RIPLEY UNDER WATER/HUCK FINN

While on vacation, even though it was technically August, I continued Patricia Highsmith Month by reading the final Ripley book, Ripley Under Water, in which Ripley contends with a Who’s-Afraid-of-Virginia-Woolfish American couple who move to his French village and begin harassing him with hints that they know about his past crimes. It was fascinating, even though I wish it spent a bit more time on the psycho couple and a bit less time on Ripley’s gardening. With so many references to the earlier books (especially the first one), it brought things full circle and provided a fitting end to the series.

August was meant to be Mark Twain month, but I’m afraid it got truncated by my lazy, vacationing ways, so all I ended up tackling was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. My dad had read the book to me when I was a kid (along with just about every other Twain work in existence—I remember really liking Twain), and I read it myself at least once during my childhood, but unlike every other American student (including my 17-year-old cousin, who was crankily trudging through it for assigned summer reading at the family reunion—the same edition I had brought, even!), I somehow never had to read it for school, and thus remembered little about the book except the vague outlines of the plot. It was a bit too picaresque for me, and (as every literary critic ever has noted), the ending (where Tom Sawyer randomly shows up to save the day with painfully ridiculous comic shenanigans) is a travesty (in the edition I read, one of the sections of the very-well-written foreword was titled “The Ending, Oh God, the Ending”), but overall the book is great, especially the narrative tone; I fell in love with Huck’s voice. I now think it would be really interesting to read Finn, John Clinch’s novel told from the point of view of Huck’s father. Another one for the TBR list! More and more, I’m thinking that just whittling that down is going to have to be its own Reading Project for next year.