Assumption. Percival Everett. 2011.
I want you to read this book. I can’t tell you why.
I’ve thought about it in the few weeks since I finished reading, and I really don’t know that there’s a way to tell you what makes this novel so great without ruining it. I went in cold, apart from someone telling me “it won’t be what you think.” Even that might be too much, and I wish I hadn’t told you, just now! I’m sorry. Go read Assumption.
Everett has, in the last year or so, become one of my favorite writers, and it might be because “it won’t be what you think” is always something you can say about his work. He’s one of the least predictable writers I know - you start by thinking you’re reading one kind of novel and then you’re reading another. He always surprises you, and even when you know that about him he surprises you in ways you weren’t expecting to be surprised. I feel like I’m already giving too much away.
If I had to compare Assumption to the work of another writer, it would probably be Shirley Jackson - which is not to say this is horror, exactly, although it’s difficult to say what it is instead. Jackson’s writing, even the writing with no supernatural elements, always has this mood about it of things being off in a hard to define way. Ogden Walker, the detective protagonist of the three separate (but connected) stories that make up this novel, is sympathetic but strangely remote - his actions and motivations appear opaque even to him. He seems like a good person, but is he a good cop? What would that even mean?
One of the interesting things about Assumption is that race and policing are central, without that emphasis being at all heavy-handed or obvious. It matters that Ogden is one of the only Black men in his white town, but it’s not always apparent how - race is something nobody talks about much, but it goes a long way towards explaining Ogden’s discomfort and alienation from the people around him. The novel can certainly be read as a kind of condemnation of American policing, if a subtle one. The cops here aren’t especially brutal, or corrupt, as far as we can see (though as ever with Everett, we should question what we see. The name of the novel is not an accident). They are merely…there. Their jobs seem mostly pointless, and they all know it. They spend their time looking for missing people they know will never be found, investigating murders they know will never be solved, looking for stolen property that will never be recovered. Ogden, and his coworkers, seem to exist in a fog of depression and uselessness, neither helping people nor obviously hurting them.
When you finish this book you’ll want to read it again, immediately. I did. That’s maybe the best compliment I can give, to one of the best American writers now writing. Read it, and read it again.