A Puzzling Classic 
 It is a curious experience, reading Huckleberry Finn for the first time in my life after almost four decades in this country. Perhaps I needed that time to gain any sense of the cultural background against which it was written. Coming to it without childhood immersion surely helped me view it more objectively, but even so I had been awed by its reputation as a classic, one of the great American novels. I find a book filled with hilarious comedy and acute observation, written in the ill-educated but brilliantly inventive voice of a child, a tour-de-force of the first water. A masterpiece clearly, but a great novel...? No. It is too episodic, too shapeless, too apt to turn back upon itself and surrender the ground just gained; towards the end it becomes a task to keep reading, rather than a delight. 
 It is also a profoundly dangerous book--but that may be its greatest strength. Although I hate censorship of any kind, I almost understand why the book is so often banned in schools. It is not just the frequent occurrence of the "n-word," but the attitude that lays beneath it. Take the passage where Tom looks at the escaped slave Jim drifting downriver away from his scattered family: 
 When I waked up just at daybreak he was sitting there with his head down betwixt his knees, moaning and mourning to himself. I didn't take notice nor let on. I knowed what it was about. He was thinking about his wife and his children, away up yonder, and he was low and homesick; because he hadn't ever been away from home before in his life; and I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for their'n. It don't seem natural, but I reckon it's so.Is this last sentence tongue-in-cheek or not? Modern readers start with the assumption that of course black people have just as much capacity for familial affection as whites, and therefore praise Twain for his marvelous subtlety in having his hero be surprised by this. But this kind of thing happens again and again. I am slightly worried that we may be taking Twain too far out of his historical era by adopting him as a paid-up member of our own. One might conclude that Twain did indeed think that blacks and whites had different capacities, just that the difference was less absolute than his more bigoted countryfolk assumed. This book about a child requires first-rate teaching if it is to be understood by children. Its subject--individual freedom--is the central tenet of American philosophy, yet the way it is treated is so ironic, so insidious, so incomplete that it defies both simplistic thinking and simple censorship. 
 Meanwhile, there are the many joys of the book itself. It begins in the childhood world of Tom Sawyer, as when Tom enrolls Huck in a band of boy desperadoes pledged to rob and kill. But one of the boys, Ben Rogers, "said he couldn't get out much, only Sundays, and so he wanted to begin next Sunday; but all the boys said it would be wicked to do it on Sunday, and that settled the thing." Yet the violence becomes real when Huck falls back into the hands of his drunken father who, in a terrible antithesis to the American Dream, makes him stop his schooling and beats him for trying to better himself. Huck goes along with this at first, but when he fakes his own murder and escapes by raft, the entire tone of the novel changes. The passage about him lying down that night in the drifting canoe and hearing voices carrying over the water has the cleansing shock of personal experience. Just as he had done in the non-fiction Life on the Mississippi, Twain takes us into that place and time with an immediacy that cannot be matched. Some of his set-pieces, such as visits to a revival meeting and a country circus, also show the brilliance of his observation and powers of description. 
 But it is its moral content that gives the novel its substance. When Huck links up with Jim, the runaway slave from his home town, the book develops strong echoes of Robinson Crusoe. Twain like Defoe uses the situation to reexamine the ethical assumptions that are at the basis of society. Even so, much of it is tongue-in-cheek, as in the line about the wickedness of murder on a Sunday quoted above. There is a wonderful section when Huck and Jim debate the difference between "borrowing" and "stealing" and solve it by resolving not to "borrow" the things they don't really want. There is a marvelous passage in which Jim, born into a situation where human life is alas disposable, totally fails to understand the story of King Solomon and the baby. But behind it all is the moral issue of whether Huck, in enabling Jim to escape, is striking a blow for humanity or robbing the good people who brought him up. Written after emancipation, but set in a period some decades before, the novel manages to set the old morality against the new in a way that permits no easy answers. Difficult, even dangerous as I say, but nonetheless amazing. 
 What makes me withhold the fifth star are the book's failings as a novel. It is strongest in its middle third, which is everything that can be claimed of it. But it fades out towards the end. Jim is captured and locked up. Huck has plans to rescue him. But Tom Sawyer reappears and turns Huck's straightforward stratagem into a complex adventure from Dumas or Victor Hugo. We are back to the band of desperadoes from the opening. The situation is finessed at the end, but the return to childishness is regrettable. In this milestone of America's slow coming of age, Huck Finn does indeed grow up; Tom Sawyer probably never will.