The Mark Twain Forum needs a reviewer for the following book:

   Griffith, Clark.  _Achilles and the Tortoise: Mark Twain's Fictions_.
   Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998.  Cloth, 6" x 9".
   Pp. iv + 272.  Notes, bibliography, index.  $34.95.  ISBN 0-8173-0903-9.

The publisher's web site describes it thus:

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Griffith shows that Twain-with a vision that would be bleak and despairing
in the hands of another-is funny precisely because he is negativistic,
pessimistic, and nihilistic.

Covering the entire body of Mark Twain's fiction, Clark Griffith in Achilles
and the Tortoise answers two questions: How did Mark Twain write? And why is
he funny? Griffith defines and demonstrates Mark Twain's poetics and, in
doing so, reveals Twain's ability to create and sustain human laughter.

Through a close reading of the fictions-short and long, early and
late-Griffith contends that Mark Twain's strength lay not in comedy or in
satire or (as the 19th century understood the term) even in the practice of
humor. Rather his genius lay in the joke, specifically the "sick joke." For
all his finesse and seeming variety, Twain tells the same joke, with its
single cast of doomed and damned characters, its single dead-end conclusion,
over and over endlessly.

As he attempted to attain the comic resolution and comically transfigured
characters he yearned for, Twain forever played, for Griffith, the role of
the Achilles of Zeno's Paradox. Like the tortoise that Achilles cannot
overtake in Zeno's tale, the richness of comic life forever remained outside
Twain's grasp.

The last third of Griffith's study draws parallels between Mark Twain and
Herman Melville. Although the two authors never met and seem not to have
read each other's works, they labored under the sense of what, in Moby-Dick,
Ishmael calls "a vast practical joke . . . at nobody's expense but [one's]
own." The laughter occasioned by this cosmic conspiracy shapes the career of
Huckleberry Finn fully as much as it does Ishmael's voyage. Out of the
laughter are generated the respective obsessions of Captain Ahab and
Bartleby, of Pudd'nhead Wilson and Hadleyburg. Reduced at last to a dry
mock, the laughter is the prevailing tone of both Billy Budd and The
Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts.

Clark Griffith is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Oregon.

Clark Griffith's Achilles and the Tortoise is effortlessly witty yet built
upon long cogitation with meticulous carpentry, fitting and refitting
together the intricate sections of his argument. It is quite deliberately
individualistic and polemical yet draws upon awesomely wide reading to
support its judgments. With deceptive simplicity yet, eventually,
multilayered sophistication it keeps asking: Why is Mark Twain 'funny'? It
culminates with a dazzling analysis of all three of the Mysterious Stranger
fables, but the entire book conducts a challenging, original, and bracing
experience. --Louis Budd, Duke University

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As usual, the review must be of publishable quality, and it would be due
within two months of your receipt of the book (i.e., due mid-August
1999).  The deadline is particularly important, as we are making every
effort for Forum reviews to appear before print reviews.  If you are
inclined to procrastinate, please don't offer to review the book.

If you would like to see the general content and style of Forum book
reviews, feel free to browse the archive of reviews, which are available
at TwainWeb:

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*** IMPORTANT ***
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I look forward to hearing from you.

Taylor Roberts
Book review editor, Mark Twain Forum