Members with This Book
Most Helpful Reviews
see all reviews
Liked It2 of 2 members found this review helpful “Brutal and brilliant. In "Finn," author Jon Clinch does the seemingly impossible: he creates a compelling literary "fraternal twin" to Mark Twain's classic, while at the same time infusing his own complex novel with startling originality. The focal Finn here is the notorious Pap Finn, father to...” see full review » see other reviews » |
Newest Reviews
see all reviews-
“Both horrible and engrossing at the same time.”
Melissa K wrote this review yesterday. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)
jasonpettus wrote this review 2 days ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
Jon Clinch's 2007 sleeper hit Finn is based on a concept almost insultingly simple, which is what makes its brilliance even more astounding -- it takes the events from Mark Twain's 1883 classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and retells them from the point of view of Huck's abusive, alcoholic hillbilly dad. And the reason this is brilliant is because it takes all the familiar characters and milieus of Twain's infamously nostalgic fictional universe of St. Petersberg (based extremely loosely on a series of tales from his own early-1800s childhood in Hannibal, Missouri) and twists them into a horrific modern Sam-Shepardesque study of White Trash Gone Wrong, flipping the treacle of the Pastoral movement on its head and showing all the ugly bits that also came with rural life in the pre-Industrial US. And ugly this book is, make no mistake, with it being wise not to assume that this is family-friendly small-town pabulum just because it's a riff on Mark Twain; just to cite one infamous example, one of the minor characters featured here is a corrupt white preacher who kidnaps black children in free states out of their homes at gunpoint in the middle of the night (because of the black parents having no one to complain to), sodomizes the children and then drowns them in the river afterwards.
And in fact that's the other thing to know about Finn, that there's a point to all the monstrous behavior seen in this legitimate "portrait of evil," which is to take a sophisticated and unflinching look at how the subject of race used to be treated in this country as recently as 150 years ago, of how it could be that some white people could treat blacks that cruelly back then, even while simultaneously getting along with certain black individuals and even being sexually attracted to some of them. The one-named villain of this book's title is a walking lesson in hypocrisy, with his profound lack of education combining with his DT-worthy drinking problem and the simple harshness of frontier life to produce the kind of infuriatingly dim-witted Caucasian animal we still even sometimes see in the modern Deep South (this book could easily double as a character sketch of a typical 2008 McCain supporter); and I have to admit that I was mesmerized by both this book's power and pure audacity while I was breathlessly racing through it. One of those books that usually would get a much bigger write-up, simply that it's getting a little long in the tooth for such a thing at CCLaP anymore (it's almost three years old as of today), and it's a shame I wasn't able to get to it closer to its original publication date, so I could've included it in one of my past "Best of the Year" overviews. Highly recommended.
Out of 10: 9.7”
“He is a soul in need of redemption. A most dispicable character in the first 50 pages, but I'll bet he is redeemed in the end.”
Linda B wrote this review Sunday, September 20 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Dark & gripping!”
LisaC wrote this review Saturday, August 8 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“authentic setting based on delapidated southern river shacks I've seen. Too dark & amoral for my tastes tho Finn did try to live by his own "code"”
Barbara G wrote this review Wednesday, July 15 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No2 of 2 members found this review helpful“Brutal and brilliant. In "Finn," author Jon Clinch does the seemingly impossible: he creates a compelling literary "fraternal twin" to Mark Twain's classic, while at the same time infusing his own complex novel with startling originality. The focal Finn here is the notorious Pap Finn, father to Huck, and Clinch entwines carefully extracted scenes, scraps, and unanswered questions from Twain's narrative into a dark tapestry of his own imaginings. I am left eager to re-read "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," which I first encountered many years ago, long before I had the maturity and insight to comprehend the depths of its mysterious underbelly.”
Darra W wrote this review Saturday, July 4 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“I loved this book. I got to relive parts of the Mark Twain story as well as understand one of the most hated American literary characters as a whole person.”
Rachel S wrote this review Tuesday, June 16 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“It's been a very long time since I read Twain's novel, and I remember Pap Finn as an odius character. Jon Clinch takes that character and gives Finn dimension, makes him completely believable and while not at all likable and in many ways despicable, even understandable. The author also explores the already-deep rift that ultimately tore the fabric of this country in two. There is much here that is horrible, but there is a real power to this book. The language of "Finn" is just gorgeous, scoured of excess but with beautiful cadences that suggest the rolling river that is such a part of Finn's life. ”
Leslie E wrote this review Wednesday, April 22 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
1 of 1 members found this review helpful“If you are a fan of Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," as I am, you may have wondered about Huck's parents. Why was his father an alcoholic vagrant who abused his son? How did that father end up dead in a house floating down the Mississippi River? And who was Huck's mother? And what happened to her?
Howard N wrote this review Monday, November 23 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
Now we have the answers to those questions and more. They are not provided by Mark Twain, but by Jon Clinch in his impressive debut novel, Finn.
Finally, we have Huckleberry Finn's back story. It helps us understand him a little better.
I must admit that there were times as I was reading the book that I wondered if it would have held my interest to the degree that it did if it were about a man named Finn who had no connection with Twain's classic. In other words, would it still have merit if had been forced to stand alone. Maybe not. But it doesn't have to.
Clinch is a talented writer and I look forward to his next novel.
”
0 of 1 members found this review helpful“ Pap: a pathological criminal of Faulknerian proportion, acts always inside his own twists of fate. Twain knew this as predestination; Clinch knows it as doom. Clinch portrays Finn as one representing the worst of humankind. The reader journeys through the book anticipating some redemptive action, somewhere, sometime, somehow. To wit, Pap’s capacity to consume alcohol places him on the level with James in Frey’s, A Million Little Pieces; the novel reeks of hooch from the first scene to the last. By having the title character drink so very much hard liquor, however, should not be construed as an endorsement of its use and abuse just as the N-word’s use and abuse in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn cannot lead the astute reader to assume that Twain endorses such epithets. Pap is addicted to alcohol, to racism, to ignorance, to sloth, to thievery, to deceit, to violence and brutal force.
Mark V wrote this review Monday, January 19 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
In January, 1885, Mark Twain published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the United States and within two months it drew the first fire. The Concord (Mass.) Public Library committee decided to “exclude” the book from its library shelves, coming short of calling the novel immoral, but still regarding it as “the veriest trash…rough, coarse and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people” (de Koster). But things have changed since then; our values have shifted to accommodate the controversial themes in literature; it seems safer to publish along the spectrum of vice and virtue. Jon Clinch’s spin off, Finn: a Novel doesn’t seem to have raised an eyebrow from exclusionists. Where is the censorship?
Please don’t misunderstand these words as even an insinuation for censorship against Finn. Rather, notice the cultural shift between 1885 and our age, appreciating its irony. Years ago, in an age of high decorum and attentive refinements in social manners, Twain exhibited his own, well, graphic art, showing (to name scenes) a fomented mob out to lynch Colonel Sherburn for shooting drunken Boggs, showing angry townsfolk, dressing the King and the Duke in feather-studded tar to ride the sham-royalty out on rails. Huck witnesses these events and in his teenage sensibility (we hope he is reliable), relates the irony for the reader, allowing us to see how the opposing groups (Sherburn v. mob, the King and the Duke v. Arkansas villagers) each treats the other so poorly. Huck reports the violence and the rage. How can we let this material into our homes where we also want Victorian manners, etiquette, and refinement?
From our vantage today, the age of high, white-collared shirts, skirts that trail about the floor, and cuirassed, stalwart vests of propriety set to save face actually had brutal violence and rage lurking below the finery.
Where then (to engage in doubles some more) is the irony in Jon Clinch’s, Finn: A Novel? The graphic language, the graphic violence, the graphic themes—the overall graphic content of Clinch’s novel would have been considered vulgar in Twain’s time.
The premise of Clinch’s novel appears as a completion of a dropped scene in Huckleberry Finn. In Twain’s book, Huck and Jim find a shack adrift on the flooded Mississippi filled with scattered rubbish: “There was heaps of old greasy cards scattered around over the floor, and old whiskey bottles, and a couple of masks made out of black cloth; and all over the walls was the ignorantest kind of words and pictures, made with charcoal” (HF 61). These artifacts need their own story, and Clinch goes to work, making the props useful by book’s end.
Pap Finn, when working, fishes the river for catfish, bartering his stock for whiskey or anything handy. In his young manhood, while traveling on a riverboat, he intervenes when two runaway slaves hold the vessel’s crew hostage; Pap kills the father and kidnaps the frightened, fugitive daughter, Mary, commandeering her to be his wife. The brutality in which he keeps Mary, who is essentially a triple slave—by race, by gender, and by marriage—under lock and key, is horrific. But this is Pap and this is his book after all, not Huck’s. The result of his union with this forced bride is young Huckleberry, a mulatto, who
emerges squalling from his mother’s womb as do all children regardless
of parentage: dark with contorted rage and the bare willful containment of
his own pulsing lively fluids, adrip with blood like some wrathful demon
plucked from hell. His mother gives him his name, perhaps in anticipation
of a dusky quality of skin that to his good fortune never quite returns after
the first fading bluish-purple of his entry into this world.
Huckleberry.
It is a poor name for a boy but then she is poor in judgment, hardly past childhood herself, and the father is more interested in celebrating the
boy’s pale skin than in helping her choose. It is a name doomed to suggest not only the boy’s curse but the raw pure accident of his creation and the
unstraightened path down which he must tread. It is a name that bespeaks
the simplist and most natural of freedoms, given at birth to a boy whose
accused birthright may prove to admit none.
His father pays the midwife with a bundle of fish and they resume
their life as if nothing has changed (Clinch 142).
Not much can change for Huck. Pap’s grasp on Huck appears beyond shared blood and genetics; Huck isn’t so much born into the Finn family as conscripted, and his mother, Mary, and Huck will fight for identity and existence. When Huck escapes from Pap’s cabin appears by staging a crime scene, a link both in Twain’s novel and also in Clinch’s, Pap returns, sobers up quickly to augur the pig bled dry of blood knowing this as a hoax that only a Finn can appreciate. It may fool others but Pap knows gut-level what his son wants everyone to think. Huck will be better off anywhere else.
Clinch crafts the final pages into a taut knot of narrative action, fulfilling the storyteller’s pledge to bring all the props to dramatic fruition. On this merit alone, the novel stands as a masterful exemplar in plotting craftsmanship. Should it be invited to be on Advanced Placement reading lists? Place Alexie’s Reservation Blues, Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, even Quinn’s Ishmael first. The graphic content in Finn obscures any reward of psychological understanding into how Pap’s pathological criminal’s mind works. But it does not matter since Pap’s murderous impulses have no explanation in Finn. Clinch’s technique and style of hyper-realism has a besmirching quality that stealthily sneaks in the back door of vulgar civilization. Our pop culture has an infatuation with visual gore and confrontational displays of explicit criminality. Clinch’s portrayal of everyday pathology in Finn normalizes the graphic content so that, ironically, it sneaks in the back door of “jejune romanticism” (LM 219), Twain’s sworn cultural enemy.
Remember when Huck complimented Mr. Mark Twain for telling the truth, mainly. Mr. Jon Clinch’s truth-telling mainly stays grim; one wonders how Pap could ever compliment it.
Works Cited
Alexie, Sherman. Reservation Blues. New York: Warner Books, 1995.
Clinch, Jon. Finn: A Novel. New York: Random House, 2007, p. 142.
de Koster, Katie, ed. Readings on Mark Twain. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1996, p. 162.
Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. New York: N. A. Talese/Doubleday, 2003.
Guterson, David. Snow Falling on Cedars. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1994.
Quinn, Daniel. Ishmael: A Novel. New York: Bantam/Turner Book, 1992.
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, p. 61.
----------. Life on the Mississippi. New York: Bantam Books, 1896, p. 219.
”
