Everett Percival by Virgil Russell

This latest novel by prolific writer and PEN Center USA Award winner Everett (I Am Not Sidney Poitier) showcases his versatility and erudition (the title's Virgil Russell echoes references to the poet Virgil and the philosopher Bertrand Russell). The author serves up the beginnings of plotlines so intriguing we wish he would resolve them; instead, he casts them aside and turns to fascinating disquisitions on philosophy and semiotics. The fragmented, almost hallucinatory narrative sometimes seems to be Everett's own voice, sometimes that of his deceased father (the novel is dedicated to Percival Edward Everett, born in 1931). For much of the novel, this uncertain narrator gives us a view of nursing home confinement that resembles the inner circles of hell, as an elderly man pens a novel that challenges his son. Everett anticipates and mocks the reader's confusion, drily noting that some readers "may require a certain specificity concerning the identity of the narrator."