The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Boy, a lot of things happen to Huck Finn. I hadn't read this in 25 years and all the controversy swirling around the so-called bowdlerized version now out got me wondering how offended I would be by the unchanged wording of the original. I picked up the least-dusty looking copy from the public library (1985), opened it up and here's what I found in the introduction by Charles Neider: What! Tamper with an American literary classic? Sacrilege! Lese majesty! Megalomania! Well...maybe. But before we rush into a drumhead court-martial, let us sit and sweetly reason a few moments...

Poor Twain has, apparently, been abused before and no, Neider did not take out offensive wording. He simply abridged the allegedly controversial "Tom Sawyer" section (my, how times have changed on what constitutes controversy) and added in a formerly omitted "long, brilliant raft chapter" (which I skipped because I found it... long).

Controversy aside, I was impressed by how well this story holds up. Yeah, too much happens, and some of it is skippered through while other times there is way too much detail for the importance of the section, but the story of a boy and a slave on a Mississippi raft moves right along and is amusing to boot. I actually laughed out loud several times and not just at the scene in which Huck tries to explain to Jim that French people speak a different language while Jim will have none of it. His reasoning is flawless and reminded me of a great Ionesco play in which there is a debate between philosophers in which it is finally determined, logically, that Socrates must be a cat. Trust me, in a strict debating sense, this works.

I also love Jim's condemnation of King Solomon's supposed wise decision to cut a child in half. Jim determines that Solomon was cavalier about the life of the child because he himself had so many children. You take a man dat's got on'y one er two chillen; is dat man gwyne to be waseful o' chillen?No, he ain't; he can't 'ford it. He know how to value 'em. But you take a man dat's got 'bout five million chillen runnin' roun' de house, en it's diffunt. He as soon chop a chile in two as a cat. Dey's plenty mo'. A chile er tow, mo' er less, warn't no consekense to Solermun...

And all the talk of children brings to mind the children from whom Jim has been separated. Huck ponders a bit about how wrong it is for Jim to want to steal back his own children from their master, but I didn't spend a lot of thought on what we were supposed to "learn" from Huck's attitude toward slavery because I did find that distracting and overly obvious. I was looking at the story and Twain throws in a lot of seemingly random adventures (a family feuding Hatfield-McCoy style seems particularly unimportant), but the way Huck deals with each of his encounters--his abusive father, meeting the escaped Jim, the swindling Duke and King--seems believably childish. At first I thought Huck wasn't being very bold in his actions, but then I realized he's a thirteen year old boy out on his own and so, yeah, he'll make some stupid mistakes, and he'll fall into the games of fantasy with Tom Sawyer and others, because he's still straddling that innocence and knowledge of the world.

In the end, I wasn't particularly distracted by the language, not even the dialect which I thought would drive me crazy. You get into the rhythm of it, eventually. I guess my only real complaint is that it's overly long. I think I'd keep that old "raft chapter" out and I can think of a few other editing choices I'd make, but it's a good read and a reminder that, inspite of the overwhelming choice available today, there are some classics still worthy of a visit. I hope the new version without the potentially offensive and distracting N word will encourage teachers to present it to their classes once again.

True Grit

I picked up Charles Portis' True Grit kind of on a whim, reasoning that I was more likely to have the chance to read the book than I was to see the movie, and then something strange happened. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Sure, it's a cowboy book (not that there's anything wrong with that), and the language is strangely stilted, and I never quite got a handle on Mattie Ross our heroine, but what a great read. Fourteen year old Mattie sets off matter-of-factly to avenge her father's death, hires and then teams up with an old marshal who is not what he seems, and a Texas Ranger who is also not exactly what he seems. The book meanders a bit at first, not unpleasantly, the way you kind of picture John Wayne meandering in his role as Rooster Cogburn in the original screen adaptation. Rooster doesn't always seem like he knows what he's doing--he's a bit shifty and a drinker at that. It's never too clear whether LaBoeuf, the Ranger, can be fully trusted either, and some of the encounters the three avengers have along their quest are casual in their occurence and their violence. The book is touted by the New York Times Book Review as "a comic tour de force" which didn't make much sense at first, but I did laugh out loud several times. It's a dry sort of humor, but it's there. When a lawman meets up with the little band, he looks at LaBoeuf and asks,

"Is this the man who shot Ned's horse from under him?"

Rooster said, "Yes, this is the famous horse killer from El Paso, Texas. His idea is to put everybody on foot. He says it will limit their mischief."

LaBoeuf's fair-complected face became congested with angry blood. He said,"There was very little light and I was firing off-hand. I did not have the time to find a rest."

Captain Finch said, "There is no need to apologize for that shot. A good many more people have missed Ned than have hit him."
"I was not apologizing," said LaBoeuf. "I was only explaining the circumstances."

And right after this exchange the three men have a pissing...uh, a shooting contest, using hard little cornmeal balls as targets, much to Mattie's exasperation. She sometimes feels she's the only one with a dog in this race, but she's paying for their help so feels they should listen to her.

She gets her wish, more or less, and there's a big show down, of sorts. The action meanders still except when it suddenly doesn't and Portis leads us straight into phobia territories. What are you scared of? Snakes? Got 'em, in the form of a nest or rattlers. Bats? Yep. Being stuck in a cave? Uh-hunh? Infested skeleton keeping you close company? Check. It's all there. Everything to keep you awake at night for a week and all of it at once, just when the reader's been lulled into a little old western. It's a satisfying and entertaining read with a delicious bit of excitement, even if exacting revenge doesn't feel quite as cathartic as we all hope it to be.

Parrot and Olivier or Why Top 10 Lists Stink

I've abandoned a book. That alone isn't terribly unusual--I ditch bad books all the time--but I was really trying this time. I ended 2010 ashamed by my new reading habits (or lack thereof) and worried that I was no longer capable of reading "difficult" books. I thought that embracing harder books would be an easy New Year's resolution. But like most resolutions made in hopeful and possibly inebriated states, this one has fallen by the wayside in the first few weeks of the first month of a new year.

Parrot and Olivier in America is a "comic" retelling of Alexis de Tocqueville's visit in 1831 to write his famous Democracy in America. Okay, I'll admit, that's not the most promising selling point to the general reading public, but it would certainly be meaty. And it was a finalist for the National Book Award! And by Peter Carey! two-time winner of the Booker Prize (although, that in and of itself should have set off warning bells--those are almost always weird and difficult and/or depressing books).

The titular Olivier is a French aristocrat post-revolution, at loose ends in a country that is still hiccuping its way toward some kind of democracy. Parrot is an English journeyman's son, trained as an engraver and naturally a mimic of languages and accents. Both are in trouble with the law or family and are brought together by a mysterious one-armed Marquis who sends them to America, bound together by fate and, as it turns out, fortune. One cannot act without the other and yet they dislike one another. Oooh, an old-fashioned buddy movie.

Or not.

I don't mind the two voices--clearly announced by helpful chapter headings, but I do mind very much that both characters saw fit to occasionally refer to themselves in the third person. Oh, thanks very much, Peter Carey. I quite liked Parrot's sections, most of the time, but the story just seemed unnecessarily difficult to follow and to read. Not the basic plot--I got that--but the writing was complicated. At first I thought Carey was doing that on purpose for Olivier's character (he is, after all, a well-educated French aristocrat), but ALL the characters were like this. Here's an example of a section that I had to read more than once: Compared to my own cramped malodorous accommodation, the deserted main cabin was a site of healthfulness, smelling of nothing worse than salt and tar. It was here I was seated when I felt the swell preceding the first big wave, that long dreadful quiver running through the timbers of the ship, not stilled or contained by the copper sheathing of its hull but rather amplified so that a deadly vibration ran through every human bone aboard the Havre, and when that shiver had been doused, snuffed, drowned, and the little barque had tumbled off the edge, then I felt the first big wave break and I saw the great wash of beef and brandy erupt from the dreadful Parrot's gorge, and as the entire craft was hurled like a lobster into a kettle, I was very pleased to note that I was not afraid.
Ugh.They're on a ship and Parrot throws up. It's all like this. It's exhausting to read, though I understand some feel their pulse quicken to such lyrical description and can think of nothing better than to curl up with just such a book. Well, have at it, but it turns out that it's not for me.

I persisted for awhile still because that was my resolution: to not abandon difficult books just because they were "hard to read" but then I realized I wasn't having any fun and really, what's the point of reading if you're not having fun and don't want to pick up the book. I made an effort and now I guess I'll have to admit that I just need to read formulaic and/or YA novels for the rest of my life. Maybe just movie adaptations.

Which brings me--sort of--to top 10 lists.
I didn't make one for 2010, though it's in my head. I did read a lot of lists, though, and found that I didn't want to read any of the books on them. Jonathan Franzen was on all of them, but I just don't like him or his writing. I don't care how brilliant some of it may (or may not) be, it's too didactic in places and I'm not a big fan of dysfunction. I never really understood Strong Motion (which is the only one of his books I've read--years ago-- and no one has read that, and, no, I don't recommend it). Parrot and Olivier was also on most, if not all, of these lists and well, obviously, that didn't work out either.

The fact is, I get to make a list of books from only those I chose to read in the first place, whereas a lot of writers and magazine and newspaper staff make lists of books they had to read. For work. Uh, well, yeah, I could do that and it would be a very short list of books I had to read with kids who struggle to read. Just think how constrained that would be.

Next up for me? True Grit. Oh wait, that hasn't been on any lists, has it?

The Wave

I saw the original The Poseidon Adventure at a very impressionable age. It was on a grainy black and white TV at my dad's house, but I was way too young for it and it took me years to recover from the thought of an ocean liner being turned over in the middle of a night-time ocean. It didn't help that I'd already been on an ocean liner and had looked over the side at churning waters. I had no doubt that the ocean was capable of tossing up the worst and taking me with it. Years later, I was just fine reading and then watching A Perfect Storm so obviously I was cured of cold-sweat nightmares. In other words, I pounced on reading Susan Casey's book The Wave. In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean.

I had read Susan Casey's exploration of great white shark behavior and the ongoing research into it in The Devil's Teeth. As she did in that book, she divides this story into science and freaky human obsessions. Yeah, there's science in The Wave, but really it just feels like an excuse to get into the heads of big wave surfers like Laird Hamilton and his crew. Not that there's anything wrong with that. These people are crazy! But oh, it's such a great crazy. There are people out there who's sole goal in life is to successfully surf 100 foot waves. Repeatedly. Oh sure, they'll settle for a 70 foot wave--if they have to. Apparently 50 feet is about the limit for traditional paddle-out surfing. After that, you need to be expertly towed out by jet ski. Susan Casey isn't really exploring surf mentality, though, but she does get to hang out with the big wave crowd and discover how much they know about these so-called freak waves.

She doesn't really get into traditional tsunamis which are generally triggered by a known something (earthquake), but she's interested in the sudden strange waves out at sea that are capable of splitting a ship in half (she includes pictures). When you read about these cargo ships and what they endure out at sea, it's a reminder of just how powerful water is as a force. You expect a surfer will get pounded, but when you see that waves can take apart a giant ship, it's something else. Suddenly The Poseidon Adventure doesn't just seem like a cheesy 1970s disaster of the week movie.

It turns out that 100 foot waves are pretty common, much more so than was originally believed. If that seems a bit dull, try the recorded 1,740 foot wave that hit Lituya Bay in Alaska in 1958. There were no surfers there, but two fishing boats made it over and survived to tell the tale. Apparently, if you can't outrun a giant wave (and, really, you can't), your best bet is to gun in toward the thing and go up over the top. You just have to hope you don't discover--as this one fisherman did-- "to his horror that the wave's backside was nothing but a sheer vertical drop; the water had drained out of the bay so dramatically that its surface had been sucked below sea level." And that was only a 490 ft wave, though there were three more just like it, dumping on that little boat. The boats that went over the top of the 1, 740 ft wave also had to contend with raining debris (the ripped up forest from the bay). Hard to believe that some people seek out crazy waves and think about surfing them.

The Wave is armchair adventure with a little science mixed in. It's an easy read and an often gripping one. Probably just right for the winter months so that your psyche has time to recover before you hit the beach in summer.

Salvation City

Sigrid Nunez' book about post-pandemic life in the midwest mostly made me want to wash my hands. A lot. Salvation City opens its arms and hearts to Cole, a 14-year old left orphaned after the big flu pandemic hits, but the book Salvation City isn't really about the pandemic or the panic or the flu. It is more of the struggle within Cole as he tries to reconcile is atheistic, scholarly parents--now deceased-- and his own upbringing with his new-found life among evangelical Christians. Still, I recommend sitting near some hand sanitizer as you read. It'll just make you feel better.

What I loved most, besides the great writing (and the squeaky clean hands) was that Nunez' Pastor Wyatt (PW to Cole) is neither a monster nor a god. He's a human being when such a character could be ripe for caricature or parody. Nunez makes Cole himself determine his path while never forcing him to reject one way of life for the other. The people who want to adopt him are good, good people, even if PW's wife isn't really intelligent enough to truly homeschool Cole. (Yeah, home schooling doesn't come off that well). And the community itself never did fall into the looting and terror that other areas suffered. In many ways, Salvation City really is a sanctuary, in spite of its obsession with the rapture. It's easy to see in post-apocalyptic times why one would believe that the end is near. Throw in advanced climate change, news from the "outside" world as falling apart, and even the stories Cole brings from his Dickensian orphanage days. Everything is tilted on its side so that even a simple camping trip can be fraught. Danger is everywhere, but hope lies somewhere. It's no wonder there's an obsession with so-called rapture children (They mostly seem blond to me, a lay person)

Nunez skirts around the disaster that many other author's would have chosen to embrace. The world hasn't ended--there's still email, electricity (if occasionally spotty), food, community spirit, a functioning government. But she gives hints that even the best planning for a pandemic was only good for a few weeks and the glimpse of what the big cities might still be experiencing, away from the safety of a religious community shimmer in the periphery of the novel. At this point, I gave up washing my hands and hoped for the best.

And this is a hopeful rather than despairing book. It is not a particularly religious book either. It is not an us against them look at survival. There is no one way, no one true path. Instead, it's Cole's chance to come of age, instead of stagnating in the aftermath of a deadly flu. It's a book that is sadly saturated with death, but it's not the end of the world, even if the rapture-ready narrate it.

Joe College

It's hard to fathom just how weird college life is until you've had some distance from it. When you're immersed in it, it's either the most awesome time in your life or the scariest, depending how well you assimilate. I mean, think about it, when else are you going to be surrounded by the smartest, most beautiful people, all in the prime of their lives, all your own age, all thrumming with youthful energy. Yeah, sure, some people have to work through college, some people are terrible at studying and that's stressful, but, hey! For the first and last time in your life, you have 24 full hours in a day to do what you need and want to do (that's thanks to the youthful energy).
There's also some weird stuff--like trying to reconcile your home life with your dorm life, your hometown persona with your masquerade as a smarty who actually does belong at, say, an Ivy League, but that's where great fiction is born.

Tom Perrotta (best known for Election and Little Children) must have been my current age when his novel Joe College was published and I cannot get over how well he captures what it's like to be, in his case (and his protagonist's case) at Yale in 1982. Danny is a classic middle class, New Jersey boy who gets plucked from his weird little suburban cul-de-sac life, and dropped into the equally weird world of higher learning. Oh, there's no question he belongs there intellectually, and certainly we don't meet him until his junior year so he's assimilated. Still, you can take the boy out of New Jersey, but you can't...well, you know. Back home, Danny drives his dad's Roach Coach luncheon wagon from one office park to the next. Back home, there are the weird little home-meals of bland middle America food, there's his father's pending hemorrhoid surgery, there's the secretary-league high school classmate whom he dates and then mentally dismisses among his Ivy League friends (not in the mean way that sounds). There are also some things more specific to New Jersey that contrast to Yale as well. Danny runs afoul of a gang of lunch truck thugs (only in NJ), replete with baseball bats, and Mafia-like leaders. I know New Haven has a bit of a run-down element, but I don't think it's quite the baseball bat, smashed headlights kind of run down that Danny meets back home. The description of the gang is priceless. Where Vito Senior [natch, they're Italian American] seemed avuncular and basically good-hearted, tired in a seen-it-all sort of way, Junior just looked puzzled and mean, like he suspected you were going to put one over on him sooner or later and wanted to wring your neck before you got a chance to do it.

It may seem that an Ivy League education insulates you from the rougher edges of the world, but it turns out that being brainy and privileged in one town, doesn't mean you can avoid getting beaten up (and having your lunch money stolen, as it turns out) in another town. You also don't get to avoid the sticky business of sleeping with a girl you don't have a future with, especially if it seems you are her future. That's real life versus college life.

And of course, Ivy League life brings its own oddities--Danny has wealthy friends who would prefer not to be, or they play at being poor, or they lie about who they really are because they know they can't possibly live up to their parents' expectations. Danny's parents are more or less stunned by Danny's college life while trying--poorly--to hide their bewilderment. Danny thinks of them occasionally when suite conversations turn so utterly from the real world. [I] was thinking of my parents, and the way my life sometimes seemed to embody their worst suspicions about college. Was this what they'd scrimped and sacrificed for all those years? So their son could spend his Tuesday nights drinking beer, smoking dope, eating weird food, and learning to see the assassin's side of the story [in this case, the guy who shot McKinley]?

Perrotta captures the bizarre late night discourses, the feeling that everyone else is in on "it" and somehow you're not, the anxiety of the first time you are told to mark up a text book--or worse, a novel (very strange, if you've gone to public school all your life) and the utterly uniquely collegiate phenomenon known as the a cappella singing group. No, I know there's a cappella in the 'real' world, it's just that there's a strange obsession and posession each student seems to have with their school's a cappella group. Perrotta might as well have been describing my own college's (male) group when he says, Resplendent in their formal wear, the Whiffenpoofs stood in a semi-circle in front of the nonfunctional fireplace, crooning "Surfer Girl" for their captive audience. One of them was black, one Asian, one short, one both short and prematurely bald; the rest looked like close relatives of Vice President Bush. And yes, they do the weird antics like dropping trou to reveal Hawaiin shorts, etc... The Whiffenpoofs have a pretty big role in this book, or at least, they pop up just as they do throughout one's college career.

Danny figures out his life, more or less, as one must with graduation looming. He doesn't always do the right thing and sometimes he just seems to skate along, but as he himself admits--after not getting his head bashed in by Junior--that sometimes he's just lucky. I think that's the point--you escape by luck from your middle of the road life and find yourself at Yale (or similar schools) and from there on, it can seem as if your life is touched by magic. That's kind of why some pay so much for a higher education. It's not the class work, it's the connections you make. I just enjoyed this foray back into that time, without my having to do the work or the sleepless nights.

The Widower's Tale

I've had trouble reading lately. Not because I don't have tons of times on my hands, but because Julia Glass' latest book, The Widower's Tale, was so absorbing, I wanted first to savor it and once I'd finished reading it, I found it hard to move on. This isn't really about a widower, exactly. I say that because I have a widowed friend who won't even touch a book with such a title. Yes, Percy Darling is a widower, has been for 40 years, and perhaps hasn't fully come to terms with his wife's death, but this book is more about the people around him than any personal sorrows he still harbors over Poppy's death.

I was struck again at how well Glass does in portraying such a variety of characters, how believable her gay, thirty year old preschool teacher is alongside 70 year old Percy. She also captures well Percy's 20 year old grandson and his dubious roommate, and the the landscaping illegal immigrant and various others. She must have taken my criticism of her last book very seriously indeed, when I felt she'd totally failed to capture a spry 90 year old in I See You Everywhere.

That's not to say I bought everything. I really didn't believe in Percy's late romance--not just because of the age gap, but perhaps because I simply didn't like the object of his affections. No, she didn't grow on me. Celestino, the illegal immigrant had a whiff of the "noble savage" to him which I found vaguely troubling and a little condescending, but I liked his character and his story line, so I forgive.

I appreciated the sense of danger that grandson Robert's roommate at Harvard brought to the picture with his extreme environmentalism, all while wishing to strangle him for throwing figurative monkey wrenches in Robert's well-laid plans. The characters are what drive this book, and they all revolve around Percy, recently retired librarian (at Harvard's Widener). I always like a literary host to any gathering and Percy fills that in spades, making witicisms, even when uncalled for, and gadding about his wealthy, landed gentry town. He agrees to rent his barn to a unfortunately named preschool--Elves and Fairies--while expecting to maintain his privacy and routine. The first thing to go, of course, is his habit of swimming naked in his pond. That is only the first of many of his habits to fall and at first it seems Percy will fail at retired life. He has events and people thrust upon him at uncomfortable regularity, but he's no true curmudgeon after all. He just plays one to the choir and meddles when he can. He is a good father to his very different daughters, a good friend and mentor to those who need it, and in the end, he holds the future of many in his still-capable hands.

The Widower's Tale does offer a sense of endings and sadness, as befits its title, but it's not of death or absence. It's more that the choices we make in life become our story.