Beyond Twain: Huck Finn’s evil pappy gets his own novel

Far from the murky waters of the Mississippi River, at a sunny kitchen table with a pretty suburban view, one of the nastiest, scariest characters in Southern fiction has been reanimated.

In his debut novel, “Finn,” Jon Clinch introduces readers to the nefarious world of Huckleberry Finn’s father, whom the author calls “a brute of the highest order.”

A violent alcoholic and unrepentant racist, Pap Finn turns up in Mark Twain’s 1884 novel as a corpse floating down the Mississippi – nude, with a bullet in his back – inside a shack containing a wooden leg, black cloth masks, a baby’s bottle, women’s underwear and other incongruous items. Clinch used the shack and its cryptic cargo as clues to Pap Finn’s loathsome life, and the springboard for themes in the book.

“The contents of the room are completely bizarre; it’s like something out of a horror movie,” Clinch said. “It seemed to me, taking Mark Twain very seriously as a craftsman and as a moralist, these things were not random. They were there to serve a purpose.”

Each of the items makes an appearance in “Finn,” which explores racism and hatred, broken families, fathers and sons, and what turns a man into a monster.

Ahead of its release Tuesday by Random House, Clinch’s first published novel has garnered substantial praise including coveted starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. A coast-to-coast book tour is upcoming.

You could call it a daring move for an author to tread inside the boundaries of an iconic work such as “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” but the former advertising executive said he found it more liberating than intimidating.

“It was freeing,” he said, because characters and story lines from Twain were already there for him to expand, diminish or ignore as he desired. It’s also heartening to Clinch that Twain scholars have largely given positive reviews to his book. Many have said that “Finn” stands on its own and that reading or rereading Twain’s classic is not required to enjoy it.

“Finn” is believed to be the first novel that spins off a “Huckleberry Finn” minor character, but other novelists have taken similar approaches. Jean Rhys’ “Wide Sargasso Sea” looks to “Jane Eyre,” Sena Naslund’s “Ahab’s Wife” stems from “Moby-Dick” and Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” revisits “Hamlet.”

Clinch said he was pleased when the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction went to Geraldine Brooks’ “March,” an imagining of the absent father in Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women.” To him, the award suggests that people can and will take seriously books using classic novels to create something new and original.

Still unclear, however, is how academics will respond to one of the book’s bombshells. Spoiler alert: Huck is biracial, the child of Pap Finn and Mary, a former slave who is Pap’s longtime mistress and eventually a victim of his violence.

“The clearest way to explain his hatred of black people was to explain that it wasn’t entirely hatred,” Clinch said. “It’s about learned hatred; he’s learned it, yet he does battle with it all the time.”

Kent Rasmussen, author of several books on Twain and who has read “Finn,” called it a powerful book that might make some academics rethink “Huck Finn” and larger issues of race and slavery in the South. He also expects it will make waves among Twainophiles.

“I suspect that giving Huck a black mother is going to shake a lot of people up,” Rasmussen said. “It raises all kinds of questions. … It may cause some arguments (among scholars), but that’s OK.”

Tim Champlin, a Twain scholar who wrote “The Blaze of Noon” and other Western novels, said Twain intended Huck and Jim to be polar opposites, so making Huck biracial “requires some rewriting of Twain’s novel to adjust the relationship.” However, he praised Clinch for his daring.

“Clinch shot for the moon, and I admire him for it,” Champlin said by e-mail. “He came very close to creating a classic.”

For Clinch, writing about the grim subject matter was draining, which he counteracted by concentrating on the language of the book – part 1840s drawl and part modern-day narration.

“I wanted it to have this great big mythic feel to it, and I think focusing on the surface of it helped me to get through the really ugly parts,” he said.

The book, like Twain’s, contains racial epithets that still get the original banned from schools more than a century after it was written. Unlike Twain, however, Clinch draws a clear line between the racially charged words of the characters and the appropriate language of the narrator.

“The narrator in Mark Twain’s time was, in fact, Huck Finn, and he used the same language throughout,” he said. “But to read (‘Finn’) in a classroom setting, it’s obvious that the more modern narrator is speaking in an appropriate way and documenting something that happened in the past.”

At least one high school has already added “Finn” to its spring reading list, and publisher Random House has created a teachers’ guide as well.

“(Schools) are saying that they would like to make this a companion to Huckleberry Finn, which is a great thing as far as I’m concerned,” he said.

Clinch is working on another novel examining the father-son relationship, this time in the upstate New York of his own childhood. However, he said he may revisit the dysfunctional Finn clan someday.

“My daughter summed it up by saying, ‘Finn … can’t help himself. He’s a prisoner of his own impulses, but he’s always the smartest guy in the room and you’ve got to keep your eye on him for that reason,’” Clinch said, then laughed. “I think there’s a Christmas story in there, and it involves a dog, and that’s all I’ll say.”