The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Greg Matthews (review)

Reviews 233 feature that can be faulted is the form of documentation; Benson never pro­ vides a bibliography of primary and secondary sources but lists sources sep­ arately for each chapter, making the reader hunt and seek among them. The only other fault is the price;at $35.00 the book istoo expensive for the average reader, who will have to check it out of the library or wait for the paperback edition. But Benson has given us the definitive biography of an American writer whose major status has never been in doubt with readers, while Edmund Wilson’s embarrassingly bad novels have long been forgotten. ROBERT E. MORSBERGER California State Polytechnic University, Pomona The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. By Greg Matthews. (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1983. 500 pages, $15.95.) Greg Matthews has guts. How else can a first-novel author who dares to write a sequel to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Adventures, here­ after) be described? He dares, and, what’smore, he does it well. The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Further) is a tour-de-force of 36 chapters, with the bulk of them covering the trek westward. Four chapters tie into Adventures and set the stage for leaving Missouri; 22 cover the desert travel to California; three have Huck and Jim digging successfully for gold almost immediately upon arrival in California; and the last seven move to San Francisco, where the American questers experience the inevitable boredom in a settled society and the desire to move on. As Huck’s statement at the end of Tom Sawyer supplied a kernel for Adventures, so that same statement is at least one kernel for Further. When Huck questioned whether or not it would be wise to bury his treasure, he said, “Pap would come back to this yer town some day and get his claws on it if I didn’t hurry up, and I tell you he’d clear it out pretty quick.” A prophetic statement, this is just what Pap, still alive in Further, does. Pap and Morg, a lowest-dregs-of-society companion, burn the widow Douglas’ house, killing her and Jim’s family, reunited with him at the beginning of Further, and murder Judge Thatcher. Huck is blamed for the murders; Jim helps him escape from jail; and they are off to “howling adventures” in the West, where they are known as Desperado Finn and his Nigger Accomplice. The fugitives assume aliases throughout their picaresque adventures, and each new alias marks a new adventure. Rather than leaving the river for the land, Huck and Jim meet people and adventure at outposts of civilization in the emptiness of the Old West. Echoes of Adventures, such as “You ain’t playin’no joke on ol’Jim is you, Huck?” and Jim’s father-sermonizing to the boy, permeate the story. Also, allusions to other Twain works, especially Roughing It, a sub-title in Chapter 31, crop up frequently. Huck is called a “puddin-head,” a town isnamed Hedleyville, signs and hexes, the “It don’pay 234 Western American Literature to mess wid kings” philosophy, several references to Tom Sawyer’senvy at the friends’adventures, and more, are present. Differences appear in Further, too. Perhaps because mores are different in 1984, the humor in Matthews’ novel is sometimes more risque, but humor it is and just as basic as Twain’s. Although Twain might have thought of depicting the practical method of checking the virginity of a mail order bride, Matthews wrote it. Prejudice also appears in Further but rather than applying only to “niggers” it embraces “Greasers” and “Chinky Chinky Chinee” as well, depicting clearly the ugliness and brutality of prejudice anywhere. And Jim comes into his own when he says, “I ain’t steppin’down no mo’.” Matthews seems comfortable when writing about women. As Twain did in Roughing It, he shows how men outnumbered women in the Old West. He, too, depicts the usual low-class whores who followed the gold strikes and the just-as-usual higher-class whores who plied their trade in the burgeoning cities on the Coast. Mrs. McSween, the ex-whore who forces her five daugh...