Trying to run away from them in a supermarket, he is abducted by religious fanatics who believe he is the devil incarnate and want to kill him in a more definitive way. After going back home with his shocked family, Ted is besieged by the media. His head is severed, yet he is born again on the third day, during his funeral, which provokes two fatal heart attacks (his department head and the dean) and a riot. A summary outline of American Desert 1 will instantly qualify the latter for inclusion in Everett’s crazy canon.Ģ The protagonist, Theodore Street, a failure of a university teacher, dies in a car accident on his way to committing suicide. Even more “straightforward” novels like Watershed abound in puns, jokes, ludicrous episodes and tongue-in-cheek narration. A quick glance at a few of his works will reveal a wide range of figures of fun, from pastiches and travesties of classical myth ( For Her Dark Skin Frenzy ), scathing satires of neo-minstrel black protest novels ( Erasure ) and the post-structuralist vulgate (Glyph ), to quasi-surrealist absurdist fables ( Grand Canyon, Inc ).

1 All page references to American Desert given between brackets are to the 2004 Hyperion edition.ġ Percival Everett is a master humorist and parodist.

We will also be led to wonder if the surrealist reference is not more than a superficial comment on the strangeness of the plot, but also a possible Ariadne’s thread in the labyrinthine web of the text. In such a context, the defamiliarizing tactics of humor can become both a debunking of empty images and narratives, and a sort of initiation beyond these disquieting mirrors and doubles, into a more human awareness. A reflection on the tall-tale/tell-tale nature of Theodore Street’s strange state of un-deadness will lead us to a discussion of American society as a parodic media desert.

These are the paths that our study will attempt to follow. Then, the important role given the media, especially television, alludes to an emptiness and superficiality in everyday American life, a life and a Dream which the protagonist had repeatedly failed to fully make his own.

That this space is peopled by religious nuts and military fools cannot be a coincidence. The desert of the title is first of all a place, reminiscent of the Manifest Destiny. A quasi-surrealistic novel about a man who died and came back to life, American Desert is also a scathing parody of American myths and the contemporary media.

American Desert by Percival Everett