Mark Twain vs. Tom Sawyer: the bold deconstruction of a national icon.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Mark Twain: A Life - Book Review

It's hard to read Ron Powers' engaging new Mark Twain: A Life (Free Press) and not conclude that there's a congenital defect in the very heart of American literature. Powers, a Pulitzer Prize winner for Flags of Our Fathers, argues that the man born Samuel Clemens "democratized the national voice by availing it of vernacular; rough action that sprawled over waterway and open terrain; comedy political consciousness, and skepticism toward the very idea of lofty instruction."

Where earlier authors looked to England and Europe for aesthetic inspiration and cultural validation, writes Powers, Twain provided a "radically new native voice [that was] diametrically the opposite of Jamesian eloquence [and which] radiated, in its very homespun ardency, a new sort of American truth."

You don't have to buy that argument fully to agree that Twain (1835-1910) helped literally to bring it all back home. He didn't just speak in an unmistakably American argot; he simultaneously conceptualized and criticized our national character and experience--and took for granted that they should be his grand subject matter. Whether memorializing the Mississippi River, traveling to the Holy Land, or introducing "Yankee ingenuity" to King Arthur's court, Twain was constantly measuring, defining, and questioning what it meant to be American as the U.S. grew in power, prestige, and influence throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

So what's the problem? Only this: Twain's acknowledged masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, inspires almost universal ambivalence among its biggest fans. "It's the best book we've had," pronounced Ernest Hemingway in 1932. "All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." Oh, but one more thing, counseled Papa: "If you must read it you must stop where ... Jim is stolen from the boys [and imprisoned by a slave catcher]. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating."

As Powers puts it, "Huckleberry Finn endures as a consensus masterpiece despite these final chapters" in which Tom Sawyer leads Huck through elaborate, ineffectual, and grotesque machinations to rescue the runaway slave from Tom's Uncle Silas (even worse, we eventually learn that Jim has in fact been free the whole time). Most critics feel that once Tom Sawyer shows up, Huckleberry Finn devolves into little more than minstrel-show satire and broad comedy that cheapens the deep, transgressive bond that has...