Finn

Jon Clinch

Washington Post Top Ten for 2007


(Finn Movie trailer)

'Shocking and charming. Clinch creates a folk-art masterpiece that will delight, beguile and entertain as it does justice to its predecessor.'

(New York Post)

'In this brilliant, dark, and utterly fearless debut, Clinch’s portrayal of the elder Finn is stark, brutal, and fierce—with glimpses of vulnerability, humanity, and love that make its litany of horrors all the more heartbreaking. Clinch’s tale is not only filled with echoes of the great American classic to which it is tied; it is destined to become one itself. This book will haunt you long after you’ve turned its last page. Read it.'

Sara Gruen, author of Water for Elephants

In this masterful debut by a major new voice in fiction, Jon Clinch takes us on a journey into the history and heart of one of American literature’s most brutal and mysterious figures: Huckleberry Finn’s father. The result is a deeply original tour de force that springs from Twain’s classic novel but takes on a fully realised life of its own.

Finn sets a tragic figure loose in a landscape at once familiar and mythic. It begins and ends with a lifeless body – flayed and stripped of all identifying marks – drifting down the Mississippi. The circumstances of the murder, and the secret of the victim’s identity, shape Finn’s story as they will shape his life and his death.

Along the way, Clinch introduces a cast of unforgettable characters: Finn’s terrifying father, known only as the Judge; his sickly, sycophantic brother, Will; blind Bliss, a secretive moonshiner; the strong and quick-witted Mary, a stolen slave who becomes Finn’s mistress; and, of course, young Huck himself. In daring to re-create Huck for a new generation, Clinch gives us a living boy in all his human complexity — not an icon, not a myth, but a real child facing vast possibilities in a world alternately dangerous and bright.

Finn is a novel about race; about paternity in its many guises; about the shame of a nation recapitulated by the shame of one absolutely unforgettable family. Above all, Finn reaches back into the darkest waters of America’s past to fashion something compelling, fearless, and new.

'Haunting ... Clinch re-imagines Finn in a strikingly original way, replacing Huck’s voice with his own magisterial vision — one that’s nothing short of revelatory ... Spellbinding.'

(Washington Post)

'His models may include Cormac McCarthy, and Charles Frazier … but [Finn] has a contemporary terseness and spikiness. This voice couldn’t be better suited to a historical novel with a modernist sensibility: Clinch’s riverbank Missouri feels postapocalyptic, and his Pap Finn is a crazed yet wily survivor in a polluted landscape ... Clinch’s Pap is a convincingly nightmarish extrapolation of Twain’s. He’s the mad, lost and dangerous center of a world we’d hate to live in — or do we still live there? — and crave to revisit as soon as we close the book.'

(Newsweek)

'The novel succeeds because of the quality of [Clinch's] writing, and because he is a meticulous and insightful reader of Twain ...

Clinch has created a compelling protagonist, whom the reader knows to be irredeemable — a destroyer of several innocent lives — and yet who occasionally evokes moments of unsettling sympathy.'

Heather Neilson (Canberra Times)

'Finn brims with tension, fuelled by sentences as taut as a cane pole wrestling a catfish in muddy waters. Considering the heady literary terrain Clinch hopes to master, the novel succeeds better than anyone other than its author could have expected. It offers a jolting companion to the mischievous antics of Huckleberry Finn.'

Erik Spanberg (Courier-Mail)

'Finn uses the ambiguities in Huck's tale to weave an impressive tale of its own ...

In its reuse of many of Huckleberry Finn's characters and its weaving in and out of the original story, Finn proves a clever, tightly imagined fiction.'

Ed Wright (Sydney Morning Herald)

Jon Clinch

Jon Clinch is a native of upstate New York and a graduate of Syracuse University. He has taught American literature, has been creative director for a Philadelphia ad agency, and has run his own agency in the Philadelphia suburbs. His stories have appeared in John Gardner's MSS magazine. He and his wife have one daughter.

Website: www.readfinn.com (Random House)

Finn
Format: Paperback
Extent: 304pp
Size: 234mm x 153mm
ISBN (13): 9781921215629
RRP: $32.95
Pub date: July 2007

Rights held:

ANZ