Just finished Jon Clinch's excellent debut novel, Finn. Wow...what a dark ride! Clinch takes the story of minor but memorable character Pap Finn from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and fleshes out his back story in vivid and sometimes brutal style. Finn is a nasty, mean, racist, whiskey swilling, river man that happens to have a thing for black women. The beauty of the novel is that it is faithful to Pap's appearances in the Twain novel, but recasts his actions in the light of the new and fascinating revelations exposed in the text.
Perhaps the most revelatory thing about the novel is that Clinch asserts, based on some exhaustive research in the current body of Twain literary scholarship, that Huck is bi-racial. Which leads me to the politics of narrative license. I happen to love the idea of taking an established classic and turning it on its head, a la Grendel in John Gardner's modern take on Beowulf. Even the Coen Brothers' take on The Odyssey in their film O 'Brother Where Art Thou? serves to give the text new chops. But this method is not without its detractors. Apparently, Clinch has received some negative comments from Twain purists, which is ind of sad. No text is sacrosanct. No text is beyond revision. You'd think most people would get that. I think the thing that makes this particular novel so compelling is the concept of unreliability as seen in the boy narrator of the older text. Huck is a liar, no doubt, so it goes to follow that some of his assertions would be lies, too, no? Clinch just takes the idea and runs with it; and what a wild dash it is. Not for the faint hearted, at all, but worth the time if you love Huck, this book will do the most important thing a book can hope to do: get you thinking.
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