The audacious, uncategorizable Everett

There's a term that entertainers, especially musicians, use: too smart for the house.

Now, today's mystery guest is smart, no doubt about it, high smart, as they'd say in the hills, where ''high" is an intensifier like ''really," maybe too smart, but not smart in the way of, say, Thomas Pynchon or Joseph McElroy -- smart in a subtler, far more subversive way. This writer mixes genre and tone with absolute abandon, slops paint from one bucket to another, never does the same song twice, throws African-American arealist tropes and retellings of Greek myths together into the same pot, never recooks a meal. He's literature's NASCAR champion, going flat out, narrowly avoiding one seemingly inevitable crash only to steer straight for the next.

That's why writers like Percival Everett often find themselves standing when the music stops and everyone else grabs a seat. They're literary wild cards, uncategorizable, impossible to pin. Brilliant.

Eighteen books in 21 years.

His first novel, ''Suder" (1983), in telling of a stalled-out athlete who teaches himself to fly, set the signature: troupes of grotesques, wayfaring, a string of seriocomic adventures, nothing to be taken for granted. Two fairly realistic novels followed, ''Cutting Lisa," about a doctor's measured ministrations to his son's straying wife, and ''Walk Me to the Distance," whose Vietnam vet's search for meaning leads him to the community (in every sense) of Slut's Hole, Wyo. But there were also, in ''For Her Dark Skin" and ''Frenzy," recastings of the Medea and Dionysius myths, and, in the futuristic ''Zulus," as centerpiece, the world's last fertile woman. ''Watershed," set like much of Everett's work in the West and nominally a mystery, deals with an African-American hydrologist who stumbles onto a scheme to rob the local Indian tribe of its water rights.

Then there are the novels that are sports even by Everett's standards:

''God's Country," a profoundly unsettling parody of the Western, whose story of the manhunt mounted by ne'er-do-well white rancher Curt Marder and his African-American tracker, Bubba, proved something of a touchstone -- especially in its escalating irreality.

''Glyph," whose infant narrator spends his time, between getting kidnapped by federal agents and other such adventures, working out new mathematical theorems in his head and thinking over his favorite book, Wittgenstein's ''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus."

Or ''A History of the African-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond As Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid."

Everett surfaced with 2001's ''Erasure," the story of a failed experimental novelist who in a fit of high pique, his life collapsing about him, writes a parody of contemporary African-American literature, ''My Pafology," which brings him riches and fame. Everett's novel abounds with comedy, sparkles with clear-eyed intelligence (most notably in its reworkings of ''Native Son" and ''Invisible Man"), and at the same time brims over with authentic feeling. Reviewing ''Erasure" in these pages, I wrote of it as a freewheeling sendup of commercial publishing, of the media's relentless creatio ex nihilo, of academic irrelevance and impotence, and of correct blackness -- that Booker T. Washington/W.E.B. Du Bois dialectic singing forever in African-American blood. It is all that and, as I emphasized at the time, far more.

Earlier this year Everett published ''American Desert" (Hyperion, $24.95), wherein we meet an untenured college professor pushing miserably on through his life. ''That Theodore Street was dead was not a matter open to debate," the novel begins. On his way to commit suicide, Street is struck by a UPS truck, his head severed from his body. Three days later, at his own funeral, head rudely stitched back in place by the mortician, he wakes, rejoins his family, and goes home to hordes of reporters, a kidnapping by a religious cult, and an abduction by government agents to Roswell, N.M., where a scientist removes the organs from his body only, at Ted's request, to toss them hurriedly back in.

And now, from Graywolf, with whom Everett has published half a dozen books over the years, we have ''Damned If I Do" (paperback, $15), a collection of 12 stories that first appeared in such venues as Callaloo and TriQuarterly. Their cast includes a wanderer who can fix anything, an old man who initiates a high-speed chase when he steals the car blocking access to his garbage bin, dreamy and practical fly-fishermen, horsemen of several sorts, an African-American guitarist who takes up ''Dixie" as his theme song, and a closeted romance novelist forever lighting out for the territory.

In conversation Everett is, as one might expect, personable, witty, and laconic, in one interview with Robert Birnbaum accounting for the variety of his work with the simple explanation that he gets bored easily, and continuing:

''I like the magic of it. I don't know where the stories come from. People will say, 'Why did that occur to you?' And I have no good answer. For them or myself. And in that way it is mysterious. That's why I really love it. There is a magic associated with it. And by now -- my students ask, 'Can you teach me to write a novel?' I say 'No, because I don't know how to write a novel.' And I don't. I know that I have written them. And from all appearances, I will do it again. But I have no idea."

James Sallis recently published a new collection of stories, ''A City Equal to My Desire."