The following book review was written for the Mark Twain Forum by Larry Howe. ~~~~~ BOOK REVIEW _The Cambridge Introduction to Mark Twain_. By Peter Messent. Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 138 pages. Softcover, 6" x 9". $19.99. ISBN 0-521-67075-6 Many books reviewed on the Forum are available at discounted prices from the TwainWeb Bookstore, and purchases from this site generate commissions that benefit the Mark Twain Project. Please visit <http://www.twainweb.net>. Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by: Larry Howe Roosevelt University Copyright (c) 2007 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or redistributed in any medium without permission. Peter Messent is no stranger to Mark Twain studies. This volume is his fourth contribution, in addition to _New Readings of the American Novel: Narrative Theory and Its Application_, which included a chapter demonstrating how Bakhtin's narrative theory elucidates aspects of _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_. He also co-edited the Twain-related volume _The Civil War Letters of Joseph Hopkins Twichell_. As with all of his earlier books on Twain, _The Cambridge Introduction to Mark Twain_ is highly readable and insightful, and the strengths of his earlier books show up here in the succinct and engaging biographical outline and especially in the commentary on the major works. And although it is part of a series that is designed primarily for undergraduate students and readers not very familiar with its subject, readers with more exposure to the life and works of America's most famous writer may well find it worthwhile. As useful an introduction as it is to Mark Twain, I cannot avoid wondering about some of the decisions that went into the organization of the book. Divided into four chapters--"Mark Twain's life," "Contexts," "Works," and "Critical reception and the late works"--the volume focuses on an appropriate set of issues, but some are arranged in a curiously unbalanced structure. Messent devotes nearly three quarters of the book (87 of 119 pages) to the third chapter--a wise decision, because it is the center of his focus. This chapter is sub-divided into four sections dealing with different influences or examples: vernacular humor; travel writing, including _Innocents Abroad_, _A Tramp Abroad_, _Roughing It_ and _Life on the Mississippi_; two relatively early works of fiction, _Tom Sawyer_ and _Huckleberry Finn_; and two later works of fiction, _A Connecticut Yankee_ and _Pudd'nhead Wilson_. In the first section, Messent provides an articulate overview of the quirky techniques of Twain's humor, tracing it from his far West journalism, with an extended explanation of the "Jumping Frog" story and frontier oddities like the "Personal Habits of Siamese Twins," through his naive posture in _Innocents Abroad_, the development of a vernacular narrator like Huck, the temporal dislocation of _Connecticut Yankee_, and finally with late work like the satire of Sherlock Holmes in "A Double-Barreled Detective Story" and the philosophical distance of _Letters from Earth_. The section on travel writing explains at a higher degree of detail how Mark Twain plays the role of tourist in _Innocents Abroad_, a precursor to what would later be popularly referred to as the Ugly American. Perhaps more notably, that book altered the format in which his writing appeared. To become a "scribbler of books," as he would denote this stage of his career in _Life on the Mississippi_, is a remarkable elevation of one who began as a writer of humorous squibs. Messent pays considerable attention to _A Tramp Abroad_, a work most often mentioned by other scholars in passing as a book taken up in the midst of the difficult composition of _Huckleberry Finn_. Messent persuasively argues that _A Tramp Abroad_ maximizes the best impulses of Twain's first travel book and benefits from a more self-conscious and seasoned awareness of what it means to be a tourist: "Twain engages issues that have since become central to the travel narrative. He shows how tourism affects, and promotes a false version of the countries it colonises. He is aware, too, of the mutual part both guest and host play as this occurs" (49). Turning to the American travel books, Messent notes the quality of bildungsroman that shapes _Roughing It_ as well as a willingness to digress and to focus on tales about story telling. This latter tendency continues and is exaggerated in _Life on the Mississippi_ while also showing Twain's interest in retrospection, which _Tom Sawyer_ and _Huckleberry Finn_ would capitalize on, and the ways of the South, which would help to focus his interest on the issue of racial and class-based inequality in subsequent work. The section of the chapter dealing with those two novels is equal in length to that which covers all four of the travel narratives, and appropriately so. Messent handles the narrative intricacies, problems, and themes with accessible sophistication. His analysis focuses on archetypal qualities in _Tom Sawyer_ as a mythology of American boyhood and the process of emerging into adult society. In his treatment of _Huckleberry Finn_, Messent points to its complex status as a realist text and its grappling with the issue of race that has been so central to American culture. The section on _A Connecticut Yankee_ and _Pudd'nhead Wilson_ similarly emphasize the degrees of complexity that Twain takes on in each narrative's attempt to frame an American identity. Twain's time-travel fantasy begins as a celebration of American virtue in response to Matthew Arnold's criticism of America but ends with a dystopian apocalypse as conflicted about the present as it is about the past. _Pudd'nhead Wilson_, on the other hand, returns to the region and era of the earlier novels, but complicates and ironizes the racial issues even more than in _Huckleberry Finn_. All of this makes for a very packed chapter, one that might have profitably been divided into two or three. Given the clarity and depth of Messent's accounts of the texts and his subtle interpretive framing of them, other chapters disappoint because they do not rise to the level of this central, well-executed chapter. The second and fourth chapters in particular are either so scant or misdirected that they raise questions about their purposes. "Contexts," the second chapter, concerns me for what its title suggests but its contents insufficiently deliver. Only ten pages in total, this chapter begins with some general comments about events that occurred during Twain's lifetime, but then segues into some of the various critical responses to his work, leading with Toni Morrison's assessment of _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_. These critical responses seem more appropriate to the fourth chapter, and some of it is repeated there, leading one to wonder why it was inserted in the "Contexts" chapter. The balance of "Contexts" deals with the division between the actual man and his authorial persona, which I would argue belongs in the first chapter, "Mark Twain's life." Moreover, a chapter titled "Contexts" might have more fruitfully expanded upon cultural developments that frame, influence, and are addressed in the writings, beyond the few slight gestures in this direction with general references to the Civil War or late-nineteenth-century technological progress. Surveying the chapter retrospectively, one comes away with the sense that material that is better suited to other chapters ended up here to fill out the section into a still rather-too-short chapter. A more purposeful execution would have expanded on what the title promises and reallocated material that belongs elsewhere. Messent does occasionally refer to historical contexts later, during his account of some of the works in chapter 3, and these instances generally work more effectively because they serve to illuminate an aspect of the writing. In chapter 2, however, they form a loose catalog that lacks a clear relevance. The final chapter, "Critical reception and the late works"--also only ten pages in length, so it hardly does justice to its title--is another area of concern. To be sure, an undergraduate introduction need not address the entire history of critical reception, but a slightly more detailed account of how the responses to Twain's writing have evolved, how contemporary criticism has paralleled the emergence of other social developments, and how it treats the texts differently than earlier commentary did would be useful. Limiting his commentary to a relative handful of critics, Messent also privileges Twain's transnationalism, which has arisen as a critical angle in recent years. Messent writes: "By transnationalism, we mean the cultural intersections and exchanges that take place between nations, and the way we can then read American Literature, and (in this case) Twain's writing in particular, as composed of a series of negotiations between national and international spaces" (115-16). Messent also foregrounds transnationalism in the section on travel writing in chapter 3 and in his discussion of _A Connecticut Yankee_. As a professor at the University of Nottingham, Messent has a British perspective that affords him authority in measuring that aspect of Twain's work. However, the weight that Messent applies to this critical perspective is arguably too heavy and reflects a bias about contemporary globalism that skews the introduction as well as risking its consideration of the nineteenth century in presentism. The last chapter "Guide to further reading," is useful though far from exhaustive. Messent lists secondary sources of biography, bibliography, criticism, and internet sites in thirteen categories. There are any number of titles that could well have been included here, but there is nothing listed that should not be. The "Notes" are also useful references to sources that Messent has relied on in his commentary. However, in a couple of instances, they raise questions about sourcing. For example, in at least two cases Messent cites one of his own earlier works to source a quote that he has drawn from another text, Howells in one and Bakhtin in another. Given that he includes full citations for the original sources in his previous work, it's not at all clear why the second-hand references appear in the _Cambridge Introduction to Mark Twain_. This is not a large matter, but it does exemplify for undergraduates a practice that is generally discouraged when, in teaching the responsibilities of scholarship, we stress the importance of tracking a quotation to its source to insure its reliability and to understand its context. Despite these reservations about organization and proportion, the core of Messent's book is an effective introduction of its subject, especially valuable for its target audience; indeed, I've recommended it to my own students. Books in a series are often formulated to a template that is not one of the author's own devising, and I suspect that some of my concerns derive from that requirement of publication. My reservations stem, however, from my regard for the standard that Messent has set in his earlier work. He rises to that standard throughout most of this volume; the lapses, though, are the more glaring because of the quality when the book is on the mark.