"Listen. Every author wants to write at least one time-travel novel," says an aging Huck Finn, the narrator of Norman Lock's remarkable A Boy in His Winter. It is 2077, and Finn is now a retired yacht salesman named Albert Barthelmy. He is recounting his boyhood on the Mississippi, where he floated through time and history, perpetually 13, until Hurricane Katrina washed him ashore, thrusting him back into time.
In the story as Albert tells it, the raft itself is the time machine for two mythic literary characters whose adventures are nothing less than the story of America itself. Huck and Jim step off the raft for brief periods but always return; Jim wants to wait until the human race has improved before leaving the raft permanently. Tom Sawyer makes an appearance as a Confederate solder and later as an old man whose sole possession is a copy of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, borrowed from the Baton Rouge Public Library and never returned. The pair floats past Lincoln's assassination, the Industrial Revolution and on through the Jim Crow South and the birth of jazz. Huck loves Jim and resents him in equal measure, and never more so than when Henry, a black jazz musician, joins them and becomes Jim's close confidant. The tragic consequences of Huck's resentment haunt him for the rest of his life.
And the story of that life is as full as the adventures that launched it. After Katrina, Huck is rescued by a group of drug smugglers, lands in a juvenile detention center, and later marries an African-American children's book illustrator before a late-life stint impersonating Mark Twain at the Hannibal River Amusement Park.
The span of his life may be epic but Albert is more interested in his story's odd synchronicities and its truth than in its facts. He argues with Mark Twain's one-dimensional representation of his character in Twain's bid for an entertaining story; his is a loftier goal: "I'll try to study cruelty (I regret my own) and render it in more familiar terms," he says.
The Boy in His Winter is extraordinary. Lock (Love Among the Particles) writes some of the most deceptively beautiful sentences in contemporary fiction. Beneath their clarity are layers of cultural and literary references, profound questions about loyalty, race, the possibility of social progress, and the nature of truth and story. They merge with an iconic American character, tall tales intact, to create something entirely new--an American fable of ideas. --Jeanette Zwart
Shelf Talker: With time travel and literary references, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is re-created into a stunning fable that celebrates and critiques our cultural preoccupations.