Copyright Date:
2017
Edition Date:
2017
Release Date:
01/10/17
Pages:
308 pages
ISBN:
0-393-60844-1
ISBN 13:
978-0-393-60844-1
Dewey:
Fic
LCCN:
2016027492
Dimensions:
25 cm.
Language:
English
Reviews:
Kirkus Reviews
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.
Our leading postmodernist novelist turns his iconoclastic eye to a great American classic in this sequel to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . At the end of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn , on the eve of the Civil War, Huck and Tom Sawyer decide to escape "sivilization" and "light out for the Territory." In Robert Coover's Huck Out West , also "wrote by Huck," the boys do just that, riding for the famous but short-lived Pony Express, then working as scouts for both sides in the war. They are suddenly separated when Tom decides he'd rather own civilization than leave it, returning east with his new wife, Becky Thatcher, to learn the law from her father. Huck, abandoned and "dreadful lonely," hires himself out to "whosoever." He rides shotgun on coaches, wrangles horses on a Chisholm Trail cattle drive, joins a gang of bandits, guides wagon trains, gets dragged into U.S. Army massacres, suffers a series of romantic and barroom misadventures. He is eventually drawn into a Lakota tribe by a young brave, Eeteh, an inventive teller of Coyote tales who "was having about the same kind of trouble with his tribe as I was having with mine." There is an army colonel who wants to hang Huck and destroy Eeteh's tribe, so they're both on the run, finding themselves ultimately in the Black Hills just ahead of the 1876 Gold Rush. This period, from the middle of the Civil War to the centennial year of 1876, is probably the most formative era of the nation's history. In the West, it is a time of grand adventure, but also one of greed, religious insanity, mass slaughter, virulent hatreds, widespread poverty and ignorance, ruthless military and civilian leadership, huge disparities of wealth. Only Huck's sympathetic and gently comical voice can make it somehow bearable.