Excerpted from
The New York Times
12/9/84
It would be superb stuff if only the writer did not keep giving away the fact that he was a modern young American working in 1984. His anachronisms were not so much in the historical facts - those seemed accurate enough - but the point of view was too contemporary. The scenes might succeed - say it again, this young writer was talented! - but he kept betraying his literary influences.
The author of ''The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'' had obviously been taught a lot by such major writers as Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck; he had certainly lifted from Faulkner and the mad tone Faulkner could achieve when writing about maniacal men feuding in deep swamps; he had also absorbed much of what Vonnegut and Heller could teach about the resilience of irony. If he had a surer feel for the picaresque than Saul Bellow in ''Augie March,'' still he felt derivative of that work. In places one could swear he had memorized ''The Catcher in the Rye,'' and he probably dipped into ''Deliverance'' and ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' He might even have studied the mannerisms of movie stars. You could feel traces of John Wayne, Victor McLaglen and Burt Reynolds in his pages. The author had doubtless digested many a Hollywood comedy on small-town life. His instinct for life in hamlets on the Mississippi before the Civil War was as sharp as it was farcical, and couldn't be more commercial.
The author of ''The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'' had obviously been taught a lot by such major writers as Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck; he had certainly lifted from Faulkner and the mad tone Faulkner could achieve when writing about maniacal men feuding in deep swamps; he had also absorbed much of what Vonnegut and Heller could teach about the resilience of irony. If he had a surer feel for the picaresque than Saul Bellow in ''Augie March,'' still he felt derivative of that work. In places one could swear he had memorized ''The Catcher in the Rye,'' and he probably dipped into ''Deliverance'' and ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' He might even have studied the mannerisms of movie stars. You could feel traces of John Wayne, Victor McLaglen and Burt Reynolds in his pages. The author had doubtless digested many a Hollywood comedy on small-town life. His instinct for life in hamlets on the Mississippi before the Civil War was as sharp as it was farcical, and couldn't be more commercial.
Norman Mailer
Mark Twain's novel was originally
published in England in 1884.
The following year,
it was published in
the United States.
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