Tag Archive for Mark Twain

Huckleberry Finn — Archetypical Boys — and a Scene from My Upcoming Novel, SHAKEN (ages 9-13)

I’ve been on a good reading streak lately. You know the feeling. These times when you keep picking up good books and your mind feels engaged, buzzing with ideas and perceptions. I read Percival Everett’s new novel, James, which is Everett’s version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from Jim’s point of view. A brilliant book. It led me to reread Huckleberry — it had been decades — which was also profoundly interesting, a book  wholly deserving of its place in the canon of American Literature. Not perfect, nope, but foundational in so many ways. 

Jim and Huck on a raft on the river.

It’s all right there.

Sidenote: 2007 saw the publication of Jon Clinch’s debut novel, Finn, which focuses on Huckleberry’s father. I remember loving this dark, gritty tale when it first came out — we meet Huck in this one, too — and now I feel that I need to revisit it again.

Anyway, that’s three supremely talented writers, like gold diggers seeking riches, working the same deep vein: that great fictional character, Huckleberry Finn. The distilled spirit of the American boy. Or, at least, one version of that boy.

In a similar way, I think of Ramona Quimby as a classic type of American girl. A powerful archetype, for Ramona is the most imitated character in all of children’s literature.

 

 

 

 

Inspired thus, and perusing the internet, as one does, I came across this illustration of Tom Sawyer by Norman Rockwell:

 

The image jarred something loose in me, because I have a similar scene in my middle-grade novel, Shaken (Macmillan, September 2024). There’s a boy sneaking out of a bedroom window late at night. Sure, I could look no farther than my own childhood to come up with that idea. But there was something else at play. Something deeper and more resonant. 

I should note here that the neighborhood boy in Shaken was inspired, directly, by my childhood friend, Jimmy Kuhlman, AKA, Jimbo Ku. But I now realize that the “Jimbo” in my story was also inspired by Twain’s depiction of Tom and Huck. All those characters (living and fictional)  flicker around the essence of the archetypical American boy, the mischievous & resourceful rapscallion. In my book, I wanted that character to represent a sense of freedom, which was something missing from Kristy’s mindset: a wildness, an openness . . . a touch of Huckleberryness.

Looking back, I understand that I treasured those qualities in my old (and still current) friend. He had an undeniable energy and rebellious intelligence. A rule-breaker. I wanted this character to enter Kristy’s world and leave her enriched and transformed. He’s just that kid in everybody’s neighborhood who is a little bit different. More alive, more free, more daring.

I sensed that those qualities were absent from Kristy’s highly-scheduled, goal-oriented routine. Today I look around and suspect that those qualities are missing from the life of so many young people. There’s just not enough time to muck around. Which is too bad, because so many good and valuable lessons are learned from just mucking about.

Here’s an excerpt from the moment when Kristy first notices — really notices — her next door neighbor. It is late at night and she is sitting on her front porch while the world sleeps. Or so she thinks:

This was where Kristy sat huddled under a fleece blanket late one evening long after her parents had gone to bed. Sleeping was still a problem—it never got back on schedule—especially since she no longer exerted herself physically with sports. Kristy used to fall into bed dead-tired; now she had become nocturnal, like a bat or a bandicoot. On this night, Kristy wasn’t doing anything in particular. Just being. Enjoying the silence, the body’s quiet, late autumn’s brisk, crisp, sharp aroma of decay.

This was something new, the post-concussed version of herself, Kristy 2.0. Up all hours of the night, not busy, not active, not even restless really. The fall fragrances soothed and comforted her in a way they never had before—the smell of rotted plants and leaves and acorns: dark, rich, woody. Kristy sat content as an owl perched on a limb: watchful, alert, still.

A soft noise came from the neighbors’ house to her immediate right. The Sullivans. A second-story window shivered up almost soundlessly, but not quite. Dark curtains billowed. And a black-booted foot stepped out onto the front roof. A bent figure hunched through the opening and, once outside, carefully lowered the window shut. It was the skinny boy next door, the youngest of them all, sneaking out of his house. Interesting. Kristy felt like a spy, as if she were witnessing a minor felony, something that she wasn’t meant to see. The night whispering a secret into her ear, the moon lending its stolen light.

What was he up to?

His name, she knew, was Jimmy. They had never talked, not much anyway, though his family had moved in nearly two years ago. Though roughly the same age, their paths rarely crossed. He wore a private school uniform and rode the bus to get there. There were four or five Sullivan children—it was hard to get an accurate census—one of those sprawling families with an ever-changing assortment of cars cluttering the driveway. Teenagers coming and going. Young adults. Sometimes they even parked on the front lawn. The family had moved up from the city, Kristy believed. Two and a half hours on the train and a galaxy away.

The boy moved to the edge of the roof, rubbed his hands against his jeans. Then he leaned dangerously out over the black nothingness and, with one hand, grabbed hold of a drooping tree limb. He swung so freely, so effortlessly—like a gibbon brachiating through the forest. Kristy took a sudden intake of air when he dipped to a lower branch, wrapped his legs around the trunk for momentary purchase, then dropped to the earth as if he’d done it a hundred times before.

A lone car traveled down the empty road, casting long shadows with its headlights. The boy stepped close to the house into the shadows. The beams swept across the grounds like searchlights in a prison movie. The danger passed.

Even if the boy glanced in the direction of Kristy’s porch, he almost certainly would not have seen her, wrapped in the deep-blue fleece blanket pulled up to her neck. He furtively moved to the sidewalk and into the street, long strides and calm confidence. He carried something in his right hand. What was it? In answer to her question, the boy lowered a skateboard to the street and stepped onto it. He pushed off—one, two— smooth as silk over glass. With a practiced gesture, he pulled a hoodie over his head and disappeared into the night.

Where was he going, now in the witching hour, while all the world slept? To meet his friends? To party in the woods? To see his girlfriend? Or maybe he was like Kristy, awake because he was lured outside by the autumn air, a nocturnal creature of the dark. A fellow bandicoot. Maybe he couldn’t sleep. Maybe home was too hard. It was a puzzle that Kristy couldn’t solve. Not yet, anyway.

She longed to follow him into the dark.

For 7th-grader Kristy Barrett, soccer is life. It has always been at the center of Kristy’s world. Her friendships and self-worth, her dreams and daily activities, all revolve around the sport. Until she suffers from a serious concussion and has to set soccer aside for an uncertain amount of time. Kristy begins to struggle in school, experience stress, anxiety, and panic attacks which ultimately bring her to some questionable decisions . . . and the care of a therapist as she suffers from post-concussion syndrome. It’s a story about identity, therapy, new friendships, making mistakes and, finally, coming true to one’s ever-evolving self.

 

SHAKEN will be published on September 10th, 2024. It is available for pre-order. Thanks for reading.

 

Mark Twain’s Library & Other Pleasures

I won’t make you wait for it. My apologies for the spillover into the sidebar, but it would require actual skill to adjust the size of the photo. So, like, that’s not happening!

This is Mark Twain’s first-floor library in his Hartford, Connecticut, home. How cool is that?

You can thank Emily Temple of Flavorwire for that shot, since she recently compiled a hot batch of photographs featuring the libraries of famous writers, inspired, in part, by the recent publication of Leah Price’s new book, Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books.

Below, a few more of my favorites . . .

Joan Didion, John Dunne, daughter Quintana Roo, and dog.

William Faulkner collected old books, apparently. Oh, wait.

Anne Sexton’s shelves look so . . . normal.

Norman Mailer lived in Brooklyn Heights, not far from my brother. But Norman had more books, and a better apartment. He also liked lamps.

This Rolling Stone gathers no moss, but collects books, obviously. If you are really in a Keith mood, go here for my ultimate “Keef Sings” mix.

Stories Behind the Story: The Case of the Frog-Jumping Contest

There’s a little bit of Mark Twain in this book, mostly from two sources, his short story “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” and, of course, his Huckleberry Finn character.

The story begins with a standard thriller device, the ticking bomb. Throw a deadline into a standard mystery and you immediately ratchet up the tension. In this case, look at the book’s opening paragraphs:

“My frog is missing,” croaked Stringbean Noonan. “And I MUST have him back by this Sunday at noon.”

“Sunday at noon?!” Mila exclaimed. “That’s only twenty-four hours from now.”

Stringbean stuffed two dollars into my coin jar. “There’s more where that came from,” he sniffed. “Just find that frog.”

Adonis, the missing frog, was no ordinary frog. (Love that name, btw.) He was a champion jumper with hops to spare, and there was a big frog-jumping contest coming up — with a $20 cash prize for the longest leap.

So already we’ve added motive to the mystery.

“Twenty dollars,” I whistled. “That’s a lot of money.”

I borrowed the first Twain idea in Chapter Five, “Want to Bet?” Most famously, there’s a character in Twain’s “The Notorious Jumping Frog from Calaveras County,” a noted gambler named Jim Smiley, who loves to bet. On anything. And everything. Twain describes him thus in the story:

“If he even seen a straddle bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take him to get to — to wherever he going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle bug to Mexico but what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was on the road.”

Anyway, I reread the story during the brainstorming stages of the book, when I was casting about for ideas, so I decided to give that character trait to a minor character, Jigsaw’s classmate, Eddie Becker, who I had established in previous books as being highly motivated by money.

Eddie loved to bet — and there wasn’t anything in the world he wouldn’t bet on. Two birds might be sitting on a telephone line. Eddie would bet which one would fly away first. He’d bet on a ball game or the color of the next car that drove down the street. The weirder the bet, the happier he was. Eddie was just one of those guys who needed to keep things interesting. Regular life wasn’t quite enough for him. Nah, there had to be something riding on it.

Jigsaw and Eddie enjoy a friendly bet. Later Eddie casually mentions a new suspect, Sasha Mink (another name I love). With Adonis now out of the way, Sasha stands to win the frog-jumping contest with her entry, Brooklyn. Eddie tells Jigsaw that she lives in the big house on the corner of Penny Lane and Abbey Road.

(These Jigsaw Jones books are loaded with pop culture references that likely float over the heads of 98% of readers. Just for fun — and for Mom or Dad who might be reading the story aloud.)

Jigsaw eventually decides he needs to learn more about frogs, so he enlists the aid of Slim Palmer, the best frog trainer in town. Here’s an illustration of Slim, as drawn by the book’s wonderful illustrator, Jamie Smith.

Look like anybody you know?

That’s Huckleberry Finn, folks. And the resemblance is intentional.

I had great fun writing the “frog whisperer” chapters, where Jigsaw meets 14-year-old Slim Palmer (and there’s a nod to Chili Palmer here, too, from the movie “Get Shorty,” based on the book by Elmore Leonard, just his casual cool). Another side note: that’s one of the advantages of writing detective stories. Each new mystery takes the detective out into the world — a bastion of moral integrity in a world gone sour: in this case, the second-grade version — where he meets new characters, good and bad. It keeps the series fresh for readers, and entertaining to write, too. Whenever the series felt boring or stale, I knew it was time for Jigsaw (and me) to encounter new faces and places.

“You’re going about this case all wrong,” Slim told me. “First thing you got to do is you got to start thinking like a frog.”

“Thinking like a frog?” I repeated.

“Exactamundo,” Slim said with a sharp nod.

“Ribbit,” I croaked.

“I’m not joking,” Slim protested. “Frogs are serious creatures. They don’t joke around.”

I researched on the internet how to catch frogs, learned some things about using a burlap bag and a flashlight, so wrote a scene where Slim urged Jigsaw to step (reluctantly) into a rather gross lake. Together they succeed in snagging a frog, and before he departs, Slim offers one final bit of advice:

“Oh, don’t you worry,” Slim said. “You’ll be fine. Just remember what I said. You have to be kind to that frog. Treat him nice, like he’s your little brother or something. A happy frog is a good jumping frog. You have to love him. A frog gets scared or nervous, he’ll jump sideways, backways, anyways. You’ll never win nothing with a jittery frog.”

Slim also advised Jigsaw to keep his frog with a pan of water. It was important to keep them wet. As he explained, “You don’t want a dry frog. They don’t jump so good when they’re dead.”

POSTSCRIPT: I have to share this letter that I was handed last week on a visit to Tioga Hills Elementary. One student, Alyssa, apparently read a book a day in preparation for my arrival — and wrote a letter to me about each one. Amazing, amazing. I have more than a dozen letters from Alyssa. Here’s the one she wrote for The Case of the Frog-Jumping Contest. Thank you, Alyssa, you rock.

NOTE: THANKS FOR STOPPING BY, I’LL BE AWAY ON SCHOOL VISITS ALL WEEK, THIS TIME TRAVELING DOWN TO SICKLERVILLE AND MARLTON, NEW JERSEY.