Channeling Mark Twain: A Novel Review

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(More customer reviews)I've just finished bingeing on Carol Muske-Dukes's brave, new fourth novel "Channeling Mark Twain." In terms of sheer hunger-inducing suspense, Muske-Dukes's book rivals Jim Crace's recent delectable fairy tale, "The Pesthouse." For its stick-to-the-ribs cast of characters, Muske-Dukes wins the Alice Waters/Thomas Keller Award, with the wondrously seasoned brisket of Yiddish freak show eccentrics in Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" not far behind.
But comparisons are odious, and so is my food analogy! "Channeling Mark Twain" is unique, a thing of beauty -- and, I believe, a joy forever. From its initial pages introducing us to 20-something Minnesotan-cum-Manhattan poet, Holly Mattox, riding a bus to New York City's penitentiary on Rikers Island, this book rocks. Throughout, Muske-Dukes's ear for dialogue is spot-on, including her rendition of the pre-hip-hop 1970s jive of pimps visiting their whores in prison.
Muske-Dukes takes us beyond security gates for a jailbird eye's view of the slammer. Holly Mattox, unlike Capote's Holly Golightly, is a coming-of-age character more interested in poems than breakfast at Tiffany's. Holly's mission is to teach poetry to women behind bars and thereby free their minds, if not their bodies, from jail. With wry humor and plenty of compassion, Muske-Dukes introduces us to such cameo convicts as Baby Ain't, Never Delgado, and Akila Malik.
Ordinarily in novels, classroom scenes are boring. Muske-Dukes's scenes of poetry classes in prison are riveting, not least because of the way she focuses on each con's "story"--how she ended up in the "joint"--and how each story turns into a poem. The anthology of prisoners' poems printed at the end of several chapters is tremendously evocative. For example, Billie Dee Boyd, who threw her baby from a twelve-story apartment window, writes, "I say to you how my baby / Could fly. Two year old / And I seen her go way up / . . . . There she go. But / Taneesha didn't fly that time." Poems are seldom the mainstay of current fiction. Muske-Dukes, a redoubtable poet herself, flies in the face of readers' alleged antipathy to poetry. She showcases the craft or sullen art of murderers and whores, druggies and even a kickass correction officer with a heart of gold. She also gives us a single poem, which Holly has been working on for the novel's duration, which weaves together what Henry James called ficelles, at the end of the novel.
Just as prisoner Polly Lyle Clement is convinced she's the descendant of Samuel Langhorne Clemens AKA Mark Twain, Holly is divided between the Twin Cities, where she grew up, and New York, where she hangs her poet's hat. Just as she has married a young Minnesota physician as blond as she, she's attracted to a tall, dark, and handsome young literary czar in the Big Wormy Apple, editor of the trendy literary mag Samizdat, Sam Glass. To some extent "Channeling Mark Twain" is a roman à clef that deftly skewers certain writers prominent on the New York scene in the 1970s. Glass, along with Joseph Kyrilokov and a number of pseudonymous literati, including one wealthy benefactress, are the loving and sometimes not so loving butts of Muske-Dukes's satire. I found her depiction of a kind of imprisoned urban literary scene hilarious and devastatingly accurate.
I won't reveal the outcome of Holly's quest to bring poetry to Rikers Island, as well as solve the mystery of her rhyming namesake, Polly. Suffice it to say that Holly/Polly is an amazing sororal composite, just as Akila Malik's escape from Rikers Island involves something eerily fraternal, i.e., North Brother Island. If this sounds too pun-ridden to be true, read this novel to plumb the depths of the East River and see how, on the most profound level, it intersects with the Mississippi. Muske-Dukes's two rivers, like her Twin Cities, have one channel, which she pilots as well as riverboat captain Mark Twain.

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