Q&A with Adam Nelson

  

 

 

Adam Nelson is the author of the new novel Huckleberry Jim. He is the founder of the New York creative agency Workhouse.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Huckleberry Jim, and how much was the novel based on your own experiences?

 

A: I was 22, just out of drama school, and the only job anyone offered me was Huck Finn in a two-man show touring schools. Three performances a day, equaling $30, in a car that smelled like an ashtray.

 

The man playing Jim had been doing that circuit for years. He was better than me at everything: the acting, the audiences, the country we were driving through. I spent that tour thinking I was having an adventure. I spent the next 35 years figuring out what he was having.

 

The tour is real. So is the father. I met mine around that time, and the political history behind him is a matter of public record; so is the request he eventually made of me, which I won't paraphrase because the book does it better. He invited me to visit him on a film set. I went and then the unimaginable happened.

 

What didn't happen is the very thing Axel is running from, the act that puts him in that car. That's invention, and it was necessary. A novel needs a reason for a young man to disappear for two weeks, and mine was the wrong shape.

 

Here's what I didn't notice until long after the book was finished: Huck is also running from a father. Pap is the corpse in the floating house, dead the whole journey, revealed at the end.

 

I never set out to echo Twain on that. I was writing my own life, and it turned out my life had been shadowing his fiction for decades. That's what happens when your truth crashes into someone else's story.

 

I didn't choose the year 1991, either. It chose me; that's when the tour was. But writing it down years later, I found I'd been handed a time that shares similarities with the one we are now living through.

 

A war on television. An economy shedding jobs. Music that was angry in a way that frightened people. And a videotape out of Los Angeles that showed the country something it had been assuring itself wasn't happening. Everyone knew something was breaking; nobody agreed on what.

 

Put that next to now and the resemblance isn't nostalgia, it's a diagnosis. Same sickness, different decade. I didn't have to build the parallel, I just had to be accurate about where I'd been.

 

Q: How would you describe the dynamic between your characters Axel Emerson and Moses Morton?

 

A: Two worlds colliding, which is the premise of Huckleberry Finn itself, though I didn't see that until years after I'd lived it.

 

Axel is 22 and thinks he's the protagonist. Moses is 55 and knows he's the reason anyone's watching. Axel had a young man's picture of this country, the one you get from school and television shows, and it could not accommodate what was actually out there. So the tour becomes a schooling neither of them signed up to give or receive.

 

That's the oddly meta part, and it snuck up on me. Twain put a boy and a man on a raft and let the river carry them somewhere neither of them controlled. We had a Chrysler Imperial and the mountains instead of the Mississippi. Water swapped for switchbacks, a gold hood ornament instead of a current.

 

But it's the same vessel doing the same work: forcing two people who would never otherwise share a room to share one for weeks, while the country slides past the window and gets a vote in everything.

 

Axel thinks they're becoming friends. Moses has run this scenario many times before. The comedy comes from Axel not knowing what’s what. So does everything else.

 

The real answer to what's between them doesn't arrive until the last pages. There's a turn near the end that reframes everything the two of them have said and done to each other, and once you've read it you can't read the earlier chapters the same way.

 

I built the book so the relationship can't be understood until that moment arrives. It's the one thing I'd ask readers to discover on their own.

 

Q: The Clarion Review of the novel calls it a “blunt historical novel about the power—and limitations—of the arts to educate, connect, effect change, or create an escape.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: "Blunt" is right, and I'll take it. The book isn't sly.

 

But the sentence gets sharper if you read it as a description of the tour rather than the novel. Two men drive into a school gymnasium and perform Huckleberry Finn for 8-year-olds, and the show is supposed to do something: educate them, connect them, change something, offer an escape. Then they load out, and the town is exactly as it was that morning.

 

The book is about the gap between what art promises in a gymnasium and what's waiting in the parking lot.

 

Q: Did you need to do any research to write the book, and if so, did you learn anything especially surprising?

 

A: The most important research was memory, and it wasn't pleasant to go back for.

 

There's a piece of American commercial history in this book that I first encountered as a boy, sitting down to eat. Something in the room was wrong. I knew it in my body before I had any vocabulary for it.

 

I remember looking around and thinking, is this all right? and nobody else appeared bothered at all. That's the part that stayed with me. Not the imagery. The calm.

 

I assumed, writing it, that I'd have to exaggerate the details. I didn't. It was real. I put it on the page close to the record and left it there. One reviewer wrote that section strained the book's believability. The scene she couldn't believe is the one I didn't make up.

 

That's the point of that section, and the point of the book in miniature: education starts small. A child sees something wrong, sees that no one else is troubled, and files it under normal.

 

By the time you're old enough, your mind has already been furnished with acceptance of things that should never have been accepted. Nobody teaches you that in a classroom. You learn it at a table, at 8 years old, over pancakes, while the adults talk about something else.

 

Which is exactly what the two actors in this novel are doing three times a day. Standing in front of children, teaching them something, and not entirely controlling what gets taught.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: We just finished shooting a film I perform, wrote, and produced called Buse, directed and shot by Gary Hanna, the same team behind Food for Thought, which won a number of awards internationally. It premieres in October, the same month as the book.

 

There's also a second novel I’m scratching at in a new notebook.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: The book publishes October 6, during Banned Books Week and Tom Sawyer's 150th anniversary, both falling within America's Semiquincentennial year. That's not a coincidence.

 

Hold those two mirrors up together: a country at 250, a boy at 150, and you get a measurement. Twain published Huckleberry Finn and it was thrown out of the Concord Public Library within a month for being suitable only for the slums.

 

A hundred and forty-one years later it's still one of the most challenged books in America, and we're still having the argument, using the same book, in schools that look a lot like the ones I performed in. The anniversaries aren't a celebration. They're a report card.

 

One thing about the prose, since it's a choice some readers may trip over: the book is written at full volume. That's Axel. He's the age I was, and at that age everything is enormous: your past is a wound, your future is a verdict, and the present is a stage you're performing on for an audience that isn't watching.

 

That's not sentimentality; that's how a young man narrates his own life when he has no other description for what's happening inside him. In 1991 nobody said anxiety out loud. Nobody said trauma. You didn't have a name for the thing in your chest, so it came out as grandiosity, or as a joke, or as a story about yourself. The style is the symptom.

 

And those fault lines didn't close. We have the words now and we're still not much better at using them, which is one more way 1991 keeps failing to stay in the past.

 

One last thing. My novel’s title corrects the billing. It says Jim where America says Finn, and that's the whole arc: a young man hired to play Huck who finds out, by the end of the road, what it costs to be Jim. What I was after was a white man's blindness, not a Black man's experience.

 

Moses is the one who sees. If readers argue about it, that's the book working. I wrote it to be argued with.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb