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HUCK'S ADVENTURES REVISITED

February 25, 2007 12:36 am

HUCK'S PAP, Finn, gets short shrift in his text of origins, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." Apart from being a worthless boozer and a violent abuser, he figures, along with the Widow Douglas, as an impetus for Huck's lighting out for the territory. In Twain's text, Finn is seen entirely from the outside and never becomes more than the lowdown, mean-spirited scoundrel he appears to be in Huck's eyes. In Finn, he's still all of those things and worse as well.

In this return to Twain's antebellum world, Huck remains fixed by his original creation and does little more than walk through his minor parts and vanish. Unrelenting psychopath that he is, Finn emerges as a more rounded person. As his own childhood is sketched in, we glimpse a harshly unloving father, literally a judge, who cares for nothing so much as his name and reputation.

Naturally enough, Finn rebels, but fate has dealt him a losing hand and the judge calls his bluff every time. He ekes out a marginal existence along the river banks, "borrowing" skiffs when needed, bumping off whoever gets in his way, and catching enough catfish to keep his spirits barely afloat. He mooches and scrounges, lives on credit and lies. He never looks back or entertains second thoughts, and his outlook is as grim as his milieu is bleak.

Then there is the pervasive dehumanizing quality of slavery.

In Twain's original, Huck and escaped slave Jim defy law and convention with their idyllic voyage down the Mississippi. And when the chips are down, Huck goes against social and religious norms to side with his friend. If instinctive loyalty means he'll go to hell, so be it.

Finn never quite crosses the moral borderline. Given choices, he calculates his own survival and never earns the reader's sympathy. What justifies this retelling of beleaguered river lives is the terrible situations of the times that they come to embody. In the original, Huck is able to escape to the West. Because there is no escape for Finn, a much darker and crueler vision transpires.

What makes bearable this river voyage that never ventures far beyond the banks is the compelling narrative Clinch has created. He writes exceedingly well, not with the immediacy Twain imbued to Huck's voice, but with an impersonal narrator's voice that almost perversely refuses to take sides. And the plot is masterful in its unfolding and in one of its key premises: What if Finn's mate and Huck's mother had been a woman of color? This way of implicating the races in each other's life means that we will most likely view Twain's masterpiece in a somewhat different light.