness." —Stacey D'Erasmo, author of The Sky Below
"Within [a] narrative labyrinth, the novel is much more than an academic exercise . . . as it searches for the possibility of meaning in life as well as narrative and meditates on the process of aging and the inevitability of death." —Kirkus Reviews
Library Journal
This latest novel by prolific writer and PEN Center USA Award winner Everett (I Am Not Sidney Poitier) showcases his versatility and erudition (the title's Virgil Russell echoes references to the poet Virgil and the philosopher Bertrand Russell). The author serves up the beginnings of plotlines so intriguing we wish he would resolve them; instead, he casts them aside and turns to fascinating disquisitions on philosophy and semiotics. The fragmented, almost hallucinatory narrative sometimes seems to be Everett's own voice, sometimes that of his deceased father (the novel is dedicated to Percival Edward Everett, born in 1931). For much of the novel, this uncertain narrator gives us a view of nursing home confinement that resembles the inner circles of hell, as an elderly man pens a novel that challenges his son. Everett anticipates and mocks the reader's confusion, drily noting that some readers "may require a certain specificity concerning the identity of the narrator." VERDICT This is a challenging book, but well worth the read; you won't think about popular fiction, the world of ideas, or old age in the same way again.—Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Lib., VA
Kirkus Reviews
Over the course of a prolific career, Everett (Assumption, 2011, etc.) has conditioned readers to expect the unexpected, but this novel is not only his most challenging to date, it sheds fresh light on his previous work. The title would seem to suggest that this is a novel about the author by a fictitious pseudonym, but the main significance of "Percival Everett" is the dedication to the author's father, who died in 2010 at the age of 77. And there is an unnamed character in the novel of that age, whose son is an artist. Or a doctor. And who has different names over the course of the novel. And who may in fact be writing the narrative about his father. Unless it is the father writing about the son. Or one of them is imagining what the other would write. Or, as the novel explains, "I'm an old man or his son writing an old man writing his son writing an old man." Within that narrative labyrinth, the novel is much more than an academic exercise (the author is also a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California), as it searches for the possibility of meaning in life as well as narrative and meditates on the process of aging and the inevitability of death. "This whole process of making a story, a story at all, well, it's the edge of something, isn't it? Forth and back and back of forth, it's a constant shuttle movement, ostensibly looking to comply with some logic, someone's logic, my logic, law, but subverting it the entire time," writes the author (or someone). It's audacious for such literary playfulness to engage such serious themes as meaning and mortality, but the novel proceeds to try the reader's patience with some extraordinarily long sentences and dense chapters. An ambitious novel in which the formalistic chances taken by the author are often stimulating and occasionally exasperating.
