Customer Reviews

Channeling Mark Twain: A Novel

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I've just finished bingeing on Carol Muske-Dukes's brave, new fourth novel "Channeling Mark Twain." In terms of sheer hunger-inducing suspense, Muske-Dukes's book rivals Jim Crace's recent delectable fairy tale, "The Pesthouse." For its stick-to-the-ribs cast of characters, Muske-Dukes wins the Alice Waters/Thomas Keller Award, with the wondrously seasoned brisket of Yiddish freak show eccentrics in Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" not far behind.

But comparisons are odious, and so is my food analogy! "Channeling Mark Twain" is unique, a thing of beauty -- and, I believe, a joy forever. From its initial pages introducing us to 20-something Minnesotan-cum-Manhattan poet, Holly Mattox, riding a bus to New York City's penitentiary on Rikers Island, this book rocks. Throughout, Muske-Dukes's ear for dialogue is spot-on, including her rendition of the pre-hip-hop 1970s jive of pimps visiting their whores in prison.

Muske-Dukes takes us beyond security gates for a jailbird eye's view of the slammer. Holly Mattox, unlike Capote's Holly Golightly, is a coming-of-age character more interested in poems than breakfast at Tiffany's. Holly's mission is to teach poetry to women behind bars and thereby free their minds, if not their bodies, from jail. With wry humor and plenty of compassion, Muske-Dukes introduces us to such cameo convicts as Baby Ain't, Never Delgado, and Akila Malik.

Ordinarily in novels, classroom scenes are boring. Muske-Dukes's scenes of poetry classes in prison are riveting, not least because of the way she focuses on each con's "story"--how she ended up in the "joint"--and how each story turns into a poem. The anthology of prisoners' poems printed at the end of several chapters is tremendously evocative. For example, Billie Dee Boyd, who threw her baby from a twelve-story apartment window, writes, "I say to you how my baby / Could fly. Two year old / And I seen her go way up / . . . . There she go. But / Taneesha didn't fly that time." Poems are seldom the mainstay of current fiction. Muske-Dukes, a redoubtable poet herself, flies in the face of readers' alleged antipathy to poetry. She showcases the craft or sullen art of murderers and whores, druggies and even a kickass correction officer with a heart of gold. She also gives us a single poem, which Holly has been working on for the novel's duration, which weaves together what Henry James called ficelles, at the end of the novel.

Just as prisoner Polly Lyle Clement is convinced she's the descendant of Samuel Langhorne Clemens AKA Mark Twain, Holly is divided between the Twin Cities, where she grew up, and New York, where she hangs her poet's hat. Just as she has married a young Minnesota physician as blond as she, she's attracted to a tall, dark, and handsome young literary czar in the Big Wormy Apple, editor of the trendy literary mag Samizdat, Sam Glass. To some extent "Channeling Mark Twain" is a roman à clef that deftly skewers certain writers prominent on the New York scene in the 1970s. Glass, along with Joseph Kyrilokov and a number of pseudonymous literati, including one wealthy benefactress, are the loving and sometimes not so loving butts of Muske-Dukes's satire. I found her depiction of a kind of imprisoned urban literary scene hilarious and devastatingly accurate.

I won't reveal the outcome of Holly's quest to bring poetry to Rikers Island, as well as solve the mystery of her rhyming namesake, Polly. Suffice it to say that Holly/Polly is an amazing sororal composite, just as Akila Malik's escape from Rikers Island involves something eerily fraternal, i.e., North Brother Island. If this sounds too pun-ridden to be true, read this novel to plumb the depths of the East River and see how, on the most profound level, it intersects with the Mississippi. Muske-Dukes's two rivers, like her Twin Cities, have one channel, which she pilots as well as riverboat captain Mark Twain.

CHANNELING MARK TWAIN is a completely absorbing novel. I especially liked the scenes about
teaching -- which is often treated elsewhere as something trivial or a matter of mere duty, but here it's understood as urgent, necessary work. When the central character of this book teaches imprisoned women to use language to shape their own meanings, she's giving them a tool to help them to live, to help them move towards personal power and toward freedom. These scenes are unsentimental, totally convincing, and make for very compelling reading. You can tell this writer's been there.

For many poetry is obscure, vague, tedious, and trying. But for poets, poetry is the highest form of human expression capable of imparting great feeling, joy, and understanding - transforming. Such is the feeling of Holly Mattox, recent post-graduate and poet, who arrives in NYC in the 1970s with her sometimes husband K.B., a hospital resident doctor, to write poetry, participate in radical politics, and attempt to make a difference in the lives of the oppressed, namely female inmates at Rikers Island, by teaching a poetry workshop.

The book is highly autobiographical as the author did conduct poetry workshops at Rikers for a number of years. The gritty reality could hardly be more palpable: the intimidating presence of the pimps monitoring the exit of the prison for ho's, the no-nonsense female correctional officers, the stark reality of steel, bars, etc. And then there are the women in Holly's class - most all of whom having led precarious lives as prostitutes, drug runners, or victims of domestic abuse with highly detrimental impacts on their psyches. The author captures the contrast of a privileged white girl leading a class of these underprivileged women writing meager, ungrammatical, though intensely personal, poems concerning their train wrecked lives. There is the interesting, but improbable, character of Polly Clement who claims to be the great-granddaughter of Mark Twain and can quote at length from his works, especially Huckleberry Finn.

Holly is a bit of a an uncertain and naïve character. She is a radical who grows disenchanted with a women's group that talks the game of helping the oppressed. She feels compelled to live the life that was cut short for her mother in the dust storms of the Dakotas in the 30s. She is ambivalent about being married to her best friend and searches for a more edgy relationship. She disingenuously confronts the prison warden to release two inmates from solitary lockdown - as though the warden is unaware of her agenda.

Between the constant bits of poetry (Holly is also haltingly writing a poem throughout the book), Holly's wanderings and hesitancies, and some rather unlikely prisoner actions, the book seems a little spotty, not completely convincing, yet worth the read. The reader can decide the impact, if any, of poetry on the women in the workshop.

Muske-Dukes taught poetry to the women who were incarcerated at Riker's Island circa 1973-83. This fictional rendition of a woman's story who is teaching at the same time in the same place has many autobiographical moments to be sure. Muske-Dukes merges her superb poetic talent with an imagined life that is quite like one she once knew well.

The inmates in her class are the dregs of society. The author makes them appealing, even loveable, almost. They are damaged souls and the poetry that they write is the distilled essence of pain and dead ends. The title of the book alludes to a mystical set of circumstances that is truly the delight of the novel. The character Polly could be the most appealing fictional creation you meet in quite some time.

I had a great time reading 'Channeling Mark Twain'. The book flowed well and wasn't predictable. I hate predictable and formulaic books. There were a number of obvious 21st Century women's themes brought in, but why not. I don't believe you have to recreate the world to create a fictional story. The scenes were realistic enough that they sent me looking at New York City maps on Google. Don't read this book unless you're willing to just relax and enjoy it.

I read Carol Muske-Dukes' CHANNELING MARK TWAIN straight through, fascinated, although I often forgot that I was reading a novel. Much of it felt like a life history--written by a young teacher-poet so captivated by her life in New York City that she simply could not resist sharing her experience. She is caught up in her work- and poems-in-process, and her efforts to do something good for society, namely, teaching poetry as a volunteer in a women's prison. The first-person narrator, Holly, seems designed to remind us of Carol, the author, whose own name sounds as if she might also have been born in December. And from the book's dedication, we know that Muske-Dukes has been there: "To my unforgettable students, the members of the original Free/Space Art Without Walls Poetry Workshop, Women's House of Detention, Rikers Island, 1973-1983."

Although the young teacher-poet-narrator begins with seeing the pimps as she arrives at Rikers Island--pimps waiting for prostitutes to be released--she manages to bring in flashes of her earlier life in the midwest, featuring wonderful vignettes of her mother, who was always quoting poetry. The narrator juxtaposes her own fragmentary autobiography, including poems, with the fragmentary life accounts and autobiographical poems of the student-poets, inmates at Rikers Island. The juxtaposition and interplay cast light on both realms. So does the poetry.

As other persons make their way into the story--a husband, a lover, associates at Columbia University--the reader realizes that they indeed are invented characters, some of them anyway, not real people, and they are there to make possible the creation of a plot. Yes, this is fiction.

CHANNELING MARK TWAIN, despite its realistic setting and its genesis in the author's real-life experience, is a highly literary piece of work, allusive on almost every page, basically so in its central plot involving the "channeling" of Mark Twain by prisoner Polly Clement, who claims Twain as an ancestor. The author manages successfully the necessary intricate structural crafting, minute narrative detail, the historical and geographical background. Her talents as a poet make convincing both the heroine's poetry and that of the convicts. The inmates are not just pitiable, but diverse, singular, often appealing personalities, portrayed with an artistry that avoids sentimentality. Although we are caught up in the emotional texture of relationships and events in the prison as well as elsewhere, the tone is expertly controlled, and there are touches of humor throughout. I read the denouement thoughtfully and sadly but not with a sense of depression.

I liked the novel. Its story held my interest and so did its techniques, its management of autobiography (or embroidered reality), its assumption of the necessity of poetry, and its deft weaving of on-going events, background details (like the flaming tragedy of the General Slocum)--and toward the end, mystery. It is a unique and engaging mix.

I actually couldn't finish this book, it was so discombobulated. There are way too many things going on at once. Holly (the heroine) somehow finds time to interact with and subtly reject her husband, contemplate an affair with an absolute jerk, teach a poetry workshop at a jail, hold down a job that has something to do with the criminal justice system, write her own poetry and essays, flash back at length to her own childhood, and belong to a women's group that seems like something out of the 60s. There do not seem to be enough hours in the day.

Holly keeps coming up with one-liners about the male hierarchy and oppressive patriarchy and spouting them off to whoever is around. I can't tell if it's a joke or not--she's very flippant, and her generalizations about men and women are staggeringly broad, but on the other hand, the author seems to want her to be taken seriously.

The book verges on screed (against capitalism, men, the criminal justice system) but never really gets to the point and really didn't convince me of anything besides the fact that the author clearly has some serious biases. It also completely distracts from what little amount of story line there is. Give me Sinclair's "The Jungle" any day.

I just finished the book, although it took me a long time to finish. I enjoyed the characters in the book and a chance to go into Rikers prison. I could also relate to Holly since I am a teacher and work in Chicago Public Schools. Although I tried to understand the poetry, I found it difficult at times. I think if I was more of a poet and into poetry I would have enjoyed the book more. I was glad that I was able to read the reviews on this site. That gave me more understanding. I am also curious to read some of the other novels that were referenced as being similar.