Huck Finn reborn.

Rule of the Bone

Russell Banks

Started July 17, 2007

Finished August 19, 2007

Rule of the Bone is yet another coming of age novel generally compared to others such as Huck Finn and The Catcher in the Rye. Personally, this one reminded me much more of Huck Finn than The Catcher in the Rye. It's told by a first person narrator, Bone, a 14 year old homeless boy who struggles with conventional society and occasionally likes to assure the reader of his honesty, which says Huck Finn all over to me. The first half at least also spends some time contemplating what it means to be American- homelessness and abuse issues, racism, religion, relationships to history, among other things. Instead of Jim, who Huck Finn patronizes, Rule of the Bone has I-Man, who Bone idolizes.

The second half of the novel consists of Bone's adventures with I-Man in Jamaica. Questions of racism and hierarchy are looked at from a different angle. While the plot kind of meanders as Bone drifts from one thing to another, there are definite moments when Bone will come out with something that just strikes me as completely true. Like toward the end when he talks about crime versus sin. Bone is on a quest for personal meaning and out to do the "true" thing , even though it very well may not be what most people would consider the "right" thing. On the one hand, you want for Bone to be saved, but on the other, you think that maybe he really is saving himself by living his life in such an unstructured way. The lack of cohesion in the novel kind of bothered me, but then, I think that the structure suits the narrator- for me, this novel was about breaking artificial boundaries- such as the way I expect a novel to be structured.