The Last Book I Read

My all-time favorite book is Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I first read it when I was in fifth or sixth grade, and have re-read it more times than I can count. Each successive reading led to increased understanding and respect for the artfulness of Twain's masterpiece. As an undergraduate, I took a seminar on Mark Twain, primarily to have the opportunity to talk and learn more about this book (not that I wasn't a fan of the rest of Twain's stuff too), and my enthusiasm led the professor (himself a renowned Twain scholar) to invite me to become a member of the English Honors Society (to his surprise, and my disappointment, I wasn't eligible since I wasn't an English major). Several authors over the years have undertaken to write sequels to this classic (including Twain himself in Huck Finn Among the Indians), with mixed results. But Jon Clinch's Finn is of a different stripe.

Finn's lead character is not Huck, but his Pap, and Clinch does an excellent job of concocting a rich backstory for this unrepentant reprobate. The author made a wise decision to forego the flavorful dialects of the original book, reducing dialogue to a minimum, and telling his story with the evocative prose necessary to recreate the fringe society of Twain's Mississippi River world. Finn's time unfolds on his skiff, running fishing lines, then peddling his catch to a series of tavern-keepers and moonshiners in exchange for the alcohol that lubricates his endless moral descent. He lurks in shadows and alleys, lives in dilapidated and ravaged squalor, and yet betrays the arrogant privilege of bigotry. The story intersects with Twain's only intermittently, and though there are a couple of instances where one might question Clinch's liberties with that parent narrative, in the end his choices are either reconciled or rationalized effectively enough to merit the effort. Well into the book, one of those choices threatens to undermine the key scene of Huckleberry Finn (and one of the most powerful moments in all of American literature), and I'll admit that it troubled me that Clinch would go so far out on a limb. But he resolves the contradiction neatly, and in a manner that is entirely consonant with his own established themes, if not completely with Twain's. In that way, he signals that regardless of how invested a reader like me may be in the original story, his book is a discrete work. Inspired by the classic, yes, but ultimately Clinch's is a literary effort that stands on its own considerable merits. I suspect that even someone unfamiliar with its inspiration would be caught up in the gothic Americana of this tale, and find great satisfaction in how it unfolds.