Watershed by Percival Everett

Well… I wanted something excellent, something accessible, something literary, something with beauty in the prose, but something with plot, something with wit, and something with heart….

Picking up another Percival Everett novel was absolutely the right thing to do…

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Watershed is a first person narrative, set in the late 70s/1980s in the United States of America, a fractious and fractured place, as it still continues to be. The protagonist is Robert Hawks, a hydrologist who has extensively studied the water table and geology of an area somewhere right in the middle of the country, where a large Native American reservation exists, and something – he isn’t quite certain what – is off..

Hawks’ grandfather was a prominent doctor and civil rights activist working in their city, who was eventually banned from practicing medicine due to racist conservative lawmakers. And although Hawks grew up in households full of politics and activism, he imbibed his grandfather’s and father’s disdain for the “render unto Caesar”-type conservative Christianity endemic in many parts of the United States for both its black and white populations, he has not taken on board the urgency of needing – or wanting – to work towards a more equitable present.

As a young(ish) Black man, he has personally witnessed and experienced cruel brutality, state violence and other forms of aggressive racism in his own life, and as a child, threats against him were regularly made as attacks against his activist family. Instead, though, of intentionally joining community struggle, Hawks becomes someone who is aloof and often alone. His favourite time is time spent in the mountains: hiking, fishing, being with his own thoughts, and (ideally) avoiding the realities of the ongoing civil rights struggle kicking around at that point in time. He also has a girlfriend he wishes wasn’t his girlfriend anymore, so he’s also avoiding her.

Up in the mountains, one evening he gives a brief lift to a Native American women, who is later rumoured to be involved in the deaths of two FBI agents. In the mountains, on land that is part of the reservation, two agents have been murdered, yet – to Hawks, and several other people – these deaths seem to be being under investigated. The only agent looking into the violent gun murders is an alcoholic woman (it’s the fact that she’s a woman more than an alcoholic that’s seen as the signifier that the boys-club FBI doesn’t really care about the “truth” here), who seems more interested in Hawks personally than professionally.

The narrative moves into an exploration, essentially, of water wars; of competing water rights, and the ways in which illegal and off the record chemical dumping may or may not have taken place and the ways the FBI may or may not have been involved in ongoing cover-ups of things like this.

So there is quite a lot of plot to it, with all of these various threads coming together; the reflections into Hawks’ childhood and youth and his grandfather and father’s failing marriages but also principled stances against police brutality and violent racism feature more frequently through the novel, with a life-defining incident being when his grandfather travelled across state lines to testify as a witness for the defence in a trial against a member of the Black Panthers. Hawks, then, turns out to be a person who has always been peripheral to the very front guard of the civil right struggle, yet he is not someone – until almost by accident – who has ever chosen to stand up and be counted in the fight against racist oppression. Gradually becoming involved in what is happening in the mountains is also a good excuse for him to spend time not hanging out with the girlfriend that he has that he wishes wasn’t his girlfriend anymore….

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These various narrative threads and memories and episodes are all recalled out of time, with the novel oscillating back and forth between episodes and moments – sometimes short, sometimes long – the text is also filled with quotations and excerpts from historical (and more recent) governmental documents cataloguing the American histories of racist land deals, exploitative attempts to disenfranchise the indigenous population of North America, and the ways in which the civil rights movement and all sorts are other attempts to increase equity were deliberately and aggressively stamped down by the representatives of the American government.

This gives the text a really pleasing and complex collage-like status, bouncing from memory to present to quotation from historical source, some stretching back centuries, some in time with the action that we are reading about…

Everett draws very clear parallels between the ways in which disenfranchisement of the indigenous inhabitants of the North American continent arrived very similarly to the ways in which Black people, particularly the descendants of enslaved people, have been historically and intentionally kept disenfranchised, impoverished and unable to organise and find ways to increase the comfort of their lives.

It is, then, a very serious novel, with deep, important, socio-culturally relevant and engaging themes, but it’s also one with a hell of a lot of gags… There is an incredibly high gag rate in this novel, it is very very funny, as well as being exciting in its plotted-ness.

This is really powerful and potent intellectual literature that is deeply accessible, and exactly what I had hoped for when I picked up the book.

The plot is genuinely exciting, and also plays with the conventions of this kind of political thriller genre, with the prose itself witty, sparkling and often quite cheeky.

The use of quotation, of textured literary collage, makes this also never feel one note or simplistic.

Watershed is a research-heavy, entertaining and engaging novel that educates, as well as putting a very clear satirical point across.

This is what political fiction should and – when done well – does do. And this is exactly what James Baldwin’s infamous essay against protest novels claims that political fiction cannot do… In that essay, Baldwin discusses the idea that when a writer tries to make a point within a novel, the literary value of the text almost always fails as this happens… Everett’s novel doesn’t do that. His characters are all rich and complex and real-feeling; his political points are all clear and documented and dramatised, yes, but there is nothing about Watershed that isn’t a satisfying and engaging work of literature.

It’s funny, it’s exciting, it’s artfully constructed and powerfully makes a clear statement about the continued levels of institutionalised racism in the United States of America.

I started reading it late at night because I needed something good, and read it through very quickly in the subsequent days because it’s an absolute treat, and I cannot wait to read some more Percival Everett again very soon.