Mark Twain has Huck F inn say he is going to “light out for the Territory” and I see myself following the same path.Ĩ Claude Julien: We next would like to open the field of literary models. I have frequently come across that situation as a teacher of the American experience. How do you explain leaving one’s roots?ħ Percival Everett: All things move from east to west geographically. It was kind of an organic move, so I don’t know if I had some actual realization that I was a fiction writer as much as I still saw myself as attempting to address philosophical concerns.Ĥ Anne-Laure Tissut: So Suder, your first novel, was bom of philosophy?ĥ Percival Everett: Basically, all of my books come out of a desire to explore something about language and how language works, even though I do write stories that deal with other things, maybe.Ħ Alice Mills: Suder moves from east to west.
I wrote a story which I submitted in my application to the writing program at Brown University where I was accepted and where I wrote my first novel. Austen but what that work consisted in was the construction of scenes in which people spoke to each other and addressed philosophical issues. I have prepared a set of questions in agreement with Alice and Anne-Laure who are of course welcome to bring up other questions of their own on the spur of the moment.Ģ We would like to start by asking you about your beginnings as a writer, the moment you knew you wanted to be a writer, the moment you knew you were a writer.ģ Percival Everett: My move to write fiction was, oddly, a natural one. He lampoons the press, religion, and academia while offering, ultimately, an existential meditation of what constitutes being alive.1 Claude Julien: Thank you for agreeing to spend time with us. In this experimental, satirical, and bizarre novel, critically acclaimed author Percival Everett once again takes on the assumptions of a culture whose priorities have gone out of whack. In the process, Theodore manages to reestablish his relationship with his estranged wife and family and to rediscover the value of his life.
He becomes a source of fear and embarrassment to his daughter, and an object of derision and morbid curiosity to the press and the scientific communities, and is anointed as a sort of devil by an obscure religious cult. Everyone is horrified by this resurrection. At his funeral, he sits up in his own coffin with the stitches that bind his head to his body clearly visible. When the decision is taken out of his hands-he's hit by a car and his head is severed from his body-he must come to terms with himself. Part parable, part fantasy novel, part laugh-out-loud satire, American Desert is the story of Theodore Street, a college professor on the brink of committing suicide.
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