From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In this darkly luminous debut, Finn, the namesake of the title, is not Twain's illustrious Huck, but Huck's father, "Pap." As the novel opens, an African-American woman's bloated corpse floats downriver from Lasseter, Ill., toward the slave territory of St. Petersburg, Mo. In the Lasseter woods, Finn—a dangerous, bigoted drunk—tells his blind bootlegger friend, Bliss, that he's finally "quit" his on-again, off-again African-American companion Mary, the mother of Finn's second son (also, confusingly, named Huck). Chronically short on money, Finn is shunned by his father (Adams County Judge James Manchester Finn) and by his brother, Will. Finn does odd jobs, traps catfish and claims tutelary rights to Huckleberry's share of Injun Joe's gold. (In this last, he is thwarted by Widow Douglas and Judge Thatcher, high-handed and stifling as ever.) The opaque in medias res narrative then backs up to detail Finn and Mary's life together: his drinking, his stint in the penitentiary following an assault (sentenced by his own father), Mary's rising debts and Finn's attempts at restitution. As the nature of the woman's murder becomes clear, Clinch lyrically renders the Mississippi River's ceaseless flow, while revealing Finn's brutal contradictions, his violence, arrogance and self-reproach. If Clinch's debut falls short of Twain's achievement, it does further Twain's fiction.
(Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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In
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,Huck and Jim find Pap Finn's body in a house floating down the Mississippi River. Riddlesome objects, such as a wooden leg and two black cloth masks, lie scattered about the room, the walls covered in cruel, illegible scrawlings. Using this scene as a point of navigation, Clinch gamely sets about reconstructing what led to the man's premature--and perhaps well-warranted--death. Finn remains the lowest sort of a man, as evil, alcoholic, and bitterly racist as he was in Twain. The boldest departure here, then, is of Finn's incongruous lust for black women. He makes a prisoner/mistress of an ex-slave and conceives with her a fair-skinned child. Thus, Huck. By and by Finn would rather guzzle 40-rod whiskey in a moonshiner's woods than raise the child, and when he tires of the woman, the easiest way to rid himself of her is also the bloodiest. This is a bold debut that takes a few tentative steps in tandem with the familiar Twain, but then veers off dexterously down a much more insidious, harrowing path.
Ian ChipmanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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