Orbital

By Samantha Harvey

Grove Atlantic, 2024

James

By Percival Everett

Doubleday, 2024

The Booker Prize for fiction and the National Book Award for fiction have just recently been announced: British novelist Samantha Harvey’s Orbital for the Booker, American novelist Percival Everett’s James for the NBA.  Both were released early in 2024, and I read them months ago, so – memory being what it is—these paragraphs are not a review.  More like notices, which reviews were sometimes called years ago.  Or, more colloquially, my two cents—one for each book—for regular readers of Open Letters who may be wondering about buying the prizewinners.  Because they are winners, Orbital and James may be difficult to find any time soon in libraries.

I don’t own either of the novels.  Given a copy of Orbital, I passed it on to another reader.  Now I wish I had it back because it’s a work I would re-read every year for its imagination, sublimity, and beauty.  Don’t be discouraged if Orbital is in the science fiction section of the store or library.  It is fiction about six scientists orbiting earth, but no alien characters and little plotted danger enter the story.  I believe I can assure you that Orbital will never be made into a movie, one of the most complimentary things I can say about a novel.

Harvey’s two women and four men from various countries have brief backstories, and some of the characters interact with each other but mostly Harvey records their feelings and thoughts about planet earth, which they circle 16 times a day.  The characters think about intimates 250 miles below, and several think about a creator far beyond the heavens they move through.  Some characters ponder the history of earth and its inhabitants.  Seeing the beautiful shifting variations in earth’s ecologies from a holistic distance, characters are amazed that we humans, the caretakers, are rapidly destroying those ecologies. 

Although there is no bottom line in space, just immensity and excess, environmental humility is probably Harvey’s bottom line in writing Orbital.  As an eco-fiction, the novel does not horrify with the details of future catastrophes.  Rather it astonishes and embarrasses the reader that we humans could be so careless about our only home, something the astronauts cannot be in their fragile temporary “home.”  If Elon Musk and other rocket blasters could just send politicians up into orbit to see what Harvey’s characters see and feel, perhaps this wondrous living experiment called Gaia could last a little longer in its orbit around the sun that, Harvey knows, will one day burn out and turn our living speck into cold stone.

Competing against James and Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, Orbital was a long shot for the Booker.  Given the consistent rave reviews of James, it was probably a lock for the NBA.  But when I read my library copy, I began to consider the meaning of “rave.”  I mean, who would trust crazed opinion?  Reviewers’ praise seemed way out of proportion to Everett’s accomplishment—even his intention—in James, which, as you probably know, is an alternative telling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a novel most recently appropriated by the late Robert Coover in Huck Out West.  Everett has said the fictional experiments of his friend Coover were an inspiration, but I found, compared with Coover’s novel (say nothing of Twain’s), James to be surprisingly uninspired, lacking in imaginative vigor, a shell of a book like an outline Everett didn’t bother to fill in.  Everett has one shocking invention about Huck’s parentage, but it turns out that counter-fictional “fact” had already been imagined by Jon Clinch in his novel Finn.

Everett publishes a lot of novels, often quickly.  James seems — and I wish I were wrong about this—exploitive, not exactly Blaxploitation but a work cleverly designed and rapidly fabricated to elicit exactly the kind of raves it received.  Huck exploits Jim for companionship. Twain exploits Jim to appeal to stereotypes, and now Everett exploits the popularity of Huckleberry Finn.  Everett predictably reverses the character of Jim—makes James learned, literary, and eventually violent—to right a wrong and appeal to well-meaning readers often embarrassed by the original Jim, even though he is the most humane character in Twain’s novel. 

Everett makes James a trickster like Huck and Everett himself in many of his novels including Erasure, his best-known work, now a movie. James fools both Black and white characters by taking advantage of their racist assumptions about him. An educated code switcher, James in his first-person narration can do dialect and can do literary or philosophical talk depending on his listener.  Given the perfunctory plotting and character development, cinematic pacing, predictable reworkings of Twain, and the artificial style of James, I think Everett may have pulled off his greatest trick yet, one that resembles the hoax in Erasure where the novelist-character intentionally writes a Blaxploitation novel that wins an award.  

Everett has long resented being labeled a Black writer.  Building limitations into James, Everett demonstrates that reviewers and prize judges will reward a Black writer for his sociology and earnestness rather than his art--the latter sadly, maybe even intentionally lacking in James.  The joke Everett made up in Erasure in 2001 becomes true in 2024.

When talking about James, Everett told his interviewer, “I’d love a scathing review.”  This is not it, only a belated notice.  And maybe not even scathing but rather appreciative of a novelist taking the risk of taking in so many literary readers—and laughing, as it’s said, all the way to the bank.  For James, Everett left his usual small-press publisher Graywolf for the mainstream promotion of Doubleday.  Next up, the movie.

That great stylist and critic William Gass spent much of his life reminding readers that novels are made of words—whatever plots or characters or genres or sociological visions the fictions might include.  Like an old-fashioned, maybe even Romantic poet, Samantha Harvey has found words and made sentences that are a pleasure and a revelation to read.  Twain did something similar with his dialects that he claimed to be realistic.  Everett chose to sacrifice any illusion of realism to alternately satisfy and parody academic discourse, unbelievable no matter how learned James was supposed to be.  Because of its language, James was a slog—for me--to read the first time.  If the ravers return to it for a second reading, they may have second thoughts about the value of James.  Too late because Everett has cashed the check.

A former National Book Award judge, Tom LeClair has often written about NBA finalists and winners.  He is the author of eight novels, four critical books, and hundreds of reviews and essays in American periodicals.