In Matthew Olshan's FINN, the author doesn't so much update Mark Twain's classic, THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN, as use it as a device to avoid the PC police. It's a brilliant move, really, because it saves him from a trap that often plagues writers of teen books, i.e., how do you make good, nice, wholesome people interesting. And you can't, of course. Real people, even good people, think and do things that aren't so nice sometimes. In teen books, authors make their heroes safe to the point of dullness to avoid offending the reader, and more importantly, the reader's parents. By adapting Twain, Olshan sidesteps the issue. With just a nod to historicity, he can let his heroine badmouth various minorities without fear of reprisal. "Don't approve of likable racists?" he seems to be saying, "Well, I'm updating Twain here."

In Olshan's modern take on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the hero is a girl called Finn --- real name: Chloe. Jim is now a pregnant Mexican maid named Silvia. She's not a slave but an exploited illegal alien; her dream is still freedom, but to the West not north. Other details remain the same. As in the original, the mismatched pair journeys through a fantastical slice of America, where danger and excitement surround them. Fortunately, Olshan doesn't water down any of it. The risks the partners face and the depth of human evil they uncover are starkly real; Finn suffers beatings, kidnappings, and attempted sexual assault.

As is to be expected in an adaptation, little similarities to the source material run rampant. Olshan chooses not to conceal them. In fact, part of his method is to throw them at the reader like party favors. The mighty Mississippi becomes a paved drainage ditch, an abandoned rowboat becomes a raft, and so on. All very cute; but beyond flattering the reader's literary knowledge, it doesn't mean much. Occasionally, Olshan uses ideas from the original book in more substantive ways, and the results are better. Finn daydreaming quietly beside her modern river, as Huck did beside his, is a genuinely bucolic moment that loses none of its power by being borrowed. However, these moments are few and far between.

That Olshan has chosen to adapt Twain is not surprising: Twain was a keen social critic, and Olshan aspires to a similar style. But Olshan lacks Twain's eagle eye for hypocrisy. He can spin a yarn, but his thoughts on "society" tend toward the obvious. Worse, at times he lets his opinions cloud his prose. Finn's appeal is that she's a straight shooter. When she gets aw-shucksy to highlight an injustice, things fall apart. "The fact that we were white seemed to make us invisible, which was the opposite of my grandparents neighborhood, where it's black people who are invisible. Wait, I take that back. It wasn't exactly the opposite. In my grandparents neighborhood they just pretended that black people were invisible. Black people are actually watched very closely there." It's as if these sentences are backlit with flashing neon signs reading "meaningful content here." The more Olshan strives to make points about the world rather than his characters, the thinner his insights become.

Finn is a wonderful hero, and a fully modern one, but FINN never lives up to its grander ambitions. Although the book is geared towards older teenagers, its brisk plotting and trendy subject matter make it a quick and enjoyable read for just about anyone; but it's insights will only be significant to children or young teenagers. As an updating of HUCKLEBERRY FINN, the book misses its mark. What makes Twain's masterpiece great is the world view it embodies and the grace with which it embodies it. FINN succeeds as a story but not as a work of social criticism. In the end, the prospect of a Huckleberry Finn for 2000 is left unfulfilled, and the parallels, which promised so much, remain just a device and an amusement.

   --- Reviewed by Fred Kovey

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