Huck Out West by Robert Coover

Our leading postmodernist novelist turns his iconoclastic eye to a great American classic in this sequel to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. n nAt the end of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, on the eve of the Civil War, Huck and Tom Sawyer decide to escape sivilization and light out for the Territory. In Robert Coover's Huck Out West, also wrote by Huck, the boys do just that, riding for the famous but short-lived Pony Express, then working as scouts for both sides in the war. n nThey are suddenly separated when Tom decides he'd rather own civilization than leave it, returning east with his new wife, Becky Thatcher, to learn the law from her father. Huck, abandoned and dreadful lonely, hires himself out to whosoever. He rides shotgun on coaches, wrangles horses on a Chisholm Trail cattle drive, joins a gang of bandits, guides wagon trains, gets dragged into U.S. Army massacres, suffers a series of romantic and barroom misadventures. n nHe is eventually drawn into a Lakota tribe by a young brave, Eeteh, an inventive teller of Coyote tales who was having about the same kind of trouble with his tribe as I was having with mine. There is an army colonel who wants to hang Huck and destroy Eeteh's tribe, so they're both on the run, finding themselves ultimately in the Black Hills just ahead of the 1876 Gold Rush. n nThis period, from the middle of the Civil War to the centennial year of 1876, is probably the most formative era of the nation's history. In the West, it is a time of grand adventure, but also one of greed, religious insanity, mass slaughter, virulent hatreds, widespread poverty and ignorance, ruthless military and civilian leadership, huge disparities of wealth. Only Huck's sympathetic and gently comical voice can make it somehow bearable. n nEditorial Reviews n nHuck Out West...establishes Huck in exactly the place Twain himself planned to take him, the Wild West during and after the Civil War: exactly the West as charted by Twain's dialect, sense of terrain and national scope. And yet a West well beyond the dark original author's darkest imaginings, a West that Hieronymus Bosch might have painted: an Eden falling fast to onrushing gold-maddened men who are glutting it with spilled whiskey and the blood of hideously murdered fellow men, and covered with the alkaline of treachery and moral anarchy...Under Coover's hell-hot pen...Tom Sawyer consummates the impish boyhood that Twain gave him; he has grown up to be, God help us, the nihilistic Sivilizer, the America-in-chrysalis. Yet Coover's sardonic revulsion toward the often profligate, prodigal nation his literature has lampooned for 50 years has not yet grown absolute. Amid the chaos and savagery, his Huckleberry Finn still stands as Twain created him: an innocent, abroad in the new world, uncorrupted, truth-telling, the last angel of our better nature. n- The New York Times Book Review - Ron Powers n n09/26/2016 nWith gusto and a rollicking plot, Coover tackles the daunting task of crafting a sequel to a Mark Twain classic. Using a line from the original novel's penultimate sentence--I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest--Coover (The Brunist Day of Wrath) takes Huck, the wide-eyed adventurer, to the Plains states, with much of the story set in Minnysota. Huck admits he's sometimes homesick for the Big River, but he rarely looks back, save for a passing reference that helps ground the reader. He and Tom ride for the Pony Express for a few years, before Tom leaves him to marry Becky Thatcher. Huck even has a surprise reunion with Jim, who has found Jesus, been freed from slavery, and is currently looking for the rest of his family. This is American Indian country, mostly Lakota but also Cherokee, the latter of whom Huck calls Southern gentlemen, living high off the hog. After Tom leaves, a savvy Union soldier named Dan Harper takes Huck under his wing, before he and his company are massacred by the Lakota. The characters are colorful, with names such as Pegleg, Yaller Whiskers, and Eyepatch. Huck finds love and there's the inevitable return of Tom, whose adult mischief is more sinister than his teen antics. A lively and fast-paced encore for a beloved American hero. (Jan.) n- Publishers Weekly n nRowdy, funny, and brilliant....It's not necessary to remember Mark Twain's classic to enjoy this tale....It's Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian narrated by the good-natured Huck....Coover takes Twain's characters and creates a worthy extension of their lives. In doing that, he creates a scathing vision of the violent Westward movement as seen through the innocent eyes of Huckleberry Finn. n- The Missourian n nA spacious-skies frontier ripsnorter that stands alone as a wildly funny, violently imaginative Western yarn with flamboyant plot turns and caustic humor Twain himself might have appreciated, if not envied....[a] droll yet faithful replication of Twain's first-person narration. n- Newsday - Gene Seymour n nCoover's speculations on what happened to Huck after he broke free of his Missouri hometown make for a wildly funny, violently imaginative Western yarn with caustic humor Twain himself might have envied. n- Newsday - Tom Beer n nMr. Coover has been one of the country's leading postmodernists. But Huck Out West doesn't deconstruct The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn so much as reprise it....as in Twain's original, the winsome humor of Huck's muddytatings lend the story a deceptive innocence. n- The Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks n nAn astonishing picaresque novel, narrated by Huck himself in a voice as authentic as Twain's original creation....Huck Out West is simply splendid, raucous, ribald and rib-ticklin'. After fifty years of incredible novels, this is another one of Coover's triumphs. n- The Providence Journal n nAn extraordinary book...a beautifully earnest and direct work from perhaps the most formidable trickster in American letters. Anyone with an ounce of heart in their chests should read this immediately. n- Alan Moore n nIn Huck Out West, Robert Coover brilliantly (and outrageously) revives Mark Twain's cardinal character by way of deconstructing any number of our cherished myths. Coover is in fine antic form here-truly, Huck never had it so good. n- T. C. Boyle n nA giant stands on the shoulders of a giant, and the view is large and giddying. In its vibrant skylarking and in its yearning undertow, this disenchanted enchantment throws new light on Twain's America-and on Robert Coover's. n- Garth Risk Hallberg n nAn audacious and revisionary sequel to Twain's masterpiece. It is both true to the spirit of Twain and quintessentially Cooveresque. n- Times Literary Supplement n nMagical....Among the many elements that Coover imitates so well is Twain's misanthropy, his macabre sense of humor and his perpetually offended innocence....Indeed, everybody seems to be growing old except Huck, who remains a voice of perplexed kindness, and Coover, who, at 84, is still a miraculously sharp writer. n- The Washington Post - Ron Charles n n*10/01/2016 nHemingway once said that all modern American literature owes a debt to the The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This latest from Coover (The Burnist Day of Wrath; Ghost Town), one of the most prolific remixers of America's tall tales, fables, and myths, is both a tribute and a fitting postscript to Mark Twain's canonical work. In the vernacular and dialect of Twain, the narrative reintroduces readers to Huck a few years into his adventuring in the Territories, boss of it all and searching for freedom beyond civilization. Tom has returned east to become a fancy lawyer, after a few years spent with Huck in the Pony Express. Alone on the plains, Huck alternates between friend and foe with cattle rustlers, prospectors, and the Lakota. Through all of these experiences, he begins to question his ethos of freedom over friendship. However, at his lowest point, Huck is reunited with Tom only to discover that sometimes not even friendship can mitigate the loneliness of the human condition. VERDICT With the humor and wit of Twain, Coover punctures the American myth of Manifest Destiny and the fantastical tales we create to avoid understanding and empathy. [See Prepub Alert, 7/25/16.]--Joshua Finnell, Los Alamos National Lab., NM n- Library Journal n n2016-11-22 nRevisiting Huckleberry Finn's America--by picking up where Mark Twain left off.Coover's 11th novel borrows its protagonist--and its inspiration--from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but don't be deceived: this is less pastiche or sequel than a project with deeper roots. Taking place in the Dakotas during the decade after the end of the Civil War, the book follows Twain's eponymous protagonist, now an adult, through a series of misadventures, including a turn as a Pony Express rider, some time spent living among the Lakota Sioux, and a difficult engagement with Gen. George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry Regiment, which ultimately met its fate at the Battle of the Greasy Grass. If such a setup seems reminiscent of Thomas Berger's novel Little Big Man (1964), however, Coover has something more than satire on his mind. Rather, he is out to deconstruct not a genre but American literary iconography. In his telling, Tom Sawyer, who keeps turning up like a bad penny, has long since ceased to be a charming bad boy; he is now a zealot for public hangings and worse. Anyways, Huck, he explains, EVERYTHING'S a hanging offense. Being ALIVE is. Only thing that matters is who's doing the hanging and who's being hung. Becky Thatcher, meanwhile, abandoned by Tom when she was six months pregnant, has become a prostitute. These are not gratuitous turns but extrapolations based on the characters' limited possibilities in a world defined by brutality. Coover effectively mirrors Twain's style and Huck's voice as well as the peripatetic movement of the original. More to the point, though, he is after a consideration, or critique, of the narrative of westward expansion, in which American hegemony was recast as opportunity and morality became an inconvenient truth at best. We ARE America, clean to the bone! Tom enthuses to his erstwhile friend late in the novel. A perfect new Jerusalem right here on earth!....They call us outlaws because they say we're on tribal land, so we got to show our amaz'n American PATRIOTICS! These lands is rightfully OURN and we're going to set up a Liberty Pole and raise the American flag on it to PROVE it! This novel reminds us that the more things change, the more they stay the same. n- Kirkus Reviews n nNarrator Eric Michael Summerer portrays all-American scamps Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer as they head out west in search of fortune and adventure. This sequel to THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER and ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN, by Mark Twain, sounds tonally and attitudinally authentic. Summerer handles the portrayals of the characters, including their accents, with empathy and a pleasing casual attitude. Summerer lets Huck's sympathetic and gently comical voice shine even when Huck feels pain and loneliness when Tom returns to the East to read for the law and be with his new wife. Summerer enthusiastically delivers the many twists and turns in Huck's new adventures, delighting fans of Twain's famous character. R.O. AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine n- FEBRUARY 2017 - AudioFile