FINN: A NEW NOVEL THAT IMAGINES HUCK FINN'S "PAP."
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Jon Clinch's Finn is a brave and ambitious debut novel inspired by Mark Twain's masterpiece, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."
It fully imagines the life of Huck's violent, alcoholic and bigoted father. It stands on its own while giving new life and meaning to Twain's novel, which has been stirring passions and debates since 1885.
Finn raises a new question: Will a novel that is set in the 19th century and that repeatedly uses the n-word, as did Huck himself, be embraced in the more racially sensitive 21st century?
I hope it is. Finn is a triumph of imagination and graceful writing. It's a puzzle built on clues that Twain left at Pap Finn's murder scene.
To discuss the genius of Clinch's novel requires disclosure of a crucial surprise in the plot. Readers who wish to experience that surprise for themselves should skip the next paragraph.
Clinch invents Huck's mother. She's a resourceful escaped slave, known only as Mary (as Huck's father is known only as Finn). She's both lover and property, a story as old as America itself.
One of the novel's lovely ironies is that Mary, unlike Finn, can read. When she reads poetry to him in his squatter's shack on the banks of the Mississippi, "she seems to him in her fluency a creature from some other place and time or an instrument shaped by the Almighty so that a long-dead cavalier poet might whisper his incomprehensible arcana into the mind of a benighted illiterate riverman."
Finn loves whiskey as much as he seems to hate blacks. His bigotry is the only thing he has inherited from his father, an imperious judge. Finn is a primitive brute yet yearns to be someone he is not.
Huck, the boy, is a minor character, but he lights up scenes. When he meets the Widow Douglas, who offers cool milk, "the look of delight that beams from his face at this small kindness illuminates her kitchen and heart as has no other thing in the years since her husband died or even before; it would be worth starving the child near to death all over again if she could witness once more so miraculous a recovery."
The plot is not linear, and that's confusing at first. Having pieced together Twain's puzzle, Clinch creates a puzzle of his own.
And his use of the n-word is bound to turn off some readers, especially those who denounce Twain's novel as racist. (In the 19th century, it was banned for other reasons: Huck's poor grammar and mischief were considered bad examples for young minds by both librarians and teachers..)
But I'd argue that Clinch, like Twain, is subverting racism, not reinforcing it.
Bookstores and libraries shelve novels alphabetically by authors' names. That leaves Clinch a long way from Twain. But on my bookshelves, they'll lean against each other. I'd like to think that the cantankerous Twain would welcome the company.