The following book review was written for the Mark Twain Forum by Tim
Champlin.

~~~~~

_Huck Out West_. By Robert Coover. W.W. Norton & Company, 2017. Pp. 308.
Hardcover. $26.95. ISBN 978-0-393-60844-1.


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Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:
Tim Champlin


Copyright (c) 2017 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.


When Mark Twain wrote his two most famous novels about Tom Sawyer and Huck
Finn, he briefly considered carrying his two young heroes into adulthood
and then bringing them back to their village as old men. Wisely, he
abandoned this idea and ended the stories while his protagonists were still
adolescents, leaving them forever young and hopeful in readers' minds.


Later authors have imagined the boys as grown-ups. One of the best efforts
is Bernard Sabath's commercially successful 1981 play, "The Boys in
Autumn," in which Tom and Huck meet again in St. Petersburg in the 1920s.
It is a bittersweet reunion. Tom tells of being a vaudeville showman for
years, but he also admits to serving time in prison for child molestation.
Huck, although the successful owner/operator of a hardware store, slowly
admits to his old friend that he eventually poisoned his wife in an act of
mercy killing to save her the pain of a terminal illness. In spite of all
this, the play ends on a hopeful note for the future.


Now we have Robert Coover's _Huck Out West_. Coover, a novelist and short
story writer, is a retired professor from Brown University. His previous
novels have been described as "fabulism" and dark magic realism. _Huck Out
West_ is, indeed, a very strange, dark novel. As the title indicates, it is
Huck's story and set about 25 years after Mark Twain's _Huckleberry Finn_
ends.


Coover has Huck narrate present and past events in a non-linear, haphazard,
stream-of-consciousness fashion. Coover's attempts at duplicating Huck's
dialect appear to be written for the eye and not for the ear. Otherwise,
why use words like "crool," "new-monia," "vilent," when the correct
spelling sounds the same? Coover is more successful at putting unique
grammar into Huck's mouth with words like "meloncholical," "extincting,"
"rumbustious," "middlegating circumstances," and "owdacious." When Huck
describes his experience of scouting for both sides during the Civil War,
he labels them all "Confederals."


Mark Twain's characters Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher and Jim, also appear and
disappear throughout the story. Huck is the same old Huck of his boyhood
(except for growing a beard, occasionally visiting prostitutes and
routinely drinking whisky--which he never did as a youth). He is still
living a survival, stray cat, hand-to-mouth existence, subsisting on odd
jobs like buffalo hunting, riding shotgun on stagecoaches, horse wrangling
and scouting for the military and immigrant wagon trains. He makes no
long-range plans--intervals of happiness being his only goal and
expectation--and tries to keep his head down out of the line of fire from
human scuzz-balls. He's witnessed what havoc and cruelty the desire for
gold has caused and thus considers the possession of this yellow metal very
bad luck. He has retained his facility for lying quickly and expertly to
keep himself out of trouble. But his kind-hearted core of goodness remains.
He still cringes from violence and is non-judgmental and sometimes
forgiving, if not compassionate, toward the worst of those around him--from
outlaws to generals.


Huck's best friend at this point in his life is a Lakota Sioux named Eeteh
who saved Huck's life after a rattler bite, The two have much in common,
each being outcasts from their own people. Coover lays out the major
episodes of Huck's back story in fits and starts. The reader finds that
Huck has been on the run since deserting a scouting job with the cavalry
after he refuses an order by General Hard-Ass (Custer) to lure the Lakota
Sioux into an ambush. Huck and Eeteh have settled into a peaceful, wooded
area in the Black Hills. But an old prospector discovers a gold rock in the
gulch. In short order, all hell breaks loose when thousands--mostly the
dregs of white society--flood illegally into the area in a wild stampede
for gold. Drunkenness, robbery, torture, murder and hanging follow, while
the hills are being denuded of trees for lumber and the streams fouled by
placer mining. Meanwhile, the Indians who retain the land by treaty are
ignored or eliminated. Manifest Destiny is not mentioned by name, but
Coover shows his concept of it to be as ugly as many of those who are
carrying it out.


Coover includes elements of fantasy in this story. For example, when Huck
breaks a wild horse named Tongo, and is the only one who is able to ride
him, the Indians dub the animal "Spirit Horse."  Huck clings to him
bareback as the horse goes galloping with lightning speed, on what seems
like a trip around the world on a flying carpet, through Indian villages,
forests, deserts, canyons, wheat fields, and army forts, sometimes dodging
flying bullets. To heighten the reader's sense of fantasy, Coover has Eeteh
spend considerable time relating the doings of talking animals like Coyote,
Snake, and Lark who have human traits and are part of his tribe's creation
mythology.


When Huck gets crossways with several outlaws, they decide to hang him for
a murder he didn't commit. As Huck is about to be dropped through the
gallows trap, a white-hatted, mustachioed Tom Sawyer gallops in from
nowhere, guns blazing, and shoots the rope in two as Huck falls. (A trick
device used in some old westerns, but nearly impossible in reality).
Loyalty to an old childhood buddy is about the only redeeming
characteristic Coover's Tom Sawyer has going for him. Tom quickly shows
that his natural leadership ability has been twisted to serve his vanity.
Filled with a massive machismo, he's a bombastic braggart, liar, cheat,
pseudo-lawyer and con artist who proclaims himself mayor of the new
boomtown of Deadwood. He dresses in gaudy clothes and bulldozes his way
through life like a snake-oil salesman. However, that's not the worst of
it. Coover reveals that when Tom, Huck, and the freed slave Jim came west
to join the Pony Express, Jim was too big for a rider, so Tom sold Jim to
the slave-holding Cherokees.


Coover's Huck acts completely out of character to the boy created by Mark
Twain by not standing up against Tom for this betrayal of their old friend
Jim. Huck's conscience assails him, but he still caves in to the bossy
Tom's reasoning that Jim needed somebody to tell him what to do. Years
later, Huck discovers Jim working as a cook on a wagon train. Jim says he'd
been sold twice more, but was finally bought from an abusive owner by this
group of Christian immigrants who'd brought him to Jesus. (I thought Mark
Twain's Jim was a Christian when he was owned by the Widow Douglas). Though
all slaves are now free, Jim is content to stay with the missionaries in
hopes of finding his family out west. Then Jim disappears from Coover's
story for good.


Coover reveals that Tom's past included a marriage to Becky Thatcher whom
he abandoned along with their unborn child. When Tom found the long-lost
father he never knew, he was disgusted with the pitiful old man who was
living with a whore and selling used hats from the back of a wagon. Tom
murdered his father, and the whore who witnessed his crime. "He warn't
NOBODY, Huck!  He didn't have no STYLE!" He laments when relating the
killings. This is rock bottom for any depiction I've ever read of a
sympathetic Twain character.


When Becky Thatcher appears in Coover's tale, Huck is silently dismayed to
learn she has turned to prostitution to survive. However, she's upbeat and
matter-of-fact about it. When Huck wonders how she gets out of all her
voluminous undergarments, she says that Tom always wanted to see what was
under them, and he finally did when they were lost in the cave and facing
certain death. Later Becky invites a grimy Huck to jump into the bathtub
naked with her and he accepts.


Coover's depiction of the adult Huck, Becky and Tom make this novel an
unlikely recommendation for younger readers. Previous authors have
speculated on the behavior of Twain's characters beyond the original novels
and lost most of the charm of Twain's story in the process. This novel
falls into that category. To me, this novel is a tongue-in-cheek fantasy
with some entertaining and ribald humor. It is an unconventional book
interspersed with some outrageous episodes, perhaps thrown in for shock
value or for what Coover deems necessary dark realism.

_____


ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Tim Champlin is the author of 40 books, mostly
historical fiction, including _Tom Sawyer and the Ghosts of Summer_ (2010),
_Mark Twain Speaking from the Grave_ (2016), the upcoming _Tom and Huck's
Howling Adventure_ (2017) and _Tom Sawyer's Dark Plot_ (2018).