RULE OF THE BONE
By Russell Banks
Harper Collins (1995)

Let's say, just for the sake of the discussion, that Russell Banks was reading Huckleberry Finn one day and said, "Wow, wouldn't this be great to update this to the 1990's?", and then went on out to write his latest novel, Rule Of The Bone. If that's the way it happened, Banks must have paid particular attention to the "Notice" Mark Twain wrote to his 1884 classic: "...[P]ersons attempting to find a moral in [this narrative] will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."

Twain, of course, was being typically facetious. Not only was Huckleberry Finn a timeless treatise on the meaning of freedom and an attack against the morality of slavery, it is one of the best-plotted books in American literature. But readers of Rule Of The Bone can rest easy; no danger here of being visited by the Border Patrol or the LA Tactical Squad. This is a book that's probably too toked on its own too-numerous dope-smoking descriptions to be able to state a moral coherently, if, indeed, it has one. And what plotline exists at all consists of some of the most outrageous coincidences this side of a 19th century melodrama.

And yes, though Russell Banks is too accomplished a writer to have to stoop to this, Rule Of The Bone seems to be lifted almost directly from Twain's novel, a sort of Huckleberry Finn 1995. With all the redeeming parts discarded.

In case one needs to be reminded, Finn is the story of a young White boy, an outcast living in an 1840's Mississippi River village, who overcomes his own anti-Black feelings to help a Black man, Nigger Jim, escape from slavery.

Update to Rule Of The Bone, 150 years later. The scene changes to the trailer parks of small town upstate New York. Huck changes to Chappie Dorset, aka "Bone," minor thief and drug-peddler, a 14 year-old [italics]grungie[end italics] complete with nose-ring and mohawk haircut and the a crossed bones tattoo on his forearm. Where Huck stayed out of school to hook fish in the river, Bone quits school to hang out at the fountain at the center of a nearby shopping mall. Where Huck's father used to get drunk and beat him, it's now the 90's, so it's Bone's step-father who sexually abuses him.

The book is at its best in the earlier passages, such as in this description of an upstate motorcycle gang:

"All the bikers rode strictly Harleys or else were planning to get one soon. ... Bruce used to say, Harleys are iron horses, man. Fucking iron horses. He liked to repeat himself, probably because he was used to talking to people who didn't get it the first time. Due to his obsession with weightlifting he had given them the name Adirondack Iron which they had painted on their leathers and had gotten tattooed upside down under their left forearms so you could read it when they did a power salute, like they were an actual serious-minded motorcycle gang or one of those foreign skinhead bands. They looked more organized than they were."

But Rule Of The Bone takes a distinct downward plunge when it leaves New York State. Like Huck, Bone eventually runs away from home, his spirit too large and restless for the confines of this suffocating small town environment. And who does he find to make this journey with? This is the 1990's remake, remember, and there is no slavery to escape from. So the simple, good-hearted Nigger Jim becomes the simple, good-hearted I-Man, a gunja-smoking, philosiphying Jamaican Rastafarian, an illegal alien who has walked away from his contract on a migrant work farm to live in an abandoned bus and grow and peddle weed. And Bone overcomes his anti-Black prejudice to become I-Man's protégé and, yes, a White Rasta-boy, complete with dreadlocks.

In I-Man, Banks revives the old "noble savage" stereotype (on earth for the sole purpose of teaching religion to the corrupt White Man and saving him from his industrial-era sins) that we thought had become the exclusive territory of Native Americans. Dis Rasta am soooo good, mon, him unbelievable. I-Man refuses to accept any of Bone's money for food or lodging, even though the boy has a huge stash he ripped off from a porn movie maker. He can sniff out the only patches of chemical-free dirt in the midst of an industrially-polluted field. When Bone gets sick, I-Man trots around the vacant lots like he's back in the forest primeval and, I swear, finds roots and herbs for a cure. And in case you missed the obvious inference, at one point Bone describes seeing I-Man walking with a little White girl as reminding him of a scene out of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

And Banks manages to accomplish what I would have thought impossible: he gives us the stereotypes of Black People as sexual studs and God's simple children all in one package. After he catches I-Man screwing his father's girlfriend, Bone tells how I-Man can't understand what all the fuss is about:

"'Bone!' he says only mildly surprised to see me like he didn't know yet that I'd walked in on him and Evening Star. 'Wussup, mon?' ... Listen, you gotta get outta here, man. Doc's after your ass, I said. He didn't seem to register, just lifted his eyebrows and pursed his lips, then reached for the handle to the fridge. He's got a gun, I said. That got his attention. 'Serious t'ing? Where him at?'"

Huckleberry Finn is often criticized for the manner in which Nigger Jim's speech patterns are written. But in an explanatory note, Twain pointed out that he used a number of dialects in his book: "the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary 'Pike-County' dialect; and four modified varieties of this last." In other words, though he is often accused of racism, Twain made no attempt in his novel to single out Black Peoples' speech for ridicule or anything else.

That's not the case in Rule Of The Bone. While Banks includes European-American characters who originate in locations outside of upstate New York...the Midwest and New England, for example...and whose accents would presumably be different from Bone's, their speech patterns are not written appreciably different from the New York White Folks. Banks makes a point of distinct spellings for the speech of Black Jamaicans, though, for reasons I don't care to speculate about.

Banks tromps all over one of my pet peeves I thought had gone out of fashion in American writing: substituting "de" for "the" when describing the speech of persons of West African descent. French-speaking people have a similar problem with the "th" sound, and their "the"'s are sometimes translated as "ze"'s. With French folk this has come to mean culture and refinement, but "de" in African-American language has often been used to denote ignorance and inability to learn and speak English properly. Banks uses it liberally in transcribing the speech of Black Jamaicans.

There are other problems with the book.

If coincidence in a plot is a sign of laziness in the writer, Banks here borders on catatonia. Bone seems to be forever hitchhiking on the road and catching rides with...ooops!...someone he'd been trying to avoid from an earlier part of the book. He decides to go to Jamaica with I-Man and oh, by the way, it turns out that Bone's real father is in Jamaica, and hey!, Bone finds him when his father just happens to be a weed-buying customer of I-Man's. Small world, mon, ain't it? And just when Bone is at his lowest, with all of his friends gone and no way to get out of Jamaica and Under The Bone's contract deadline probably looming, a purse snatcher runs by and tosses the purse right into the bushes where Bone is camped out for the night. Everything has been taken but the telephone calling card, which Bone uses to call back to the States to tie up some loose plot ends that otherwise would have been left dangling.

Russell Banks has a reputation as a fine writer, and in some ways he shows here that it is well-deserved. In Chappie Dorset, he has created a thoroughly engaging and memorable character, and has placed him in a small town upstate New York environment rich with story possibilities. Unfortunately, somewhere along its way to Jamaica, Rule Of The Bone missed the boat. Unlike the original Huckleberry Finn, nobody's going to be caring about any lost episodes a hundred years from now.