Fostering Adaptive Readers

Percival Everett's James is, among other things, a book about how to read well. Everett's narrator James, his reimagined Jim, is a reader who relates in critical and playful ways with what he reads. He meets Locke in his dreams and calls him out for endorsing slavery; at one point, he wonders what Kierkegaard might have wished for from a genie. And the book itself is the product of Everett's own critical, close reading of Mark Twain. In interviews, he's said he read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn fifteen times so that he could get sick of it and then write from within the world Twain created. And he emerged from this with a kind of ambivalent form of respect. "It's a great, great novel," he told one interviewer. "I don't think there's a flaw in it that I haven't found," he told another. He set out, he has said, to write "the book Twain did not and also could not have written."

And so, in James, we have an adapted protagonist who is a brilliant reader in a book that is the product of a critical close reading of a canonical American text. I have a hard time believing Everett wasn't thinking about the beleaguered status of reading nowadays—the book bans, the state of literacy broadly—and that at least part of what drove him to write this book was to offer up a defense of good reading. And the definition of good reading to be gleaned from both James the character and James the book is clear: read the old, famous writers, but read them in a way that by reading them you make them into something radically new and freshly alive. To be a good reader, in other words, you need to be a critical adapter.

This articulation of good reading could not have come at a better time for me, as a high school English teacher. As I read Everett's book for the first time, I felt that he had anticipated and set out to help me answer several questions I've wrestled with lately about what, exactly, the role of an English teacher ought to be now. The questions all stem from an awareness, certainly not one I'm alone in having, that high school English classes are experiencing an identity crisis, one caused in large part by education reforms and policies designed to reframe English classes in American public schools by turning them into literacy skills-building workshops. What, in this context, do we do with the canon, or even the idea of literary tradition, in American high schools? How do we help young people develop meaningful relationships with books, especially given the mechanistic way so many of us have been trained to think about reading at the high school level, a training some people cite as a cause of book reading's decline? And what should the humanities—always a precarious discipline, but especially so now—look like in the public high schools that educate around 16 million kids daily?

Everett's book suggested some answers to these questions, and those answers helped me develop the class I'm teaching now. I'm calling this class, clunkily enough, "Canonical Texts and Contemporary Adaptations." The curriculum, which I designed to help my students develop critical relationships with canonical texts while developing the skills necessary to read closely and carefully, asks students to analyze a series of canonical texts and their adaptations, beginning with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and James.

***

Teachers are inundated with information about our students' literacy skills. In New York City, where I teach, all students take assessments at the end of grades 3 through 8 that place them on a proficiency scale ranging from a "1" to a "4"—and they take screeners throughout to track their progress across that scale. They take the Regents Examination in English Language Arts, a standardized graduation requirement, and of course they take AP classes and the SATs. They also take seasonal "MAP Tests" to determine their Lexile Scores, or their approximate grade levels as readers. The pool of literacy data in schools is immense: I can browse through my students' assessment results extending back to third grade, see their MAP Data, and check their scores on College Board exams. Almost all the data corresponds, ultimately, to their ability to perform skills that map onto standardized language that is either identical to or very similar to the Common Core State Standards.

Because this data has profound material and personal consequences for teachers and students alike, our teaching and thinking about literacy derives from the vision articulated by those mandates, standards, and assessments. We organize our classes to make sure that our students "show growth." We analyze data points, the nuances of standards, the presence of skill gaps. Our questions in class, the assessments we design, and the texts we choose become shaped in subtle and explicit ways by those mechanisms that tell us, ultimately, if we are teaching children to read and write. Schools where the stakes of performance are the highest, the schools that educate our most vulnerable kids, feel this pressure the most acutely.

This is not all bad. I've witnessed how important it can be to assess students' skills and respond when necessary with direct instruction in the basics. Literacy does include a set of skills that students need to learn. But this necessity has overshadowed efforts to help students participate in the kind of immersive reading that can be difficult to define or standardize. Emerson referred to it as "creative reading": an engagement with texts that leads to a book becoming something "luminous," the sort of generative, critically engaged act that he argued colleges should have their students participate in so that they could "set the hearts of their youth on flame."

Jonna Perillo and Andrew Newman's recent research into the impact of skills mandates and standardized testing confirms teachers' understanding that something here is amiss. Their vital contribution to this cluster takes this research further, explaining its far-reaching implications in classrooms. We have arrived at an ironic impasse: we have spent the past couple decades refining mechanisms to standardize and measure reading, but in doing so we have enabled learning environments that make it easy for everyone—teachers and students alike—to forget what exactly reading should be for. A similar debate has emerged in higher education about close reading; the debate isn't a new one, of course, but there have been several recent reappraisals of the critical, ethical, and pedagogical values of close reading as a practice.

We are now witnessing a groundswell of humanistic counterpoints to mechanistic visions of schooling; much of this conversation has been, naturally enough, about reading. Annie Abrams has written trenchant critiques of the problems with tests and how they can warp how we teach reading, including in her book Shortchanged; she has also written extensively about the importance of bringing literature back to the center of our work. Jennifer Berkshire has argued that the left needs to articulate a humanistic version of education to counteract years of what reform has done to our schools—something that people on the right have already started to do. Some of this discussion about secondary education has mirrored, in interesting ways, the conversation about close reading that is happening in higher education now, including in books like John Guillory's On Close Reading and Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant's Close Reading for the 21st Century. Scholar-teacher Andrew Rejan wrote, for example, that we should "rehumanize" close reading in high schools. While he acknowledges that curriculum writers test makers articulate close reading in a way that "instrumentalizes students, forcing them into the role of passive consumers," he resists facile distinctions between New Critics and reader response critics; he argues that both had an essentially democratic commitment to the belief that individual students could enter into a text and make arguments about its meaning—that close reading done well can bring "readers into closer contact with their own humanity and the humanity of the literature they encounter."

***

All of this was on my mind when I read Everett's book. I am not a Huck Finn partisan. I've taught high school English in New York City public schools for twelve years now, and this is my first year teaching Huck. What excites me most about James is not the opportunity it affords me to teach Huck to my students. I'm drawn, rather, to the argument Everett's book makes about what it means to be a good reader—an argument I'm now trying to make my students understand.

One scene rendered in both Huck and James illustrates what adaptive reading means in practice. My students and I discussed it, and it's become the foundation for our broader conversation about reading like an adapter.

At one point in Twain's book, Huck and Jim discover a pile of books in a trunk that a band of thieves stole off a wrecked ship named The Walter Scott. Twain famously condemned Walter Scott's romantic depictions of a premodern, aristocratic past in Life on the Mississippi. Scott was, Twain said, a writer whose "jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead" fostered in southern Americans the sort of "reverence for rank and caste" that produced the people satirized in Huck. In this scene, Huck reads to Jim, and the books sound in Huck's telling like the books Twain loathed: "I read considerable to Jim about kings, and dukes, and earls, and such, and how gaudy they dressed, and called each other your majesty, and your grace, and your lordship, and so on." As Huck reads, Jim comments on the absurdities of kingly behavior. He cannot understand, for example, why Solomon would try to settle a dispute by splitting a child in two when clearly a half a child would do nobody any good. Jim's misunderstanding of that Solomon story, and his refusal to find kings impressive, infuriates and baffles Huck.

Twain achieves a few things here: he makes explicit the intertextual sparring match this book takes up with a writer he despised, reminding readers that this book is, in some important ways, about books and reading them; he mocks southerners' attempts to resurrect romantic notions of the past, notions they lift from bad books; and, finally, he portrays Jim's character as both skeptical and ignorant.

In Everett's adaptation of the same scene, we find the moment retold from Jim's (or, James's) perspective. In this telling, Everett amplifies Twain's argument that romanticized notions of adventure overtake people's ability to see the world for what it is. In this case, the target is more explicitly Huck: James comments on Huck's childish excitement at the "adventure of it all." He envies this excitement. He wishes that he, too, could "feel that in a world without fear of being hanged to death, or worse."¹ And they find books in Everett's adaptation, too, but the books they find are not Scott-ish romances, and James is the reader, not Huck. James notices, with an excitement that he has to hide, that there are copies of Voltaire's Treatise on Tolerance and All for the Best, Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, a Bible, a pamphlet, a book about training horses, and The Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But Resident Above Sixty Years in the United States of America.² James waits for Huck to fall asleep so that he can read safely. "I could not chance his waking and discovering me with my face in an open book," he says. But then he reconsiders. "How," he asks, "could he know that I was actually reading?"³

That reading is a private affair yields a moving reflection from James on what he calls the "power of reading." Reading, James recognizes, is a "completely subversive" act, because if he "could simply see the words, then no one could control them or what [he] got from them."⁴ He begins reading Voltaire's Candide, a volume he didn't see at first, and he relishes the feeling he gets that he's escaped elsewhere. A few chapters later, though, he cools on Voltaire; he appreciates his "notion of tolerance regarding religious difference" but ultimately finds himself absorbed not "in the content of the work" but in "its structure, the movement of it, the calling out of logical fallacies." Twain's Huck was a bad reader whose world became distorted by fantasies concocted by writers; James, on the other hand, is a serious one, one whose critical intelligence makes reading a "subversive" act that enables a kind of freedom.

Everett, in conversation with Twain, achieves a few things in this scene by adapting Twain's work in a few key ways: he makes it explicit that he, too, will take aim at past writers, but in this case those writers are Enlightenment thinkers lauded as emblems of good thinking about freedom because of our own form of "jejune romanticism"; he spars with Twain by translating Jim's intelligence into James's subversive, inward, critical intellect; he establishes reading, both James's reading and his own reading of Twain, as a subversive act.

When I first read this scene, it felt like a splash of cold water to my face: of course reading is private and subversive; of course we should bring critical intelligences to bear on past writers, search through them for what resonates with us and seems worth keeping. It struck me as a perfect opportunity to talk about what literacy really means with my kids. James practices a kind of good reading that tests don't measure. And my desire to teach the book was further confirmed by the fact that it is itself an expression of a close reading, a kind of critical examination of the original that takes the form of a novel instead of an academic essay. I headed over to my principal's office and asked if we could figure out how to get 60 hardbacks. She was happy to help me figure it out.

***

This scene became the backbone of my class, both because of what James has to say about reading, and because of what the book itself presents as a critical form of close reading. I was explicit with my students that the goal of this first pairing was to teach them to read like an adapter. We reviewed this scene together when we arrived at it in James, but we began talking about reading as a critical, creative act at the start of the year.

One way I tried out to help them approach books like adapters was to strip away what would normally mediate their readings of texts—as we read these books, they did not fill out graphic organizers, hunt around for literary elements, or try to make a closed case about what the text means. Instead, they kept a journal with some loose guidelines for reflection. Seniors are busy—during this unit I also helped them edit and revise their personal statements for their college applications—so I wanted the lift in these journals to feel light. I read through them occasionally to see what they were thinking about as they read. I asked them to consider questions like: Which scenes strike you as particularly interesting? What is a line or two that strikes you as particularly moving, compelling, infuriating? Why do you think other people have liked this book so much? Do you like the book? What does this book make you think about in our own country today? Ultimately, their journals became the basis for our class discussions.

In class, I have them seated in groups of four. In those groups, they discussed which moments in the books interested them, and they focused especially on the development of key "thematic ideas" that they saw unfolding in the texts. I told them which idea interests me (literacy, naturally). I tried not to frame this the way that it can sometimes be framed in high school classrooms: I didn't want them to think that there's some theme code to crack. In general, I'm more interested in having my students explore literature's ability to invite us to consider what Lionel Trilling called "ideas as living things," to get them to see how literature can help animate and complicate our understandings of ourselves, our histories, and our world. Students decided which ideas interested them and traced them between both Huck and James. They talked about race, performance, identity, friendship, family, the influence of history on the present—and they discussed how Everett writes back to Twain's book to explore those ideas with him.

Huck is not an easy book to put in front of kids these days, but having my students read like adapters made it possible—in fact, I can't imagine doing it otherwise, at least not in my teaching context. My classes are racially and socioeconomically diverse; my students' families come from all over the world. Before we started, I sent letters home explaining my rationale, assuming—correctly, it turned out—that some parents would be alarmed by a book with the n-word used in it over 200 times. Many students felt uncomfortable about the book from the outset. They were shocked, understandably, by the language, and some found the depiction of Jim offensive.

But they also knew that eventually we would read Everett's version. This created an interesting tension: the students recognized the book as a fallible response to a particular moment. We discussed the historical context of the book, something I knew they understood since I taught them last year in our American Literature class. We considered, for example, how the failures of Reconstruction may have led to Twain's grim ending of the novel. We discussed Toni Morrison's luminous Huck essay in which she delineates the disturbing silences of the book; we read some of Shelly Fisher Fishkin's cases in favor of reading the book; we read Op-Eds about book bans and discussed whether this book should be banned, too. Eventually, the students wrote essays explaining whether the book should still be read in American high schools. Most said yes, though I'm not sure they would have if I hadn't presented it to them as a question. Confronting the book's defects directly with my students helped them appreciate what it is about it that, in Morrison's words, "heaves, manifests and lasts."

After finishing James, students wrote about Everett's changes and how the adaptation changed their thinking about the original. They noted that Everett's book was (in one student's words) more "explicit and rough" in its depictions of the brutalities of slavery and the hypocrisies of the American south. Students appreciated the friendship and intimacy between Huck and Jim. Some threw their hands up and laughed in despair, others said it made perfect sense, when we found out that Everett decided to make James the biological father of Huck. They compared and appreciated each author's uses of irony to highlight hypocrisies of their times. They talked about how Everett's depiction of race as a performance builds on a concept in Twain's original and speaks to our time today. They appreciated James's power in Everett's retelling; "this is the importance of adaptations" wrote one student, "[they] reveal to us a shift in thinking, a change in power, a transformation in dynamics that not one single story can reveal."

The first few weeks of this class involved me in some of the most enriching conversations I've had with kids about literature in my twelve years teaching here in New York City. One student wrote, in an email on the night I'd assigned the final few pages, "AMAZING, MASTERPIECE I LOVE THE ENDING." She ended the email with "I'm going to think about this book for the rest of my life!" Of course, not all of them felt exactly this way—but this was, on the whole, an immersive, heartfelt, and thoughtful exploration of two great novels.

And it was, as Everett himself would put it, a subversive experience. In an interview with the Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, he said that it was not writing novels that he thinks is the most "wonderfully subversive" act in our current cultural and political moment. "It is actually reading," he said, "[that is] the most subversive thing we can do. The second most subversive thing you can do is not writing. It is being part of a book club because you are really keeping art alive and talking about ideas and that is fantastic."

My class is not a book club—there's a little more work involved, an occasional quiz—but the point here stands. As we wrestle with what English classes in our schools might do, we should keep in mind the many ways reading and discussing books can help all of us, our students most importantly included, keep art and ideas alive. 

---

John Downes-Angus teaches journalism and 11th and 12th Grade English at a public high school in New York City.

---

References

1. Everett, Perceval. James. Doubleday, 19 March 2024, 68. ↩︎
2. Everett, 69. ↩︎
3. Everett, 73. ↩︎
4. Everett, 73. ↩︎