📚 24 - July
Mark Twain (1884). The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Percival Everett (2024). James.
I wasn't crazy about Huck Finn, which I read before in middle school. The funnest parts by far were the hijinks with the Duke and the King. Though if this is a reading blog, I'll admit that I had trouble concentrating while reading, largely due to factors outside the text. Despite its erstwhile status as the Great American Novel—indeed, it seems much the literary thought around this book concerns questions that interest me little about the project that is "America"—Huck Finn remains to me essentially a pleasure read. Maybe I wasn't in the mood to be pleased.
Simpletons and tricksters—much of the plot's interpersonal dynamics hinges on a particular mode of allowing others to think you simple, or allowing others to believe you think them simple, or a mutual vortex of performances of simplicity into which nobody buys. (This is the principle Everett's text plays with as well—in Twain's work, Jim's literally unbelievable simplicity seems to be hiding in plain sight as a central textual question.)
Tom Sawyer looms for me now as a villain of American literature—more than an obnoxious entrepreneur, his dominating cruelty at the end (gleefully toying with Jim's freedom so that he, Tom, can play out a fantasy of Monte Cristo-style prison break—a game in which, perplexingly, Jim participates) is shocking given how he's considered a beloved American rascal.
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