Fiction:Percival Everett is best known for the kind of erudite, self-consciously literary fiction you would expect from a practising academic. In Glyphhe wrote of an infant with an IQ of 475 given to such utterances as "my father was a poststructuralist pretender and my mother hated his guts" (surely the inspiration for Stewie on the US TV show Family Guy?). Erasure, another fiendishly clever satire, sees a highbrow African-American author succumb to the temptation to write a "ghetto" novel.
Watershed, published in 1996, showed that Everett can tone down his stylistic exuberance. In it, an educated black man decides to lose himself out west, only for the idyll to be corrupted by murky dealings and brutal crimes. With WoundedEverett is on similar ground: the protagonist is again an educated black man who has decided to live out west, as a horse trainer this time, and whose idyll is corrupted by brutal crimes. However, Woundedis a far more successful venture, in large part because of its controlled, streamlined narrative.
Everett's storytelling skills, rather than his stylistic and allusive flights, are always to the fore. Narrator John Hunt's language is unadorned yet precise; his calmness, his reticence and his detachment from human affairs are pitched perfectly and resonate convincingly with the indifferent, beautiful landscape of Wyoming.
Hunt accepts he is an outsider in a town of white folks but he seems respected by them. However, the uglier, hidden tensions of small-town co-existence are brought to the surface as first a gay man is slaughtered, and then a Native American rancher has some of his cattle shot. These canyons may be full of coyotes, the hills of bears and wolves, but no animal is as savage as the human, and Woundedmakes a depressingly good job of confirming Hunt's conviction that this is so.
The arrival of Hunt's friend's gay son, David, seeking work on his ranch after a break up, draws Hunt reluctantly to face the unwelcome underbelly of his locale and ultimately to dispense some frontier justice of his own.
The novel's finest moments come in the first half, as Everett sets the scene and slowly cranks up the tension. Everett's West is a microcosm of America; and in this America subtle and individual prejudices prevail, having replaced the more predictable, institutionalised ones of the past. This is fecund ground indeed for a novelist and Everett succeeds in creating characters who step past our expectations of caricature to become satisfyingly delineated.
It is perhaps a pity then that, as Woundedbecomes a page-turner, such subtleties cease to be examined. Neo-Nazi interlopers, it turns out, rather than the townspeople themselves, are the engines of unrest, the perpetrators of what we now call "hate crimes". This gives the reader a warm glow, since it remains the case that the decent townsfolk can all get along. But it does mark a break from the intriguing interplay of prejudices Everett had begun to describe and which might have raised more uncomfortable questions, for American readers at any rate.
Ultimately, Everett lets his country off the hook. If he did this for the sake of realism, then bully for America. From this side of the Atlantic, it seems as though the exigencies of plot won through, leaving the reader wishing Everett had either sought a different way to get us turning the pages, or had spent more time on the issues he raises. Nevertheless, the spare beauty of the prose and the expert command of narrative create a lasting impression.
Alan O'Riordan is assistant editor of Magill magazine and a freelance journalist and theatre critic
Wounded By Percival Everett Faber and Faber, 207pp. £10.99