AFTER 12 YEARS of deconstructing novelistic forms, Percival Everett seems almost to play it straight with Assumption, a triptych of detective/crime stories framed as a novel about distorted memory, money, and murder. Assumption's protagonist, Ogden Walker, is a sheriff's deputy in Plata, a tiny New Mexican burg. Unlike the leads in Everett's recent novels, Walker is not a genius child (as in Glyph [1999] and I Am Not Sidney Poitier [2009]), not an underappreciated postmodern or vengeful romance novelist (as in Erasure and The Water Cure [2008], respectively), nor is he a suicidal, underachieving professor who, after his beheading, returns from the dead (American Desert [2004]). In fact, as a character, Walker never rises to any distinction. That's purposeful: Walker is Everett's central mystery among the unsolved crimes. He's the classic accidental detective: He lives alone in a trailer; his mother is his main confidant; he doesn't sleep much or very well; his only solace is in the artisan labor of lure-tying and his frequent fly-fishing excursions; he served in the military police, but couldn't imagine more for himself than being back in Plata — the only black man in town. Like so many other detectives in novels of this type, Walker is finding himself in the process of his solving mysteries. But readers will say of Walker, as a Plata motel manager suggests to him rhetorically, "you're not a very good detective, are you?"

Though Everett is an adept and accomplished postmodernist, he hikes over this familiar terrain and repeats its clichés unironically. Everett has also recently published his second collection of poems, Swimming Swimmers Swimming (2010). These new poems backlight the novel's ideas, helping detail Everett's narrative and linguistic aesthetic and offering some direction for understanding his choices in Assumption. Not all the poems in Swimming Swimmers Swimming dazzle. However, the strongest ones artfully demonstrate Everett's fascination with American English's refractive qualities — a trait Everett has inherited from Gertrude Stein, whose ideas about repetition in detective novels inform Assumption as well. Once a single trope or, character or narrative trait is iterated again, Stein argues in her lecture, "Portraits and Repetition," "there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis." In Assumption, Everett's insistent use of standard detective/crime fiction situations disrupts readers' expectations of the genre while emphasizing new meanings. We ought to see Everett's recent poems, like "Rows," for example, as concentrated, sharply crafted exercises on insistence and meaning. "Rows" springs from Stein's canonical line, "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" (repeated in many of her poems, including "Sacred Emily"). Here, Everett insists on Stein's melodic concept, but reconstitutes the line's contours thus emphasizing a different claim about language and meaning:

the rose

and the book

are the same

color.

the book

and the rose

are the same color.

the book

is open

like a rose

has leaves
...