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February 28, 2007

TEV GUEST REVIEW: FINN

Finn Finn
By Jon Clinch
Random House
287 pp
$23.95

WHAT COLOR IS YOUR HUCKLEBERRY?*
BY JIM RULAND

When I was in the seventh grade, St. James’s drama department put on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and I was cast as Alfred Temple, Tom’s competitor for the attention of Becky Thatcher. Tom and Alfred come to blows over her affections and on opening night, Tom tackled me and pinned me to the stage. The violence of Tom’s rough attack caught me off-guard. Needless to say, it hadn’t gone quite like that during rehearsals.

On the second night, I punched Tom Sawyer in the face, and it was on. Alfred Temple, it should be noted, was a teacher’s pet and I was costumed as a cross between Alfalfa and Little Lord Fauntleroy. Alfred is not supposed to know how to throw an uppercut and Tom was pretty irate. On the third and final night of the run, Tom Sawyer and I stole the show with a full-on Jerry Springer-style battle royal. Technically, Tom won, but only because I let him, and only because I had to.

The show, after all, must go on, and on it goes in Jon Clinch’s debut novel Finn, a compelling retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point-of-view of Pap, Huck’s alcoholic father. At the heart of the novel is the unsolved mystery that Twain left behind for his readers to mull over: How did Pap come to be shot in a room filled with weird paraphernalia? (Clue: Alfred Temple didn’t do it.)

Although Finn’s fate is known from the onset (he dead) and the plot is defined by the parameters established in Twain’s novels, there is a score of delicious twists and turns that a clumsy summary would risk ruining. Suffice to say, the biggest revelation in Clinch’s novel is the writing, which is as muscular and deliberate as the act of poling a skiff upriver.

With prose that is reminiscent of Faulkner’s early Yoknapatawpha novels, Cormac McCarthy's Tennessee novels (particularly Child of God), and of course, Twain, Finn gives us an honest-to-God yarn that’s as pleasing to puzzle over as it is to read. Finn lives in a falling down house by the river and with Clinch’s lush descriptions one can almost smell the gutted cat fish and river rot. There's something magnificently voyeuristic about Finn's crimes happening in plain sight of anyone who happens to be taking the air on an upper deck of a riverboat as it chugs up the Mississippi.

From Twain’s novels we know that Finn is a violent, bigoted drunk and Clinch endeavors to explain how he got that way. There’s no question that Finn is as vile a villain that ever skulked on two legs, but once we meet his father we can’t help but look at him with a glimmering—however faint—of sympathy.

One of the paradoxical aspects of Finn’s personality is that early on he manages to escape the yoke of his father's seething hatred and sets out on a path that is, in its own way, wiser and more compassionate than the road taken by his father. Ultimately, however, Finn repudiates this way of knowing the world and is revealed to be very much his father's son – to the peril of everyone he comes into contact with, and none more so than Huckleberry, the most cherished outsider in American letters.

QUIZTUNES WITH JON CLINCH:

TEV: What was the greatest challenge to re-imagining characters that you inherited as opposed to invented?
CLINCH: The challenge came in imagining a history for characters whom we think we already know and love -- when in fact we don't really know them at all. The Widow Douglas, for example. She's a two-dimensional figure, if that, in Twain's novels. But I wanted to understand her better in order to understand her involvement with Huck (and his mother). So it was important to imagine her in her loneliness, her long widowhood, her own painful childlessness.

Clinch01color Finn himself was of course the greatest example of this challenge. We know from Twain that he's a drunk and a child abuser and a bigot -- but why? As I set out to understand how he ended up dead in that floating house, I also set out to determine how he became the memorable monster that Twain gave us. That process took me back into Finn's youth and his family background, and his story unfurled from there.

TEV: You’ve obviously done a lot of research for this novel about a whole host of subjects: Twain, slavery, life on the Mississippi, etc. What was the most startling discovery?
CLINCH: The biggest revelation was at the heart of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn itself, and Twain left it there for all of us to see: How fragile Huck's existence was, out there in a world that cared almost nothing for him. I remembered this sense of constant peril from my first childhood reading of the book -- the sense that Huck was living on the margins of an adult world almost completely indifferent to him. And in Finn I found myself giving full voice to the dark side of that dark world.

TEV: Finn has a curious relationship with alcohol. He is like Faulkner’s young Ike McCaslin or Joe Christmas. The alcohol doesn’t mellow Finn: it focuses his rage.
CLINCH: Oh, he's a mean drunk all right. But only, I think, because he's mean to begin with. Your choice of the word "focus" is a good one. Finn has a few good qualities, but none of them is at all assisted by his addiction to alcohol.

TEV: Finn is a wonderful scoundrel. The line that resonates for me pertains to his self-awareness, something that common criminals lack and great villains require, a certain willfulness that draws them over to the dark side, along with an astonishing lack of remorse. While giving "full voice to the dark side of the dark world" did you ever wonder if readers, especially Twain enthusiasts, would be able to handle it?
CLINCH: I didn't fear how Twainians might respond to the dark side of Finn -- and in fact it seems from what I've heard so far that the better a reader knows Twain's Pap, the less surprised he is by mine. I think that fans of Twain, then, will by and large believe that I've been abundantly fair to my source materials on that count. Where they may feel differently, though, is in my exploration of the forces that made Finn so tormented. In my reading, his bigotry comes from a conflict between handed-down racism and an impulse toward love -- of a sort -- toward a black woman. Which is certainly credible, but has the side effect of giving us a bi-racial Huck. By doing that to America's favorite white kid, I may have sinned in some eyes. But either way, it's certainly not a failure of courage.

TEV: What are you working on now? Is the Twain oeuvre a universe you'd like to continue exploring?
CLINCH: My new project is a little too rough to talk about yet. There's surely room for more exploration of Twain's world, but I think I'll set that aside for now.

*A Huckleberry can be red or blue. According to Wikipedia, “The 'garden huckleberry' is not considered to be a true huckleberry but a member of the nightshade family.”

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

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