Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
And, mind you, emotions are among the toughest things in the world to manufacture out of whole cloth; it is easier to manufacture seven facts than one emotion.
This is an awkward book to review, since it consists of so many, varied sections. Yet it can be neatly divided between the first third and the remaining portion. After a few brief chapters about the mighty river and its history, the beginning section focuses on Twain’s young days as a steersman aboard Mississippi River steamboats. These are easily the best pages. As evinced by the Huckleberry Finn stories, Twain had a marvelous way of writing from a child’s perspective, naively learning to navigate the world. What is more, Twain does an excellent job in illustrating the extensive knowledge necessary to effectively pilot a steamboat—memorizing hundreds of landmarks, learning how to gauge speed and depth, and dealing with difficult coworkers.
The second section is a meandering account of a voyage he took two decades after leaving the steamboat business, when he was an accomplished author. At this point he was already so famous he had to adopt a pseudonym. Here he pauses so often to lose himself in tributary wanderings that the narrative breaks down into a vaguely connected series of anecdotes, most of which seem obviously inflated or simply fictional. Though there is much to amuse in this section, I found myself growing increasingly restless and bored as I continued on, eager for the end. Though I did not dislike this book as much as I did A Connecticut Yankee, I nevertheless felt that the joke had gone stale and that Twain was merely filling up space.
My reactions to Twain tend to shift violently. Again, in the beginning section of this work, when he is writing from the perspective of his younger self, his writing is energetic and witty and wide-eyed. But when he dons the cap of a raconteur, I tend to find his stories mechanical and dull. His account of the Pilots’ Association is an excellent example of this—proceeding in predictable steps to the inevitable conclusion. And when he shifts away from humor, the results can be pretty grim. His flat-footed tall tale of the man who sought revenge for his murdered family—a mix of the ghoulish and the sentimental—is an excellent example of this.
Even with these faults and lapses, this book is an unforgettable portrait of a time and place that are gone for good, written by an indefatigably mordant pen.
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