Book Review: The Autobiography of Miss Huckleberry Finn by Gina Logan 

I don't think many of us read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for fun. Most likely we were made to read it in high school. Or maybe CliffsNotes did the reading for us. As for those of us who found ourselves enjoying that trip down the Mississippi on a raft with two escapees — a young boy leaving behind his violent Pap and a slave chasing freedom — well, many of us turned out to be English majors.

And then we taught that book 20 times more and cringed when students revolted from reading the N-word 10 times on each page. "The book is a time machine," you tell your class. But unless you can get students into that machine with you and set the dial for 1840, the language remains a shocker. Compared with the irony of The Catcher in the Rye, Twain's tale itself may seem to today's teenagers like pure fantasy, a kid's story.

Yet for all the factors working against it, Huckleberry Finn holds its own in American culture. In Vermont alone, we've seen two novelists publish "spin-offs" that approach Twain's novel from daring new perspectives. First there was Jon Clinch's acclaimed 2007 novel Finn (which tells the violent story of Huck's Pap). Now comes Gina Logan's self-published novel The Autobiography of Miss Huckleberry Finn.

The novel's hook is right there in the title. We pick up a book like this because we want to see how Logan will handle the challenge she's set herself: How can Huck Finn have been a girl? In justifying the premise, will she try to out-Huck the original huckster? Will this be an exercise in mimicry? When and if Huck grows out of his/her juvenility, will we still love him/her?

The first thing Logan does is place us in that time machine. She begins her novel with a document discovered in a fire that generates the following news article:

Dowager Philanthropist's Remains Found in Earthquake Wreckage

(San Francisco, April 21, 1906) The Body of Mrs. Theophilus V. Osterhouse was recovered from the smoldering remains of her Nob Hill home by soldiers searching for survivors of the earthquake and subsequent fires that continue to devastate the city.

The document specifies that it is not to be opened and read until the year 2007. It's a 400-page autobiography written by Mrs. Osterhouse, aka Sarah Mary Williams. That's the name Twain's Huck gave himself when he dressed up as a girl — except that, in Logan's version, Huck was actually a girl dressed as a boy pretending to be a girl. Yes, gentle reader, Huck Finn was a real person — and female.

In Logan's metafiction, Twain knows Huck is a girl, interviews her and pays her $5,000 for her story. We learn that her mother named her Huckleberry because her eyes were dark like the berry. She dresses as a boy because her early life in Hannibal is rough-and-tumble, as is her trip down the river. For much of her life after that, especially when establishing herself out west, she prefers the more practical garb of menfolk. As to how much of Twain's story is true, Huck says, "he lied as much as I did, albeit he did it rather better than I ever managed to do."

Both Logan's and Clinch's novels take us back into the seminal text, as they must to legitimize their hybrid pedigrees, while making changes to increase the fun. If you've read Clinch's Finn, you may think you know what fate befell Huck's mother — but Logan tells a different tale. (Turns out she was as bad as Huck's father.) This version of Huck falls in love with a girl at her eastern boarding school, is betrayed, heads west to find her mother's relations, is betrayed again, falls in love with a black man whose father accompanied her down the Mississippi — and that's just the beginning of her adventures. Oh, and the real Huck Finn, according to Logan, did not use the N-word. That was a Twain device.

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• Jeb Wallace-Brodeur
• Gina Logan

You don't have to know Twain's book to enjoy Logan's version, but it helps. The book's unlikely events are easier to accept because we trust the narrator. Huck often sounds like the Huck we know in her autobiography: "The light was all goldenish an' shinin' on the ground and the leaves an' all, and there was a little soft wind up high in the trees — no clouds to speak of, and I stopped to rest a minute..."

Logan uses this convincingly Twain-esque language to relay Huck's early memories, but in occasional instances of adult narration, she deploys a vocabulary that comes right out of a textbook of literary analysis. For instance, Huck muses, "I am still the unredeemable son of the town drunkard in those scenes, a foil to Tom and to Joe Thatcher and Ben Harper..." and "I will continue to call him [Samuel Clemens] by his nom de plume [Mark Twain]" (italics mine).

While this sophisticated literary vocabulary is a distraction, Logan generally abstains from it. Instead, she gives Huck a realistic awareness of her lack of cultivation, which becomes palpable later in the text as she matures and begins to correct her own grammar.

This is a self-published work of high quality, but the book could have used an editor to reduce the plot-dragging description. A section on how to dress as a woman shows good scholarship but could have stayed mostly in the research notes. A lengthy wagon trip across the plains feels just that — lengthy.

The novel is at its most original and intriguing in a section set in San Francisco, where the adult Huck has to deal with her mother and aunt — who run a whorehouse — and her evil cousin and uncle. It's edgy and more adult in its entertainment than anything Twain might have written. In fact, I would have liked the book better had it stayed in Frisco and kept its main character busy outwitting the denizens of that atmospheric town. The result might have been another Huck novel that channels Cormac McCarthy, as the New York Times says of Finn.

Instead, Huck has to push off for the territories once again, and Logan's plot tangles and resolutions suggest she's channeling a literary giant of another era — Dickens. Still, Twain and Dickens in one book isn't bad for the price.

Part of the novel's fun is watching Logan solve potential plot conundrums occasioned by her premise: For instance, how could Jim, the runaway slave, have traveled all those miles down the Mississippi without knowing his raft mate was a girl? (Fact is, we're told, he did know.) Watch for revelations about those two rascals who pulled the grift on the Wilks family, as well. There are enough surprises in this book to keep it fun. Just skip over the parts that drag — it won't be long before you're having fun again.

The original print version of this article was headlined "He Was a She"