Synopses & Reviews
In this masterful debut by a major new voice in fiction, Jon Clinch takes us on a journey into the history and heart of one of American literature’s most brutal and mysterious figures: Huckleberry Finn’s father. The result is a deeply original tour de force that springs from Twain’s classic novel but takes on a fully realized life of its own.
Finn sets a tragic figure loose in a landscape at once familiar and mythic. It begins and ends with a lifeless body–flayed and stripped of all identifying marks–drifting down the Mississippi. The circumstances of the murder, and the secret of the victim’s identity, shape Finn’s story as they will shape his life and his death.
Along the way Clinch introduces a cast of unforgettable characters: Finn’s terrifying father, known only as the Judge; his sickly, sycophantic brother, Will; blind Bliss, a secretive moonshiner; the strong and quick-witted Mary, a stolen slave who becomes Finn’s mistress; and of course young Huck himself. In daring to re-create Huck for a new generation, Clinch gives us a living boy in all his human complexity–not an icon, not a myth, but a real child facing vast possibilities in a world alternately dangerous and bright.
Finn is a novel about race; about paternity in its many guises; about the shame of a nation recapitulated by the shame of one absolutely unforgettable family. Above all, Finn reaches back into the darkest waters of America’s past to fashion something compelling, fearless, and new.
Praise for Finn
“A brave and ambitious debut novel… It stands on its own while giving new life and meaning to Twain’s novel, which has been stirring passions and debates since 1885… triumph of imagination and graceful writing…. 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.”
–USA TODAY
“Ravishing…In the saga of this tormented human being, Clinch brings us a radical (and endlessly debatable) new take on Twain’s classic, and a stand-alone marvel of a novel. Grade: A.”
–ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
“A fascinating, original read.”
–people
“Haunting…Clinch reimagines Finn in a strikingly original way, replacing Huck’s voice with his own magisterial vision–one that’s nothing short of revelatory…Spellbinding.”
–WASHINGTON POST
“Meticulously crafted…Marvelous imagination…The Finn of Clinch’s novel is certainly a racist villain but also psychologically disturbed and disconcertingly compelling.”
–SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
“From the barest of hints in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Clinch has created a fully believable world inhabited by fully realized characters. Clinch treads dangerous ground in making one of America’s greatest novels his jumping-off point, but he brings it off magnificently…The language of this book is one of its great beauties…Finn is far from one-dimensional, and that is another beauty of the book. Clinch has a knack for putting us squarely inside the heads of his characters….Clinch draws as compelling and realistic a picture as any we’re likely to find…Finn stands on its own. The richness of its language, the depth of its characters, the emotional and societal tangles through which they struggle to navigate add up to a portrait of life on the Mississippi as we’ve never before experienced it.”
–dallas morning news
“His models may include Cormac McCarthy, and Charles Frazier, whose Cold Mountain also has a voice that sounds like 19th-century American (both formal and colloquial) but has a contemporary terseness and spikiness. This voice couldn’t be better suited to a historical novel with a modernist sensibility: Clinch’s riverbank Missouri feels postapocalyptic, and his Pap Finn is a crazed yet wily survivor in a polluted landscape…Clinch’s Pap is a convincingly nightmarish extrapolation of Twain’s. He’s the mad, lost and dangerous center of a world we’d hate to live in–or do we still live there?–and crave to revisit as soon as we close the book.”
–newsweek
“I haven’t been swallowed whole by a work of fiction in some time. Jon Clinch’s first novel has done it: sucked me under like I was a rag doll thrown into the wake of a Mississippi steamboat…Jon Clinch has turned in a nearly perfect first book, a creative response that matches The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in intensity and tenacious soul-searching about racism. I wish I could write well enough to construct a dramatic, subtle and mysterious story out of careful, plodding and unromantic prose, but for now I’m just happy to have an alchemist like Jon Clinch do it for me.”
–BOOKSLUT
“Finn strikes its most original chords in its bold imagining of possibilities left unexplored by Huckleberry Finn.”
–austin american-statesman
“An inspired riff on one of literature’s all-time great villains…This tale of fathers and sons, slavery and freedom, better angels at war with dark demons, is filled with passages of brilliant description, violence that is close-up and terrifying…Everything in this novel could have happened, and we believe it… so the great river of stories is too, twisting and turning, inspiring such surprising and inspired riffs and tributes as Finn.”
–new orleans times-picayune
“A triumph of succesful plotting, convincing characterization and lyrical pros
Review
"The Mississippi River is a character in its own right, prominently featured in each chapter. Every fan of Twain's masterpiece will want to read this inspired spin-off, which could become an unofficial companion volume. Highly recommended." Library Journal
Review
"A brave and ambitious debut novel....It stands on its own while giving new life and meaning to Twain's novel, which has been stirring passions and debates since 1885...triumph of imagination and graceful writing....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." USA Today
Review
"Ravishing....In the saga of this tormented human being, Clinch brings us a radical (and endlessly debatable) new take on Twain's classic, and a stand-alone marvel of a novel. (Grade: A)" Entertainment Weekly
Review
"Meticulously crafted....Marvelous imagination....The Finn of Clinch's novel is certainly a racist villain but also psychologically disturbed and disconcertingly compelling." San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"Shocking and charming. Clinch creates a folk-art masterpiece that will delight, beguile and entertain as it does justice to its predecessor....In Finn, Clinch expands the bloodlines and scope of the original story and casts new light on the troubled legacy of our country’ s infamous past." New York Post
Review
"Gripping...he inventively remaps known literary territory...the descriptive riffs are lucent." Chicago Tribune
Review
"Considering the heady literary terrain Clinch hopes to master, the novel succeeds better than anyone other than its author could have expected." Christian Science Monitor
Synopsis
In this masterful debut by a major new voice in fiction, Jon Clinch takes us on a journey into the history and heart of one of American literature's most brutal and mysterious figures: Huckleberry Finn's father. The result is a deeply original tour de force that springs from Twain's classic novel but takes on a fully realized life of its own.
Finn sets a tragic figure loose in a landscape at once familiar and mythic. It begins and ends with a lifeless body #151; flayed and stripped of all identifying marks drifting down the Mississippi. The circumstances of the murder, and the secret of the victim's identity, shape Finn's story as they will shape his life and his death.
Along the way Clinch introduces a cast of unforgettable characters: Finn's terrifying father, known only as the Judge; his sickly, sycophantic brother, Will; blind Bliss, a secretive moonshiner; the strong and quick-witted Mary, a stolen slave who becomes Finn's mistress; and of course young Huck himself. In daring to re-create Huck for a new generation, Clinch gives us a living boy in all his human complexity not an icon, not a myth, but a real child facing vast possibilities in a world alternately dangerous and bright.
Finn is a novel about race; about paternity in its many guises; about the shame of a nation recapitulated by the shame of one absolutely unforgettable family. Above all, Finn reaches back into the darkest waters of America's past to fashion something compelling, fearless, and new.
About the Author
A native of upstate New York and a graduate of Syracuse University, Jon Clinch has taught American literature, has been creative director for a Philadelphia ad agency, and has run his own agency in the Philadelphia suburbs. His stories have appeared in John Gardner's MSS. magazine. He and his wife have one daughter.
Reading Group Guide
1. Finn (the character) is both sympathetic and unsympathetic. How do his various traits and actions make him that way? Did you find yourself rooting for him or against him? For what reasons? How did your reactions to him change as the book went on?
2. Finn is deeply conflicted on issues of race. Which of his impulses are good? Which are bad? What could he have done to change the outcome of his circumstances?
3. Finn is also fiercely conflicted in his relationship with his father, the Judge. He wants desperately to please him, but subverts his own intentions time and again. How does this make you feel about the two of them-and about their relationship?
4. The author chose to give Finn no first name and to give certain other characters either no names at all or names that identify them as archetypes (e.g., the Judge, the preacher, the laundress). Why do you suppose he made this decision? How did this unusual naming convention affect your understanding of and involvement with the story?
5. The events in Finn are told out of sequence. How would the novel have been different if it had been told chronologically?
6. Although the action in Finn is closely tied to the events of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the novel stands by itself and takes some very different directions from Twains work. Did that surprise you? If the author had chosen to stay closer to Twain, how would the book have been different?
7. If you have read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn recently, how did the world envisioned in Twains novel compare with the world in Clinchs? Which seemed to you more realistic? Why?
8. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has a first-person narrator (Huck tells the story himself ), while Finn has an omniscient third-person narrator. Huck is told in the past tense, and Finn in the present. How do these differences affect your understanding of the novels and your connection to them?
9. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is widely regarded as a masterpiece of dialect writing. Did the author of Finn choose wisely in avoiding the use of dialect in his novel? What tricks did he use to give the impression of dialect speech without actually rendering it?
10. What images-either from memorable scenes or through vivid language-stand out to you? The author has said that much of the inspiration for the language of this book came from William Faulkner, the King James Bible, and old gospel hymns. Does that make sense to you?
11. Some minor characters from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn reappear in Finn. Which of them did you recognize? How are they different, if at all?
12. One important theme of Finn is paternity: the things we take from our fathers and pass to our children. There are several father-and-child combinations in the book, both real and symbolic: Finn and the Judge, Finn and Huck, Judge Thatcher and Huck, Judge Thatcher and Becky, the Judge and Will, Judge Stone and his children, Marys father and Mary, the laundresss husband and the murdered child. How do they compare to one another?
13. The last sentence of Finn-“He will take what he requires and light out”-echoes the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “...I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest. . . . ” Yet it also refers to the issues of paternity raised in Finn. Twains ending was hopeful. Is Clinchs? How are the endings different?
Exclusive Essay
Read an exclusive essay by Jon Clinch
Author Q&A
ON THE ROAD AND ON THE PHONE: A CONVERSATION WITH JON CLINCH
During his tour for Finn–and in telephone calls to book groups ever since–Jon Clinch has been collecting interesting questions. Here are some of the best, by way of sparking discussion at your group meeting.
Question: Early in Finn, we know that the two main characters will die by the end. What kind of problems did that pose for you?
Jon Clinch: More than a few–but I wanted to start out with that floating corpse for a number of reasons. First, it never hurts to start with a body–especially one that’s been mysteriously flayed. Second, I wanted to echo a scene from chapter three of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where people find the corpse of a man drowned in the river (for a while they believe it’s Finn himself ). And last, this particular body belongs to a character who will be the emotional center of the novel and its chief revelation.
Beginning with this moment left me with two choices: I could either write the rest of the novel as a flashback leading up to this point, or I could structure the narrative in a much more complex way to focus more on character than on plot. Obviously, I chose the second path. My goal from that point on was to create a story that developed its urgency by means of intense focus on a handful of characters– mainly Finn himself.
In the end, this structure served thematic purposes as well. Finn is in many ways a novel about imprisonment–Finn physically imprisons both Huck and Mary at various times–and taken all around there’s really no character who functions with the absolute freedom that he desires. It seems to me that the novel’s structural confinement reinforces that point.
Q: Why didn’t you use dialect in Finn?
JC: I set out with two clear aims for the way that Finn would sound. First, I wanted an archaic and mythic kind of narrative voice that would give the novel a sense of timelessness and truth. That meant calling on the language and cadences of some large and imposing models: the King James Bible, for one, and the work of American masters like William Faulkner and Herman Melville. My second goal was to honor Twain’s grand use of dialect in Huckleberry Finn without attempting to mimic it in any way. By stripping the speech of characters like Finn or Bliss down to its barest essence, I was able to create a contrast between narrative and dialogue that conveys the impression of dialect without giving in to specifics.
As for Finn’s “I know it,” I hear this vocal tic as a statement of mingled assent and defensiveness and one-upmanship–as if he believes that merely agreeing with another person is too passive and undignified an act. With this little formula he simultaneously assents and defends his independence and declares his awareness of any knowledge possessed by whatever person he’s speaking with. Plus I believe that the Homeric quality of repeated, formulaic expression–coupled with the naming conventions in the book, where certain characters are identified only by their roles and Finn himself has no known first name–works to advance the novel’s mythic scope.
Q: How careful were you to match events in Finn to events in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?
JC: Extremely, although I always gave myself a certain amount of leeway. As Twain himself wrote: “Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.” My intent was always to honor the imaginative world that Twain created in Huckleberry Finn, rather than enslave myself to the details of geography or history. Some scenes from Huckleberry Finn replay whole in Finn, except for point of view and subtext. Some scenes that Twain only sketched or suggested–Finn and the professor from Ohio, Finn and Judge Stone–are fleshed out fully. Other scenes that my narrative required–Finn’s discovery of Huck’s escape from the squatter’s shack, for example–called for interpreting the events of Huckleberry Finn in new ways, ways that I think are often more credible than Huck’s reportage.
Twain’s decision to have a child tell his own story gave me the freedom to consider Huck an unreliable narrator, particularly when it came to describing the wickedness of his own father. (One key example of this is the scene in Huckleberry Finn where, his escape from the squatter’s shack having left the people of St. Petersburg thinking him dead, Huck describes seeing a search boat that carries practically everybody in town–including Judge Thatcher and Pap. I couldn’t see Finn playing the good father here, even for pay, any more than I could see him falling for Huck’s clumsy “escape.” So I chalked Huck’s report up to wishful thinking, and let Finn go on his way up the river.
Q: Other than Twain, what were your inspirations?
JC: William Faulkner, obviously. I’d always wanted to write a novel with a powerful motivating character who remained just behind the scenes, like Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom! The Judge fills that role in Finn, although as draft turned into revised draft he moved more and more out of the shadows. Herman Melville was a great inspiration, too. The Santo Domingo sequence where Finn abducts Mary is in some ways a retelling of his novel Benito Cereno.
Then there’s music. Many rhythms and phrases and references in Finn come from the magnificent gospel hymns of Fanny Crosby, Charles Albert Tindley, and others. I came to love these as a child, and they stay with me to this day. Other musical touchstones are the fine banjo-andfiddle recordings of John Hartford and Texas Shorty, whose plaintive and stately melodies form the secret soundtrack of this book. You can hear one of them, “Midnight on the Water,” at www.ReadFinn.com.
Q: How have people responded to the notion of a biracial Huck?
JC: Finn definitely has Twain scholars talking, and by and large their opinion is that although my book’s revelations won’t satisfy everyone, they provide some important and convincing answers to questions posed by Twain’s novel. This gratifies me, not because I set out to please the academics or to advance some kind of scholarly agenda, but because I set out to write a book that was true to its raw materials and true to its deepest impulses and true to my own worldview–particularly to my understanding of how human nature functions at points of extremity. That it’s being received as a convincing extension of Twain’s world seems to me a great reward for my efforts.
All of which leads me back to the central question of Huck’s blackness. As Shelley Fisher Fishkin demonstrated in her provocatively titled monograph Was Huck Black? Twain’s worldview was much influenced by the black children with whom he grew up. Their manner of speech–their manner of thought, come to that, since language both reflects and influences cognition–was enormously important in shaping his own modes of expression. Particularly his taste for satire and irony, without which we wouldn’t have much in the way of a Mark Twain at all. With Fishkin, I believe that there is most certainly a whole black culture at work behind the character of Huck Finn, regardless of the particulars of his pigmentation.
Q: What about the level of violence in Finn? How does it align with the world of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?
JC: While he was composing Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain lamented that the strictures of polite culture–and the limits of writing for an audience of boys–kept him from describing in its pages the hair-raising violence that he had seen on the Mississippi of his youth. He felt constrained, in other words, from telling a truth that I was free to describe.
But I was more than free to describe it, really. I was obliged. First because of my commitment to Twain, and second because of my deeply held belief that we live in a world where it’s easy–in fact, almost inevitable–to become inured to violence. There is plenty of brutality in Finn, but there’s nothing in its pages that you can’t see on the evening news or in a thousand other less serious corners of popular culture: movies, cop shows, video games, the latest thriller on the library shelf. If some of Finn makes readers flinch, and I hope it does, it’s only in the service of awakening a kind of primal human reflex that I fear we may be on the verge of dulling to extinction.