Jim The life and afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's comrade

Mark Twain used the character of Jim from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to push back against racist myths of the Reconstruction era, according to this astute study. Fishkin (From Fact to Fiction), an English professor at Stanford University, argues that Twain's friendships with Frederick Douglass and an erudite Black tour guide Twain met while on a trip to Venice convinced him to portray Jim as intelligent--as seen in scenes where Jim gets the better of Huck Finn in arguments--to rebut the prevailing "myth of Black mental inferiority." Pushing back against criticisms that Jim is a minstrel stereotype, Fishkin notes that Twain viewed minstrel shows as unrealistic and avoided several minstrelsy conventions (e.g., replacing the "final f or v sound in words like of or give or have with b") in his effort to more accurately represent "Missouri Negro dialect." A chapter recounting episodes from Huck Finn from Jim's perspective feels redundant after Percival Everett's James, which receives only a passing mention, but the chronicle of Jim's stage and screen portrayals fascinates (both the 1936 and 1973 Soviet film adaptations of Huck Finn "use the novel... to criticize America and to champion socialist ideals of interracial proletarian solidarity"). This sheds new light on a much-studied character. Agent: Sam Stoloff, Frances Goldin Literary. (Apr.)

Reviving Huck's friend. Few know more about Mark Twain than Stanford Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and few have done more to excavate the racial world of Twain's America than she has. The author of the landmark bookWas Huck Black? Fishkin here writes a biography and critical history of Huckleberry Finn's companion, the enslaved Jim. Boldly affirming the need to keep the N-word in print but refusing to bow to later convention and use that word as an epithet for Twain's fictional man, Fishkin gives a life to the kind of person who would have been familiar to the author and many of his readers. Her book writes a history of race relations in America, focusing on various myths about people of African descent. The work explores the place of Black men and women in Twain's own life and looks at how the novel's critics often used Jim as a marker for their own predilections. Jim is someone we have often made our own: We project our fears, our sentiments, our fantasies on him. Here, Fishkin restores life to the character. She argues that Twain wished to create a figure of creative power--of imagination, bravery, and eloquence--and dramatize the net that slavery cast over him. Jim comes back, here, as a figure of great wit. Fishkin has a fine ear for comedy in Twain, and a great insight into dialect. In scene after scene, Fishkin shows how Jim is "more active, smart, and assertive…than he is often given credit for." Jim's adventures have lived on: stage adaptations, films, classroom discussions, popular cultural artifacts, and so forth. Any reader of Percival Everett's award-winning novelJames should read Fishkin's book as a scholarly mirror through which to better perceive this great character and ourselves. A powerful work of historical scholarship that brings to life one of American fiction's most complex creations. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.