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This is a little book about the small things in life that suddenly coalesce into profound, life-altering choices that can shake the most normal of days to its foundation. The story concerns an average family man living a quiet life when he is confronted with the horror of the Magdalen Laundry that exists in the heart of his small town. And once his eyes are open, he can’t close them. Not about the darkness everyone is happy to ignore, not about his relationships, his faith, or his own identity. The book is a little more than 100 pages, and every syllable of every word seems perfectly placed. The prose is graceful, plain-spoken, and at once gentle and unsparing. A profound and beautiful miracle of a book. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

I’m not averse to using existing works as the jumping off point for something new, or a tale being told from a new perspective. And I’d certainly expect a book set in the world of Huckleberry Finn, with a slave as a narrator to have heavily racial themes. And I’m a big fan of great writing and good storytelling. Percival Everett’s “James” certainly has all of this going on. But it’s also up other things. Things I don’t enjoy. Or even respect. First, it’s an inconsistent mishmash of parody, satire, pastiche, melodrama, racialist political screed, and self-indulgent intellectual hogwash. It simply can’t make up its mind what it wants to be, so it ends up like a scrap collection that’s pretending to be a quilt. But the Pulitzer committee obviously disagreed.

Meh.