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Channeling Mark Twain: A Novel
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Channeling Mark Twain: A Novel Overviews
Fresh out of graduate school, Holly Mattox is a young, newly married, and spirited poet who moves to New York City from Minnesota in the early seventies. Hoping to share her passion for words and social justice, she decides to teach poetry at the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island, only minutes from Manhattan. There Holly meets a woman who will change her life forever: Polly Lyle Clement, an inmate who claims that she is a descendant of Mark Twain and is capable of channeling his voice. As Holly is caught up in the drama of her students’ lives, her identification with their despair leads her to lose all perspective on the nature of justice. And when she is drawn into an affair with a fellow poet, Holly risks all that is familiar and conventional in her life.
Praise for Channeling Mark Twain:
National Book Award Finalist
“Muske-Dukes takes vast chances with both her voice and her subject matter, and ends up with a work strongly based on reality, but unquestionably elevated into the wondrous realm of art.”
–San Francisco Chronicle
“This is a novel that asks all the right questions–about writing, about life, about our common humanity.”
–The Times-Picayune
“A gripping story complete with a politically charged narrative, sexual tension and vividly drawn characters.”
–Time Out New York
“Riveting . . . a powerful story.”
–The Washington Post
“Muske-Dukes shows us there is something magical and mighty in the connections that art can forge among human beings.”
–Los Angeles Times Book Review
“[An] elegant work of prose.”
–People (four stars)
“Deeply rewarding.”
–The Wall Street Journal
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
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Channeling Mark Twain: A Novel CustomerReview
I read Carol Muske-Dukes' CHANNELING MARK TWAIN straight through, fascinated, although I often forgot that I was reading a novel. Much of it felt like a life history--written by a young teacher-poet so captivated by her life in New York City that she simply could not resist sharing her experience. She is caught up in her work- and poems-in-process, and her efforts to do something good for society, namely, teaching poetry as a volunteer in a women's prison. The first-person narrator, Holly, seems designed to remind us of Carol, the author, whose own name sounds as if she might also have been born in December. And from the book's dedication, we know that Muske-Dukes has been there: "To my unforgettable students, the members of the original Free/Space Art Without Walls Poetry Workshop, Women's House of Detention, Rikers Island, 1973-1983."
Although the young teacher-poet-narrator begins with seeing the pimps as she arrives at Rikers Island--pimps waiting for prostitutes to be released--she manages to bring in flashes of her earlier life in the midwest, featuring wonderful vignettes of her mother, who was always quoting poetry. The narrator juxtaposes her own fragmentary autobiography, including poems, with the fragmentary life accounts and autobiographical poems of the student-poets, inmates at Rikers Island. The juxtaposition and interplay cast light on both realms. So does the poetry.
As other persons make their way into the story--a husband, a lover, associates at Columbia University--the reader realizes that they indeed are invented characters, some of them anyway, not real people, and they are there to make possible the creation of a plot. Yes, this is fiction.
CHANNELING MARK TWAIN, despite its realistic setting and its genesis in the author's real-life experience, is a highly literary piece of work, allusive on almost every page, basically so in its central plot involving the "channeling" of Mark Twain by prisoner Polly Clement, who claims Twain as an ancestor. The author manages successfully the necessary intricate structural crafting, minute narrative detail, the historical and geographical background. Her talents as a poet make convincing both the heroine's poetry and that of the convicts. The inmates are not just pitiable, but diverse, singular, often appealing personalities, portrayed with an artistry that avoids sentimentality. Although we are caught up in the emotional texture of relationships and events in the prison as well as elsewhere, the tone is expertly controlled, and there are touches of humor throughout. I read the denouement thoughtfully and sadly but not with a sense of depression.
I liked the novel. Its story held my interest and so did its techniques, its management of autobiography (or embroidered reality), its assumption of the necessity of poetry, and its deft weaving of on-going events, background details (like the flaming tragedy of the General Slocum)--and toward the end, mystery. It is a unique and engaging mix.
*** Product Information and Prices Stored:Mar 04, 2010 16:24:31
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