Huck Out West

September 26, 2016
With gusto and a rollicking plot, Coover tackles the daunting task of crafting a sequel to a Mark Twain classic. Using a line from the original novel’s penultimate sentence—“I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest”—Coover (The Brunist Day of Wrath) takes Huck, the wide-eyed adventurer, to the Plains states, with much of the story set in “Minnysota.” Huck admits he’s “sometimes homesick for the Big River,” but he rarely looks back, save for a passing reference that helps ground the reader. He and Tom ride for the Pony Express for a few years, before Tom leaves him to marry Becky Thatcher. Huck even has a surprise reunion with Jim, who has found Jesus, been freed from slavery, and is currently looking for the rest of his family. This is American Indian country, mostly Lakota but also Cherokee, the latter of whom Huck calls “Southern gentlemen, living high off the hog.” After Tom leaves, a savvy Union soldier named Dan Harper takes Huck under his wing, before he and his company are massacred by the Lakota. The characters are colorful, with names such as Pegleg, Yaller Whiskers, and Eyepatch. Huck finds love and there’s the inevitable return of Tom, whose adult mischief is more sinister than his teen antics. A lively and fast-paced encore for a beloved American hero.

Starred review from December 1, 2016
Revisiting Huckleberry Finn's America--by picking up where Mark Twain left off.Coover's 11th novel borrows its protagonist--and its inspiration--from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but don't be deceived: this is less pastiche or sequel than a project with deeper roots. Taking place in the Dakotas during the decade after the end of the Civil War, the book follows Twain's eponymous protagonist, now an adult, through a series of misadventures, including a turn as a Pony Express rider, some time spent living among the Lakota Sioux, and a difficult engagement with Gen. George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry Regiment, which ultimately met its fate at the Battle of the Greasy Grass. If such a setup seems reminiscent of Thomas Berger's novel Little Big Man (1964), however, Coover has something more than satire on his mind. Rather, he is out to deconstruct not a genre but American literary iconography. In his telling, Tom Sawyer, who keeps turning up like a bad penny, has long since ceased to be a charming bad boy; he is now a zealot for public hangings and worse. "Anyways, Huck," he explains, "EVERYTHING'S a hanging offense. Being ALIVE is. Only thing that matters is who's doing the hanging and who's being hung." Becky Thatcher, meanwhile, abandoned by Tom when she was six months pregnant, has become a prostitute. These are not gratuitous turns but extrapolations based on the characters' limited possibilities in a world defined by brutality. Coover effectively mirrors Twain's style and Huck's voice as well as the peripatetic movement of the original. More to the point, though, he is after a consideration, or critique, of the narrative of westward expansion, in which American hegemony was recast as opportunity and morality became an inconvenient truth at best. "We ARE America, clean to the bone!" Tom enthuses to his erstwhile friend late in the novel. "A perfect new Jerusalem right here on earth!....They call us outlaws because they say we're on tribal land, so we got to show our amaz'n American PATRIOTICS! These lands is rightfully OURN and we're going to set up a Liberty Pole and raise the American flag on it to PROVE it!" This novel reminds us that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

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Starred review from November 1, 2016
Coover brilliantly envisions what comes next when Huckleberry Finn lights out for the territories. After leaving St. Petersburg with Tom Sawyer, he hits the high and low points of the Wild West Zelig-like, riding for the Pony Express, witnessing the mass hanging of 38 Dakota men, wrangling horses for a Custer-like general, getting snakebit, becoming an ornerary Lakota Sioux, and pitching up in the Black Hills just before the Gold Rush. Coover nails Mark Twain's tone and voice (including the hilarious malapropisms) but, more than that, evokes the deadpan dark humor and social commentary that made Huck's Adventures infinitely superior to Tom's. This picaresque tale is both a dynamiting of America's cherished myth of westward expansion and a surprisingly affecting imagining of its two most beloved literary boys as adultsthe image of Tom Sawyer's bald spot will linger awhile. Tom, with his penchant for self-aggrandizement and telling stretchers, takes to adulthood like a duck to water, leaving Huck with plans to become a lawyer. But Huck remains at heart a boy, observing, It was almost like there was something wicked about growing up. Afraid of sivilizing influences as ever, he remains in awe of the simple beauty of nature yet struggles with loneliness and melancholy in the midst of the awfulness around him. And the world is wicked indeed. Tom has sold Jim back into slavery; Becky Thatcher, abandoned by Tom, is now a prostitute; and the general, a long-haired, dandy psychopath, wants to hang Huck for desertion despite the fact he never actually joined the army. As gold-crazed prospectors crowd the Black Hills, bison are hunted to extinction, and Indian nations face genocide, Huck plays helpless witness, less and less able to avoid people and towns to enjoy his precious loafing under the sky and stars. And when Tom triumphantly arrives in Deadwood, tyrannizing both Huck and the town, the gentle-hearted Huck must choose between his old friend, whose lies justify his nihilistic whims, and new friend Eeteh, a Lakota outcast and kindred spirit whose stories of Coyote and Snake speak to timeless truths. Reimaginings of classics are nothing new. From The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) to The Wind Done Gone (2001), many writers have opened a dialogue with canonical works, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has itself inspired other tales in Twain's universe. But this one ranks among the best. Fifty years after the publication of his first novel, The Origin of the Brunists (1966), and in a much more accessible mode than in some of his other postmodern fictions, Coover delivers a near-masterpiece. It's pitch-perfect and laceratingly funny but also a surprisingly tender, touching paean to the power of storytelling and the pains of growing up.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2016

Postmodernist novelist Coover (The Public Burning) again turns American mythology and genre inside out by picking up at the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when Huck and buddy Tom Sawyer run for the Territory. Tom quickly returns, ready to rise in society, but Huck has iconic Wild West adventures.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 1, 2016

Hemingway once said that all modern American literature owes a debt to the The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This latest from Coover (The Burnist Day of Wrath; Ghost Town), one of the most prolific remixers of America's tall tales, fables, and myths, is both a tribute and a fitting postscript to Mark Twain's canonical work. In the vernacular and dialect of Twain, the narrative reintroduces readers to Huck a few years into his adventuring in the Territories, boss of it all and searching for freedom beyond civilization. Tom has returned east to become a fancy lawyer, after a few years spent with Huck in the Pony Express. Alone on the plains, Huck alternates between friend and foe with cattle rustlers, prospectors, and the Lakota. Through all of these experiences, he begins to question his ethos of freedom over friendship. However, at his lowest point, Huck is reunited with Tom only to discover that sometimes not even friendship can mitigate the loneliness of the human condition. VERDICT With the humor and wit of Twain, Coover punctures the American myth of Manifest Destiny and the fantastical tales we create to avoid understanding and empathy. [See Prepub Alert, 7/25/16.]--Joshua Finnell, Los Alamos National Lab., NM

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2016

Hemingway once said that all modern American literature owes a debt to the The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This latest from Coover (The Burnist Day of Wrath; Ghost Town), one of the most prolific remixers of America's tall tales, fables, and myths, is both a tribute and a fitting postscript to Mark Twain's canonical work. In the vernacular and dialect of Twain, the narrative reintroduces readers to Huck a few years into his adventuring in the Territories, boss of it all and searching for freedom beyond civilization. Tom has returned east to become a fancy lawyer, after a few years spent with Huck in the Pony Express. Alone on the plains, Huck alternates between friend and foe with cattle rustlers, prospectors, and the Lakota. Through all of these experiences, he begins to question his ethos of freedom over friendship. However, at his lowest point, Huck is reunited with Tom only to discover that sometimes not even friendship can mitigate the loneliness of the human condition. VERDICT With the humor and wit of Twain, Coover punctures the American myth of Manifest Destiny and the fantastical tales we create to avoid understanding and empathy. [See Prepub Alert, 7/25/16.]--Joshua Finnell, Los Alamos National Lab., NM

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.