FINN

A follow-up to my rereading of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn last year, this novel by Jon Clinch is a dark, masterful take on the story from Huck’s father’s point of view. As in Twain, Finn is first-nameless, an outsider, a racist, and a terrifyingly brutal drunk, which makes being inside his head, as you are for much of the novel, a disturbing experience. The big twist here is that in Clinch’s version, *SPOILER BUT OTHERWISE I REALLY CAN’T EXPLAIN WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK SO INTERESTING* Huck’s mother is black, a runaway slave whom Finn basically kidnaps, abuses, and then eventually murders after she tries to seek a better life for their light-skinned son by surrendering him to the Widow Douglas and passing him off as a white orphan. Finn clearly cares for her and their son (at least to some extent, in his own manner, as much as he’s capable of it) but repeatedly torments, fails, and betrays them, in the end robbing them both of their very identities. The book makes you simultaneously sympathize with him and hate yourself for doing so, rendering his violent end (in that house floating down the river that Twain so eerily evokes, where Huck and Jim will stumble across his body) both tragic and victorious. Although—as Clinch himself acknowledges—there’s no evidence Twain ever intended Huck to be anything other than white, reimagining Huck as mixed-race does fit well into the world of the novel, helping to explain Huck’s thorough knowledge of folk wisdom and his marginalization (in Twain, all the mothers in town warn their sons to stay away from him). This wasn’t an easy read, and I’m not sure I would want to read it again, but it was a powerful and memorable exploration of some of the darker themes and undertones of Huckleberry Finn.

One quibble: Apparently Clinch irrationally hates em dashes, because they don’t appear anywhere in the book, even when they’re desperately needed—for example, to convey an interrupted sentence in dialogue, such as:
“I thought you said—”
“Never mind what I said.”
“But—”
Instead, in Finn, we get periods:
“I thought you said.”
“Never mind what I said.”
“But.”
This is both disconcertingly choppy and incredibly confusing, and it left me just plain annoyed. I understand disliking certain punctuation marks because you feel they’re ugly or overused; I tend to be peeved by lazy use of ellipses. But they exist for a reason. In the case of ellipses, no other punctuation mark can really convey that sense of a sentence gradually trailing off, and in the case of em dashes, no other punctuation mark can convey sudden interruption—and certainly not a period, which conveys an intentional ending. IT’S JUST WRONG. It gets in the way. It doesn’t express what you want to express. Who are you to think you know better than the accumulated tradition of grammatical rules and commonly accepted usage? This is why I’m not a fiction editor, because there are certain “artistic” authorial whims I refuse to put up with when they go against good sense.

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.