Finn: A Novel [Hardcover]

Jon Clinch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 20, 2007

In this masterful debut by a major new voice in fiction, Jon Clinch takes us on a journey into the history and heart of one of American literature’s most brutal and mysterious figures: Huckleberry Finn’s father. The result is a deeply original tour de force that springs from Twain’s classic novel but takes on a fully realized life of its own.

Finn sets a tragic figure loose in a landscape at once familiar and mythic. It begins and ends with a lifeless body–flayed and stripped of all identifying marks–drifting down the Mississippi. The circumstances of the murder, and the secret of the victim’s identity, shape Finn’s story as they will shape his life and his death.

Along the way Clinch introduces a cast of unforgettable characters: Finn’s terrifying father, known only as the Judge; his sickly, sycophantic brother, Will; blind Bliss, a secretive moonshiner; the strong and quick-witted Mary, a stolen slave who becomes Finn’s mistress; and of course young Huck himself. In daring to re-create Huck for a new generation, Clinch gives us a living boy in all his human complexity–not an icon, not a myth, but a real child facing vast possibilities in a world alternately dangerous and bright.

Finn is a novel about race; about paternity in its many guises; about the shame of a nation recapitulated by the shame of one absolutely unforgettable family. Above all, Finn reaches back into the darkest waters of America’s past to fashion something compelling, fearless, and new.

Praise for Finn
“A brave and ambitious debut novel… It stands on its own while giving new life and meaning to Twain’s novel, which has been stirring passions and debates since 1885… triumph of imagination and graceful writing…. Bookstores and libraries shelve novels alphabetically by authors’ names. That leaves Clinch a long way from Twain. But on my bookshelves, they'll lean against each other. I’d like to think that the cantankerous Twain would welcome the company.”
–USA TODAY

“Ravishing…In the saga of this tormented human being, Clinch brings us a radical (and endlessly debatable) new take on Twain’s classic, and a stand-alone marvel of a novel. Grade: A.”
–ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

“A fascinating, original read.”
–people

“Haunting…Clinch reimagines Finn in a strikingly original way, replacing Huck’s voice with his own magisterial vision–one that’s nothing short of revelatory…Spellbinding.”
–WASHINGTON POST

“Meticulously crafted…Marvelous imagination…The Finn of Clinch’s novel is certainly a racist villain but also psychologically disturbed and disconcertingly compelling.”
–SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

“From the barest of hints in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Clinch has created a fully believable world inhabited by fully realized characters. Clinch treads dangerous ground in making one of America’s greatest novels his jumping-off point, but he brings it off magnificently…The language of this book is one of its great beauties…Finn is far from one-dimensional, and that is another beauty of the book. Clinch has a knack for putting us squarely inside the heads of his characters….Clinch draws as compelling and realistic a picture as any we’re likely to find…Finn stands on its own. The richness of its language, the depth of its characters, the emotional and societal tangles through which they struggle to navigate add up to a portrait of life on the Mississippi as we’ve never before experienced it.”
–dallas morning news

“His models may include Cormac McCarthy, and Charles Frazier, whose Cold Mountain also has a voice that sounds like 19th-century American (both formal and colloquial) but has a contemporary terseness and spikiness. This voice couldn’t be better suited to a historical novel with a modernist sensibility: Clinch’s riverbank Missouri feels postapocalyptic, and his Pap Finn is a crazed yet wily survivor in a polluted landscape…Clinch’s Pap is a convincingly nightmarish extrapolation of Twain’s. He’s the mad, lost and dangerous center of a world we’d hate to live in–or do we still live there?–and crave to revisit as soon as we close the book.”
–newsweek

“I haven’t been swallowed whole by a work of fiction in some time. Jon Clinch’s first novel has done it: sucked me under like I was a rag doll thrown into the wake of a Mississippi steamboat…Jon Clinch has turned in a nearly perfect first book, a creative response that matches The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in intensity and tenacious soul-searching about racism. I wish I could write well enough to construct a dramatic, subtle and mysterious story out of careful, plodding and unromantic prose, but for now I’m just happy to have an alchemist like Jon Clinch do it for me.”
–BOOKSLUT

“Finn strikes its most original chords in its bold imagining of possibilities left unexplored by Huckleberry Finn.”
–austin american-statesman

“An inspired riff on one of literature’s all-time great villains…This tale of fathers and sons, slavery and freedom, better angels at war with dark demons, is filled with passages of brilliant description, violence that is close-up and terrifying…Everything in this novel could have happened, and we believe it… so the great river of stories is too, twisting and turning, inspiring such surprising and inspired riffs and tributes as Finn.”
–new orleans times-picayune

“A triumph of succesful plotting, convincing characterization and lyrical prose.”
–ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS

“Shocking and charming. Clinch creates a folk-art masterpiece that will delight, beguile and entertain as it does justice to its predecessor…In Finn, Clinch expands the bloodlines and scope of the original story and casts new light on the troubled legacy of our country’s infamous past.”
–new york post

“In Clinch’s retelling, Pap Finn comes vibrantly to life as a complex, mysterious, strangely likable figure…Clinch includes many sharply realized, sometimes harrowing, even gruesome scenes…Finn should appeal not only to scholars of 19th century literature but to anyone who cares to sample a forceful debut novel inspired by a now-mythic American story.”
–atlanta journal-consitution

“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.”
–fredericksburg freelance-star

“Disturbing and darkly compelling…Clinch displays impressive imagination and descriptiveness…anyone who encounters Finn will long be hautned by this dark and bloody tale.”
–hartford courant

“Jon Clinch pulls off the near impossible in his new novel, Finn, which brings Huck's dad to life in all his terrible humanness…Clinch vividly paints the origins of the amazing Huck...powerfully told.”
–winston-salem journal

“Gripping…he inventively remaps known literary territory…the descriptive riffs are lucent.”
–chicago tribune

“The best debut so far of 2007.”
–men’s journal

“Inventing Huckleberry Finn’s father using only the thin scraps of information that Mark Twain provided is a pretty admirable feat, and reading Jon Clinch’s first novel provides an almost tactile pleasure…Clinch clearly respects Twain, but he doesn’t feel especially cowed by his inspiration, and some of his inventions qualify as genuine improvements on the original text.”
–washington city paper

“In this darkly luminous debut…Clinch lyrically renders the Mississippi River’s ceaseless flow, while revealing Finn’s brutal contradictions, his violence, arrogance and self-reproach.”
–Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

“Bold and deeply disturbing. . . A few incidents duplicate those in Twain,
but the novels could not be more different; instead of Huck’s unlettered child’s voice,
we have an omniscient narrative, grave, erudite and rich in the secretions of adult knowledge;
terse dialogue acts as an effective counterpoint. All along, Clinch’s intent
is to probe the nature of evil . . . a memorable debut, likely to make waves.”
–KIRKUS REVIEWS, STARRED review

“Every fan of Twain’s masterpiece will want to read this inspired spin-off, which could become an unofficial companion volume.”
–LIBRARY JOURNAL, STARRED review

“This is a bold debut that takes a few tentative steps in tandem with the familiar Twain,
but then veers off dexterously down a much more insidious, harrowing path.”
–BOOKLIST

“Jon Clinch’s first novel Finn…succeeds wonderfully because its gritty lyricism is at once authentic and original…reminiscent at times of Cormac McCarthy…the eloquence of the telling will never make the courageous reader wish for a gentler touch. Like any appealing novel, Finn achieves the force of a dream with fascinating actions, indelible characters and spellbinding language. Its ...

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this darkly luminous debut, Finn, the namesake of the title, is not Twain's illustrious Huck, but Huck's father, "Pap." As the novel opens, an African-American woman's bloated corpse floats downriver from Lasseter, Ill., toward the slave territory of St. Petersburg, Mo. In the Lasseter woods, Finn—a dangerous, bigoted drunk—tells his blind bootlegger friend, Bliss, that he's finally "quit" his on-again, off-again African-American companion Mary, the mother of Finn's second son (also, confusingly, named Huck). Chronically short on money, Finn is shunned by his father (Adams County Judge James Manchester Finn) and by his brother, Will. Finn does odd jobs, traps catfish and claims tutelary rights to Huckleberry's share of Injun Joe's gold. (In this last, he is thwarted by Widow Douglas and Judge Thatcher, high-handed and stifling as ever.) The opaque in medias res narrative then backs up to detail Finn and Mary's life together: his drinking, his stint in the penitentiary following an assault (sentenced by his own father), Mary's rising debts and Finn's attempts at restitution. As the nature of the woman's murder becomes clear, Clinch lyrically renders the Mississippi River's ceaseless flow, while revealing Finn's brutal contradictions, his violence, arrogance and self-reproach. If Clinch's debut falls short of Twain's achievement, it does further Twain's fiction. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School—Embarking from a scene in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Clinch has written a debut novel of harrowing intensity. When Jim and Huck find a dead man in a house floating down the Mississippi, the room with the body is filled with mysterious oddities: a wooden leg, two black masks, crude scrawlings over the walls, etc. Huck does not know that the corpse, shot in the back, is his father. Clinch meticulously fills in the backstory of Finn (or "Pap Finn," as Twain usually referred to him). He uses the details of the floating-house scene, and much of Twain's plotting, characters, and themes, to create a story at once intricately entwined with Huckleberry Finn and separate from that novel in tone and focus. The author makes no attempt to duplicate Twain's humor and satire. Instead, he sets his sights on humanity's immense capacity for evil. While Huck's innate good heart won the battle against his society-produced conscience, allowing him to help the runaway slave, Finn has neither the heart nor conscience to aid anyone. Clinch's book contains many surprises: Huck is a mulatto; the extremely racist Finn fancies black women; Finn's father (Judge Finn) is the wealthiest and most respected citizen in town and yet, in significant ways, more evil than his son. Many fans of Twain's masterpiece will want to read Clinch's inspired interpretation of Pap, but some might find it too gruesome, and too void of hope. In any event, Clinch offers a wealth of material for AP English and college-level papers.—Robert Saunderson, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Random House (February 20, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400065917
• ISBN-13: 978-1400065912
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (79 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #331,166 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born and raised in the remote heart of upstate New York, Jon Clinch has been an English teacher, a metalworker, a folksinger, an illustrator, a typeface designer, a housepainter, a copywriter, and an advertising executive. Teaching and advertising took him south to the suburbs of Philadelphia for many years, and only with the publication of Finn, his first novel, was he able to return to the surroundings he'd loved from the start: This time, in the Green Mountains of Vermont. He's married to the novelist Wendy Clinch, and they have one daughter.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river, February 22, 2007

By 

Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Finn: A Novel (Hardcover)

Exodus 1:22

It is hard for me to imagine the audacity it must take for a novelist to choose possibly the greatest novel in American literature as the starting off point for his first novel. It was even harder for me to imagine that such a book could be anything other than a derivative effort that diminished both the original work and the contemporary author. I imagined wrong. Jon Clinch's first novel "Finn" is an immensely entertaining and thoughtful novel that takes Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and creates a back-story that takes us into the world of Huck's father, known to the world as Finn.

"Finn" begins and ends with a body floating slowly down the Mississippi. In between, Clinch tells us the story of Finn's life on and near the river. Finn is not a likeable man. For Finn, his life along the Mississippi River is one akin to that portrayed by Hobbes in his treatise "Leviathan". Finn lives in a state of nature and in that state there is "continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Finn, a ne'er do well almost since birth has been cast out "into the river" of life by his father (Huck's grandfather), Judge Finn who, although less physically violent than Finn, is as loathsome a character (to me) as you may ever meet in a piece of fiction. Finn has been cast out because he has fallen into a relationship with a runaway slave girl, Mary. Mary provides Finn with the only real sense of belonging and longing he is ever likely to know. She also provides him with a son, Huck. (Clinch acknowledges Shelley Fisher Fishkin's monograph "Was Huck Black?" in his Author's Note.) Finn's life consists of catching fish, drinking cheap whiskey and moonshine, and struggling with whatever demons a person such as this can conjure. His hatred of slaves, one inherited from his father, cannot rationally coexist with his love (to the extent Finn is capable of that emotion) for Mary.

As the story progresses we are provided with snapshots of characters first brought to us in Huck Finn, such as the widow Douglas and Judge Thatcher. Readers familiar with Huck Finn will see the inception of events that arise in Huck Finn. At the same time, the nature of the relationship between Finn and Mary allows Clinch to discuss some of the same issues Twain did in Huck Finn, the stain of slavery on America's soul and the emotional burden of that stain on those who were touched by it.

It seems inevitable that "Finn" and Clinch will have to bear the ongoing comparison to Huck and Twain. No one can match Twain for his extraordinary feel for idiomatic English or for his ability to tell a story. Clinch is not quite Twain but "Finn" still stands on its own as a terrific first novel. Christopher Hitchens once noted, in connection with an author he had compared to Tolstoy, that even to be compared to Tolstoy with a straight face is a tremendous achievement on its own. Clinch's prose is crisp, his sense of pacing is first-rate, and his characters' voices seem authentic.

After reading "Finn" I found myself with a strong urge to pick up Huck Finn and read it again. I cannot think of a higher recommendation than that. In my opinion, Clinch's 'audacious' efforts did nothing to diminish Huck Finn. On the contrary.

Highly Recommended. L. Fleisig

33 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant debut by an awesomely talented novelist, February 23, 2007

By 

JLind555 - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Finn: A Novel (Hardcover)

When I first heard about Jon Clinch's book in which he creates a mulatto Huck Finn, almost immediately I wondered if his book had been in any way inspired by Shelly Fishkin's fascinating monologue "Was Huck Black?" Fishkin suggested that Twain based his character on two young African-Americans he knew personally and liked very much, one of them a ten year old boy named Jimmy and the other a youth named Jerry. A lot of their characteristics, not to mention their speech patterns, come out in Huck: Jimmy's sociability, loquatiousness, and total lack of pretension and inhibition, and Jerry's mother-wit and plain common sense. But Clinch has gone far beyond Fishkin's premise; in "Finn", his brilliant first novel, Clinch gives us a Huck Finn who actually is black, or at least half-black, by a slave woman.

Clinch's story is not about Huck but about Twain's immortal creation Pap, Huck's father, a loathsome, illiterate, unwashed drunk who could probably be smelled five miles downwind. In Clinch's book, Finn is the older son and the black sheep of an upper-middle-class Southern family; his father, a judge, hates blacks so deeply that he hires a poor white couple as servants rather than have blacks anywhere near him. Finn has already earned his sire's contempt and disgust as a ne'er-do-well alcoholic, but what cuts him off from the family forever is his relationship with Mary, a runaway slave with whom he not only lives but commits the ultimate abomination of siring a half-breed child, thus, in the eyes of the judge, forever sullying the Finn name.

As despicable as the elder Finn is, at least he is no hypocrite. However brutally blacks were treated in the antebellum South, miscegenation, almost always in the form of master/slave or overseer/slave rape, was so common that there were hundreds of thousands of mulatto offspring of these liaisons ranging from white to black and every shade in between. Clinch gives us a Huck who is like his father in more ways than one; looking enough like him to pass for white and sharing his contempt for school, church, and similar traps of civilization.

But Clinch gives Pap a humanity that was almost totally lacking in Twain's Finn. Finn's relationship with Mary is beautifully presented, showing all the conflict Finn must have felt; loathing her color and despising her race in general, he is hopelessly attached to her; it's a love/hate relationship that is doomed from the start. He treats her like dirt, casually abuses her, and when she escapes down the river with Huck in tow, preferring the literal slavery of life in Missouri to the actual slavery of her life with Finn in Illinois, he goes after them. He can take or leave Huck, or rather he'd much prefer to take Huck's six thousand dollars in gold from Injun Joe's cave and leave Huck, but it's Mary he has to have. And once he has her again, he realizes he can't live with her or without her. The judge's ultimatum decides the question once and for all.

Clinch gives us a Finn who thoroughly lives up to, and goes beyond, Twain's portrayal of Pap as a stumbling drunk. Clinch's Finn is diabolically evil, a trait he came by honestly enough; the fruit didn't fall very far from the tree in this family and Finn's father the judge is one of the most loathsome creations in modern fiction. But where the judge is absolutely untroubled by his conscience, at least Finn seems to have one on the occasions when he's not drunk and raving or drunk and stuporous. He looks into the dark night of his own soul and doesn't like what he sees, but he's powerless to change it, as if he would if he could.

Clinch's writing is brilliant, spare and concise; he has sense enough not to try to out-Twain Twain (only Twain could successfully imitate Huck's, Pap's and Jim's speech patterns), but his characters are totally believable. Clinch also brings in a couple of the characters from Twain's book, Judge Thatcher and the Widow Douglas; they aren't clumsily tacked on but add another convincing dimension to the story. But as much as we appreciate these familiar faces, "Finn" is totally Finn's book. Clinch presents us with a tormented soul both loathsome and pathetic; we almost feel sorry for him as much as we abominate him. And the book's ending is brilliant; we already know from Twain that Huck and Jim will find Pap dead in the house floating down the Mississippi, but how he meets his end is something only an awesomely talented writer like Clinch could conceive.

And what did Finn finally pass on to Huck? Clinch's Huck is his father's son in more ways than one: light enough to pass for white, with his father's shrewd intelligence and his disgust for school, church, and all the other tiresome traps of civilization, and ultimately trapped himself by his black blood in a society that sees blacks as something less than human. But out of spite for the woman he loved and hated, who ultimately left him, Finn lies to Huck about his parentage, telling him that Mary wasn't his real mother but only raised him, and that his real mother was a white woman long dead. By symbolically robbing Huck of his real mother, Clinch says in his Afterword, Finn set Huck free to to pursue whatever fate Mark Twain had in store for him. Twain would have loved it.

Judy Lind

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great novel., July 14, 2007

By 

AKM (New England, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Finn: A Novel (Hardcover)

This novel was a wonderful read. I did find the vocabulary and sentence structure,at times,difficult to comprehend--at the same time I found this to be a postive challenge. The story itself is a great read, with Pap Finn being an extrememly unlikeable man. I respect Clinch's attempt at bringing Pap Finn to life and respect even more his abilty intertwine Twain's Huckleberry Finn with his story of Pap Finn. This will be one that I reread! And of course it makes you want to go and pick up a copy of Huckleberry Finn again too!!