The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog.

James by Percival Everett tells the story of Huckleberry Finn’s escape from his drunken abusive father with slave Jim in pre-Civil War Missouri. As a child, I read Huckleberry Finn as a simple adventure tale; as a college student, I came to understand it as telling account of mid- 19th century American life and culture. Unlike Mark Twain’s narrative, this version of their trip down the Mississippi River on a raft is told from Jim’s perspective. Everett brilliantly takes us on a journey into the evils of slavery, the inhumanity wrought by oppression of every kind, the values of loyalty and kindness.

James is clever, funny, satirical, insightful and, in the end, deeply moving. Told in the first person, James explains the slave experience in polished English prose.  He had taught himself to read and write when his mistress, Miss Watson, and others were not looking. His attitudes were expanded by having surreptitiously read books he found in the library of one Judge Thatcher. James comes to understand much about liberty, freedom and human rights based on the writings of Rousseau, Voltaire and Locke, among others. Yet, when James speaks to Huck or anyone else, it’s with the limited vocabulary and obsequious speech style of the slave.  After all, he explains to the reader, the silly and subservient way blacks talk is what whites expect of them.  Nor did they want slaves to look anywhere but downward. Whites were suspicious when they saw two blacks talking to each other and especially uneasy if the two blacks were laughing.

James is a runaway because he suspects that Miss Watson is preparing to sell him to a new master. But he can’t settle in a northern state until he finds a way to free his wife and daughter. Like Twain, Everett has created a spellbinding adventure, and many of the subplots evoke Twain’s original. But Everett’s version is more gripping emotionally and richer in fostering understanding of the human condition.

Martyr by Kaveh Akbar, an Iranian-American poet, is an interestingly structured novel that probes the author’s experiences as an orphan, a poet, alcoholic, drug addict, depressive, insomniac, whiner and a bisexual. It’s a deeply interior story that sweeps the reader into his struggles, his history, present-day challenges and ultimately his future prospects.  Told in the third person, chapters revealing Cyrus Sham’s complexities alternate with chapters told by his mother, Roya, who was said to have died when he was an infant when a United States Navy warship mistakenly launched a missile at a plane she was on. Other chapters are third-person narratives in the voice of his dead father, Ali, who had brought him to the United States soon after his mother’s death and worked in a chicken factory in Indiana to support baby Cyrus. (Ali died of a stroke when Cyrus was a sophomore in college.) Occasional chapters are told by others in Cyrus’s life: his roommate and lover, as well as his uncle in Tehran.

It is mother Roya, however, and Cyrus’s  loss of her, that is a central prism through which the reader comes to understand who he is and what will become of him. Throughout the book, Cyrus is obsessed with the randomness of her reported death and how, at whatever point he should die, might the means of his dying, convey some meaning to his life. The novel takes its title from that search for meaning, as do many of Cyrus’s poems interspersed throughout the book and which he is compiling in a fictional website called bookofmartyrs.

As if these layers were not enough, Cyrus also includes imagined conversations between his late family members and others, including public figures like Madonna or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. These fantasy side trips were a device Cyrus developed to help him relax during one of his achingly sleepless nights. The jump between real and surreal, past and present, dead and alive, can challenge the reader to make quick adjustments (a plethora of “huh?” moments) but open the door to humor, insights about the human condition, and the first-time novelist’s gifts of language and imagination.  The twists as the novel evolve make reading this book a worthwhile exercise.