What happened in the Territory

Most of us who have read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remember that Huck plans to "light out for the Territory" at the end. And then what? Mark Twain's ending practically begs for a sequel, and all these years later Robert Coover finally provides one in his 2017 novel Huck Out West.

It's not just Huck who heads out west, but Jim, Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher as well, each of them crossing paths now and then. Tom and Becky actually get married, but it doesn't last. Tom still has big dreams and grand ambitions and hasn't lost that ability to talk people into almost anything. Becky turns to whoring. Jim finds religion and becomes a cook on a wagon train.

As for Huck, he remains something of an innocent, still uneducated but wiser and a better person than he thinks he is. Now that slavery has been outlawed, his new guilty friendship is with an Indian named Eeteh, ostracized by his tribe yet hated by white settlers as well. The latter, Tom included, want to kill him on sight. Huck remains torn between loyalty to his old pal, Tom, and his affection for Eeteh. He hates to admit that Eeteh may actually be the better friend.

With language that includes words like ruinder, sadfuller and possibleness, Coover's Huck sounds a lot like Twain's, yet somehow Coover himself doesn't sound much like Twain. We are never convinced that this is the sequel Twain would have written, nor is it told in the way Twain would have told it. Still it's quite a story.