It takes some cheek to write a sequel to Mark Twain's classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. If anyone can pull it off, however, it's Robert Coover (The Public Burning; Noir), whose writing pushes the boundaries of fiction. Despite this oeuvre of challenging reading, Huck Out West is a funny, often rollicking, episodic story that embellishes Twain's sardonic wit with Coover's own trenchant humor and linguistic finesse to prick the Manifest Destiny balloons of United States history.
Coover's Huck is an exuberant pragmatist--exploring the "territory" west of the Mississippi one step ahead of those out to "sivilize" him. To scratch his itch for rambling, he scouts for both Civil War armies, steals horses and cattle, kills "injuns," rides for the Pony Express, stumbles into the Dakota gold rush, and joins a Lakota Sioux tribe. With his truth-stretching best friend Tom Sawyer a lawyer (what else) back east, Huck finds a new wingman in the Lakota outcast Eeteh: "He's a loafer and a drunk like me and he don't fit in with his people no more'n I fit in with mine." When Tom unexpectedly shows up at Dakota Gulch to bring order to its remote anarchy, he exhorts a gathering crowd: "We're making the first ever perfect nation out here and there ain't no damn injuns going to stand in the way." But Huck's learned a thing or two in his years out west and answers with his usual simple insight: "Well, you can live with folks without trying to whup them." Surprisingly perhaps, Huck Out West is very much a book for our times. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.