Review of Robert Coover’s Huck out West
Huck out West is the story of Huckleberry Finn’s adventures after the original Huckleberry Finn as told by Mark Twain, following Huckleberry Finns adventures with Tom Sawyer as they work for the pony express, the confederate states, and the union army, and continues as Tom Sawyer goes his own way back east and Huckleberry Finn joins an Indian Tribe and shacks up with a nose-less squaw. The story is told from the point of view of Huckleberry Finn in a southern cowboy vernacular, with misspellings and odd grammar that works to create the feel that we are actually in the time and place of the novel, which is during and after the Civil War and takes place down south and moves out west. The misspellings and odd grammar occasionally make for a difficult read, as it is sometimes a matter of guess work as to what a particular word or phrase means, and a dictionary is no use for finding out the meaning of misspelled words, and the odd verb conjugations make it difficult to figure out when exactly a particular even took place. In spite of the difficulties of reading the piece it’s a very fun book to read, most of the humor is inappropriate and off-color. At one point Huckleberry Finn is in a bar trying to get guns for the Indian tribe that he was staying with, telling people instead that he was getting guns for a “vegilanty” group, and one of the men in the bar tells a story about how he was lost in the desert, dying of thirst, and was saved by the Virgin Mary who let him suck her tits. At another point in the book Huck is relating his life with the Indians to a man and the man asks if “A squaws business runs from side to side, rather than fore and aft?” To which Huck replies that it was just normal. The book is a short read, running only three hundred pages, and I am just over half finished with the book, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the original Huckleberry Finn.
"Review of Robert Coover’s Huck out West" by Kenneth Larot Yamat
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