Huckleberry Jim: A Novel

Summary

A Publishers Weekly Editor’s Pick

A darkly funny 1991 road novel about two actors touring a stripped-down Huckleberry Finn through a hostile America—perfect for listeners of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and Percival Everett’s James.

Axel Emerson isn’t chasing a dream—he’s running from a body. After the sudden death of his estranged father, and the detective’s calls that follow, a washed-up casting agent offers him an exit: tour the schools as Huck Finn in a stripped-down, two-man stage version of the American classic. It’s 1991, and the country is cracking open.

His co-star is Moses Morton, a fifty-five-year-old Black actor cast as Jim—and from the first moment, Moses sees straight through him. Their road trip through hostile American towns becomes a crash course in race, history, and performative ignorance, recited from lines a white man wrote in 1884 about a country that hasn’t changed as much as it thinks. When performance and reality finally collide, there’s no script left to hide behind.