Navigating the murky backwaters of an American literary icon

Novelist Jon Clinch offers a cruel but compelling back story for the life of Huck Finn's Pap.

from the February 27, 2007 edition

Page 2 of 2

Page 1 | 2

The patriarch, the powerful local judge James Manchester Finn, rules with tyrannical cruelty. Pap and his brother, Will, emerge, unsurprisingly, as miserable adults. Will manages an air of adult convention through his law practice. Pap fails even that. Instead, he plummets into poverty and alcoholism – the blackest of black sheep.

Clinch picks up the narrative thread as Pap commits a Hannibal Lecter-style murder. He dismembers his young black mistress – this after an audacious episode of miscegenation – in gruesome fashion before sending her corpse down the Mississippi. But those horrors pale next to Pap's frightening blend of crazed logic and cruel calculation. His motto might best be stated as, "Malice for all."

Finn curses the judge, his neglected son, women, children, traders, bartenders, and anyone else in his orbit. As a town doctor says of Finn, "The only way you'll ever improve him is with a pistol."

Clinch keeps Pap from devolving into caricature by delving into the guilt and psychoses hounding him.

Finn drinks himself into a stupor every night in a failed attempt to forget the nightmares of his own actions – and those of his family. Like a deranged Faulkner, he seeks contrition by chronicling his acts in a crude narrative scrawled on his bedroom walls.

Whiskey represents the lone pleasure in Finn's life. He makes his living from the river, bartering his daily catfish haul for minimal groceries and as much whiskey as he can afford. Finn spends much of his time in a backwoods hut with a blind bootlegger named Bliss, whose life is anything but.

Clinch writes with a grim sense of foreboding. He never shies from the ravages borne and bred by the damaged souls drowning in the midst of the mighty Mississippi. As with Twain, Clinch makes the river a prominent character, a presence that "steams like slow soup in the cool morning."

Grab a raft and test the waters, but beware. This river ride disturbs even as it enchants.

• Erik Spanberg is a freelance writer in Charlotte, N.C.

1 | Page 2