Can a work of art ever be successfully reinvented and reconfigured for a modern audience? Ask Barbara Kingsolver, last year’s co-recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Demon Copperhead, her re-make of the Dickens classic. The achievement comes not without considerable risk, however. Ideally, any attempt requires more than a similar template of characterizations and narrative arc, and demands a heightened capacity for compelling insights about our present zeitgeist, our everyday flashpoints for conflicts and their resonance in the present moment. One might ask if Twain’s monumental picaresque novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which Hemingway called the greatest American novel, could be re-conceived without factoring in the death of George Floyd, for example. It can, and most impressively so, in Percival Everett’s retelling, as he creates new dialogue more readily consistent with our own and more revealing with the languages that reflect wide and particular differences between what is spoken in one group and then another. It happens seamlessly when Huck’s Jim (marvelously recast as James here) finds himself as a black man passing as a white man, and then, upon joining a minstrel show to parade before all white, keen-eyed audiences, “as a light-brown Black man painted black in such a way as to appear like a white man trying to pass for Black.” It can as well when James can read and engage and survive terrifying nights holding ongoing interior monologues with Rousseau, Voltaire and Locke. It can when a stolen pencil is worth dying for. One could quibble or engage in meaningful conversation about Everett’s take on the relevance and recognition of fathers, but this book succeeds on so many levels as we sense ourselves increasingly lacking a common language or even a common belief system in a runaway country seemingly trying to escape from itself.