New York Review of Books Review

"IT WAS AS though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short." Those lines are from Evelyn Waugh's novel "Brideshead Revisited." They came to me as I switched off the 2016 presidential campaign and listened to Nick Offerman's audiobook narration of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer." What a tonic those eight hours were! Offerman's Illinois-raised voice and actor's talent suit him ideally to channel Mark Twain and his archetypal American Puck (that "P" isn't a typo), who played pirates with an archetypal American Huck, conned his pals into whitewashing the fence, fell in love with Becky Thatcher and showed up alive at his own funeral. Was it as satisfying as it was because of all the political screeching in the background? No. Listening to Offerman's "Tom Sawyer" would be ear balm anytime. Perhaps the reason is that this is a novel many of us first heard before we read it. "Tom Sawyer" and its sequel, "Huckleberry Finn," are arguably America's ur-bedtime stories. This may not be true for the millennial gen raised on apps and Twitter, but it was for mine and generations going back to Ulysses S. Grant's presidency. Listening to Tom's adventures over - gasp - a half-century after I last did sent me back to a time when early evenings found me sipping hot cocoa instead of vodka-and-tonics. In the preface to the novel, Twain tells us, "Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account." Hmm. Actually, Mr. Clemens is being a tad cagey with us. (Surprise!) On July 5, 1875, he wrote his friend William Dean Howells. the great editor and "Dean of American Letters" of the day: "I have finished the story & didn't take the chap beyond boyhood. . . . If I went on, now, & took him into manhood, he would just be like all the one-horse men in literature & the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him. It is not a boy's book, at all. It will only be read by adults." On reading the manuscript, Howells wrote back: "It is altogether the best boy's story I ever read. It will be an immense success. But I think you ought to treat it explicitly as a boy's story. Grown-ups will enjoy it just as much if you do." In his afterword to the Oxford Mark Twain edition, the critic Albert Stone provides a tantalizing, and somewhat pause-giving, asterisk: Before Howells read the manuscript, Twain wrote and asked him to collaborate with him on a stage version: "I have my eye upon two young girls who can play 'Tom' and 'Huck.'" As Aunt Polly might say, "Laws!" Twain was conflicted about his novel in another way. In that July 5 letter to Howells, he says, "I perhaps made a mistake in not writing it in the first person." Nine years later, Twain would publish a novel that begins, "You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,' but that ain't no matter." If it was timely to have this audio version amid an especially choleric and noisy election cycle, writing "Tom Sawyer" must have been a tonic for its author as well. It's the first novel Twain wrote entirely by himself. He probably began writing it in 1873. the year he and his co-author, Charles Dudley Warner, published "The Gilded Age," their novel of Reconstruction-era corruption and greed. What could be more cleansing, after literary immersion in the seamy and squalid arena of robber-baron America, than an adventure story about an idyllic boyhood on the Mississippi River? This book, he said, was "simply a hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air." The operative word there is "worldly." Tom's idyllic boyhood witnessed grave robbing and murder. One of his pals was the homeless son of the town drunk; another character is a child slave named Jim. Nostalgia can be a mixed bag. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, editor of the Oxford Mark Twain collection, points out that Twain "understood the nostalgia for a 'simpler' past that increased as that past receded - and he saw through the nostalgia to a past that was just as complex as the present. He recognized better than we did ourselves our potential for greatness and our potential for disaster." Decades later, Twain would call President Teddy Roosevelt "the Tom Sawyer of the political world of the 20th century." This was not intended as a compliment. As the incessantly cited line by Hemingway goes, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn.'" Does it? "Huckleberry Finn" sold more copies than "Tom Sawyer" during Twain's lifetime. (Twain was overjoyed when it was banned by the Concord Library, estimating that censorship would sell an additional 25,000 copies.) But in the 20th century, "Tom Sawyer" reigned as the top best seller of all Twain's novels. Twain scholars themselves cannot explain this, so I sure won't try to, beyond recording my pleasure in listening to Nick Offerman read it to me anew over the course of eight happy hours. He makes it sound easy. It can't have been. This is one of the first novels to capture - indeed, define - the American vernacular. Try these lines on your tongue, see how they roll out: "'Oh, I dasn't, Mars Tom. Ole missis she'd take an' tar de head off'n me. 'Deed she would.' "'She! She never licks anybody - whacks 'em over the head with her thimble - and who cares for that, I'd like to know. She talks awful, but talk don't hurt - anyways it don't if she don't cry. Jim, I'll give you a marvel. I'll give you a white alley!' "Jim began to waver. "'White alley, Jim! And it's a bully taw.'" How's your tongue doing? In Chapter 5, the minister of the village church gives out the hymn, which he does "with a relish": "At church 'sociables' he was always called upon to read poetry; and when he was through, the ladies would lift up their hands and let them fall helplessly in their laps, and 'wall' their eyes, and shake their heads, as much as to say, 'Words cannot express it; it is too beautiful, too beautiful for this mortal earth.'" The minister, Twain tells us, "was regarded as a wonderful reader." So he was; so he is, 140 years later. 'Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women.' CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY'S latest novel, "The Relic Master," is now out in paperback.