Earlier this year, the prolific writer Percival Everett released a critically acclaimed novel, “James,” that adopts as its conceit the story of Jim from “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” as told by Jim himself. Though its intended audience is very different from that of “James,” Hope Jahren’s first novel and first book for young readers, “Adventures of Mary Jane,” tries something similar. It’s framed as the first-person story of a much less prominent — one might say fairly minor — character from “Huckleberry Finn”: the object of Huck’s affection over the course of about 50 pages in Mark Twain’s 1884 classic.
“She had the grit to pray for Judas if she took the notion — there warn’t no back-down to her, I judge,” Huck tells us at one point in the original novel. “You may say what you want to, but in my opinion she had more sand in her than any girl I ever see; in my opinion she was just full of sand. It sounds like flattery, but it ain’t no flattery. And when it comes to beauty — and goodness, too — she lays over them all. I hain’t ever seen her since that time that I see her go out of that door; no, I hain’t ever seen her since, but I reckon I’ve thought of her a many and a many a million times.”
Appearing a little more than halfway through “Huckleberry Finn,” the 19-year-old Mary Jane and her cousins Susan, 15, and Joanna, 14, fascinate Huck and fall prey to the manipulations of others after their guardian and “benefactor,” Peter Wilks, dies and leaves behind a considerable estate.
Mary Jane never “sat right” with Jahren, a renowned scientist who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir, “Lab Girl.” “I just couldn’t square her gullibility (‘Take this six thousand dollars … and don’t give us no receipt for it’) with her deft execution of good-cop-bad-cop in Chapter 26,” she writes in her novel’s introduction. “Neither could I reconcile her passivity (‘You tell me what to do, and whatever you say, I’ll do it’) with the fact that a boy as intrepid as Huck falls so deeply in love with her. … That girl is up to something, part of me kept insisting.”
Or, as Mary Jane says at the end of the second chapter, “Trust me on this: When you find something lacking in a book that somebody gives you, there’s ways to sit down and fix it.” And fix it Jahren does.
Female characters don’t figure much, if at all, in “Huckleberry Finn.” Mostly, there’s Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas, two women who oversee Huckleberry’s domestication before he turns tail and sets out on his adventures with Jim, who will become his companion and protector as the two make their way south on the Mississippi River.
Mary Jane, who is 14 in Jahren’s novel and whose father abandoned the family before she was born, has no such protector. She is her own protector, and soon the protector of Joanna and Susan, whom she is sent from her home in Minnesota to care for after her mother receives a letter from Aunt Evelyn suggesting all is not right down South.
After an exciting journey on the Mississippi that is full of twists and turns, Mary Jane discovers Aunt Evelyn’s family has very little to live on, following Uncle George’s incapacitation from a serious head injury suffered at his logging job. Mary Jane comes to the rescue, sometimes too conveniently. And irritatingly. She’s often cloying and overly earnest, as for that matter is Aunt Evelyn, whose sustained optimism is grating enough that I found myself rolling my eyes. In fact, when I got to the part where Evelyn and George die, I felt immense relief.
So does Mary Jane, though she’s ashamed to admit it: “They died, how could that be for the best? You are afraid that you are a terrible person for thinking it is for the best.”
Mary Jane has nothing to be afraid of; she is not a terrible person. But she’s a profoundly unlucky one: Her life takes an even darker turn after she treks farther south with Susan and Joanna to live with Peter Wilks. (She pretends to be their older sister, of 19, so the three girls won’t be separated.) From the moment the trio step foot on Wilks’s property — he owns a tannery, and Jahren vividly describes its smell of death and decay — it’s clear that things are about to get really bad.
That “really bad” comes in the form of, among other things, Mary Jane’s introduction to two enslaved people — a woman named Sugar and her daughter, Candy — who are forced to suffer in silence as they’re subjected to Wilks’s degradations, both explicit and implicit. (Mary Jane describes Sugar and Candy as sharing the same eyes, though the mother’s skin “was the color of coffee without cream, and the daughter’s was the color of coffee with cream.” Hmm.)
Readers are encouraged to feel sympathy for these characters, but they’re thinly drawn. This may be by design, to show how they’re experienced by Mary Jane, a self-proclaimed “Abolitionist” who loves the book “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and proves herself to be clueless about what it might mean to buy their “freedom.”
Though Mary Jane’s attempts to connect with the two women emotionally and intellectually are well-meaning, they’re also naïve, betraying a stunning lack of awareness.
As one local woman scolds her, “You’re not from here, which makes you ignorant. … You need to keep your head down and worry about yourself and your sisters. You’ve got plenty on your plate already, living with that Peter Wilks.”
And yuck, that Peter Wilks. Jahren certainly doesn’t skimp when it comes to the litany of abuses he rains down on his staff and his kin. Indeed, the males Mary Jane meets throughout her travels are mostly malevolent: Early on, as she’s about to embark on her first trip down the Mississippi, there’s the man at the trading post who cons her out of (“emergency money”) beaver pelts with a counterfeit bill; and of course there’s the “duke” and the “king,” the two tricksters we meet in “Huckleberry Finn” who attempt to cheat Mary Jane and her cousins out of their rightful inheritance. Readers of “Huckleberry Finn” will remember that this is where Huck makes his appearance in Mary Jane’s life, and eventually his departure.
But Mary Jane cannot get this complicated, mysterious young man with the memorable blue eyes and hair pulled into a ponytail out of her mind. After taking leave of Joanna and Susan, she sets out on a quest to find him — her imagined intended — and, one assumes, live (and adventure) happily ever after.
Even though I blanch a bit at this spunky but sensitive protagonist’s pursuit of male attention, I understand it: For the first time, Mary Jane is going after what she wants — “Have you ever once seen a girl out by herself, wandering as her fancy takes her?” she asks another character earlier in the novel — and what she wants (and deserves) is love.
“We’ve learned it the hard way, girls,” Mary Jane tells Joanna and Susan. “We have to reach out and grab the future we want, before the world pushes a different one onto us.”
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