Jon Clinch
Author of Finn
About the Author
Works by Jon Clinch
Associated Works
My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop (2012) — Contributor — 617 copies, 16 reviews
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 20th Century
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Syracuse University
- Occupations
- English teacher
folk singer
metalworker
illustrator
typeface designer
house painter (show all 8)
copywriter
advertising executive - Awards and honors
- Pennsylvania Teacher of the Year Award
- Relationships
- Clinch, Wendy (spouse)
- Short biography
- Jon Clinch is an American novelist. Originally from upstate Oneida, New York, he graduated from Syracuse University and went on to teach American literature. Formerly creative director for various advertising agencies in the Philadelphia area, he now lives in Vermont. He has written stories which have been published in MSS magazine.
In February 2007 Random House published his first novel, Finn, a critically acclaimed backstory about "Pap Finn," Huckleberry Finn's father from Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).
Named an American Library Association Notable Book, Finn was also named one of the best novels of 2007 by the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor and Book Sense. It was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle's first-ever Best Recommended List and the Sargent First Novel Prize.
Clinch's second novel, Kings of the Earth, was published by Random House in July 2010 to wide critical acclaim, and was named #1 on the annual summer reading list published by O, The Oprah Magazine.
Marley, his reimagining of the world of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, was published by Simon & Schuster's Atria imprint in October 2019. Reviewing the book in the New York Times, critic Simon Callow wrote, "By some uncanny act of artistic appropriation, [Clinch] has, without imitating Dickens, entered into the phantasmagoric realm that is the great novelist’s quintessential territory. Clinch has done something remarkable in Marley, not merely offering a parergon to Dickens’s little masterpiece, imagining the soil out of which the action of A Christmas Carol grows, but creating a free-standing dystopian universe, a hideous vision of nascent capitalism in which nothing is real and every transaction is a fraud. - Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Oneida, New York, USA
- Places of residence
- Vermont, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Reviews
Apparently Jon Clinch likes a “jumping off place” when he sets out to write a novel. In Finn, his first novel, he took Twain’s few references to Pap Finn and Huck’s wretched home life, and invented a back story that felt dead solid perfect. If he’d told us he found an outline and extensive notes for that story in a trunk in Samuel Clemens’s attic, I would not have doubted it for a second. What Clinch has told us is that he feels Twain left clues to Pap Finn's story in the details show more of the scene where Huck and Jim see his unidentified corpse in a floating house, and he just couldn't leave that story untold.
Now, for his second effort, Clinch has used for his springboard some basic elements of a true story---the circumstances surrounding the death of a man named William Ward on a farm in upstate New York in 1990---and landed firmly on his feet once again. Only it’s his readers who get the prize: a stunning novel populated by people such as most modern readers will never have encountered. In reality, Bill Ward lived in what was charitably described as a “dilapidated farmhouse” with his three brothers, the youngest of whom, Delbert (IQ 68), was eventually tried for murder (there was evidence that Bill may have been suffocated or strangled) amid the sort of media circus we’ve all come to recognize. In fictionalizing the story, Clinch has chosen to eliminate one brother, and ignore the trial, the media and the flocks of “city folks” who came to watch, concentrating instead on the grim facts of life for the family he calls the Proctors, dirt poor in a very literal sense of the word. Believe me when I tell you, you will smell these men. In the words of their compassionate neighbor, Preston Hatch, “Outdoors is no different from indoors to them, except outdoors there’s more breeze and it smells better. Even in the barnyard.” I know there will be readers who find it difficult to believe any humans “choose” the way of life described in this novel, but in my childhood I knew people who lived almost as primitively as the Proctors (although usually with slightly more regard for the sanctity of hot water and soap), as well as those others whose accommodation and acceptance lent a certain dignity to that stained and encrusted existence. For this reason, perhaps, I truly appreciate what Clinch has done, and what he has not done, in bringing his characters and their story to life. He hasn’t invented anything; rather he has opened the blinds on a world where these people live and breathe, and allowed us to watch from a comfortable distance so that we can bear to see it. In structure and content comparisons to Faulkner are inevitable, and appropriate. Kings of the Earth is told from multiple perspectives, including that of each brother; their younger sister Donna, who left the farm for education, marriage and cleanliness; the siblings’ long-dead parents; neighbors Preston and Margaret Hatch; the State Police captain who investigated the possible crime; and several other members of the local community. Each individual voice sounds clear and true, and there isn’t a false note to be heard. show less
Now, for his second effort, Clinch has used for his springboard some basic elements of a true story---the circumstances surrounding the death of a man named William Ward on a farm in upstate New York in 1990---and landed firmly on his feet once again. Only it’s his readers who get the prize: a stunning novel populated by people such as most modern readers will never have encountered. In reality, Bill Ward lived in what was charitably described as a “dilapidated farmhouse” with his three brothers, the youngest of whom, Delbert (IQ 68), was eventually tried for murder (there was evidence that Bill may have been suffocated or strangled) amid the sort of media circus we’ve all come to recognize. In fictionalizing the story, Clinch has chosen to eliminate one brother, and ignore the trial, the media and the flocks of “city folks” who came to watch, concentrating instead on the grim facts of life for the family he calls the Proctors, dirt poor in a very literal sense of the word. Believe me when I tell you, you will smell these men. In the words of their compassionate neighbor, Preston Hatch, “Outdoors is no different from indoors to them, except outdoors there’s more breeze and it smells better. Even in the barnyard.” I know there will be readers who find it difficult to believe any humans “choose” the way of life described in this novel, but in my childhood I knew people who lived almost as primitively as the Proctors (although usually with slightly more regard for the sanctity of hot water and soap), as well as those others whose accommodation and acceptance lent a certain dignity to that stained and encrusted existence. For this reason, perhaps, I truly appreciate what Clinch has done, and what he has not done, in bringing his characters and their story to life. He hasn’t invented anything; rather he has opened the blinds on a world where these people live and breathe, and allowed us to watch from a comfortable distance so that we can bear to see it. In structure and content comparisons to Faulkner are inevitable, and appropriate. Kings of the Earth is told from multiple perspectives, including that of each brother; their younger sister Donna, who left the farm for education, marriage and cleanliness; the siblings’ long-dead parents; neighbors Preston and Margaret Hatch; the State Police captain who investigated the possible crime; and several other members of the local community. Each individual voice sounds clear and true, and there isn’t a false note to be heard. show less
The General and Julia takes us back and forth in time with Ulysses S. Grant and his beloved wife, touching on the high and low points of his life, featuring the final "Forty Days and Forty Nights" during which he labored through pain and drug-induced disorientation to finish the memoirs he hoped--and Sam Clemens promised--would assure his family's financial future after the General was gone. The prose is never flowery, nor even poetic, and yet Clinch can take my breath away with a simple show more turn of phrase. Describing the rising KKK, for instance, there's this: "...they are organized the way a hurricane is organized, madly a-spin around a terrible void. That void is hatred, and it draws every weak and broken thing to it." Why has no one ever put it quite so succinctly before? Even in this relatively short and intentionally limited treatment of his life, it is clear that Grant was more than a General, less than a god, human to the core. This is an engaging, poignant portrait of a man whose genius served him well in certain phases of his life, but whose generous nature left him vulnerable to exploitation. Clinch's talent for "raising the dead" (his own words) in historical fiction places him at the top of my list of greatest living American authors. show less
List five things you think you know about Ebenezer Scrooge. (Mean as a snake, obsessed with money, dumped by his sweetheart as a young man, lives alone in a big creepy house, gets redeemed by visits from Christmas spirits…) If anything on your list relates to how he met his business partner, Jacob Marley, you’ve been watching too many movies, and owe yourself a re-read of the Dickens original. BUT FIRST---get your hands on a copy of Jon Clinch’s Marley, so you’re ready to learn the show more truth about Jacob and Ebenezer. I don’t know whether Dickens gave much thought to the relationship between the two tight-fisted covetous old sinners, or the exact nature of their business, beyond usury. (I mean, they had to get the money from somewhere before they could lend it out, right?) He didn’t share it with his readers, if so. And what the heck is with that huge, apparently mostly empty house Scrooge lives in, having inherited it from Marley? Dickens didn’t explain that either, except for a brief reference to wine merchants using the basement for storage. But the fact that he left all that to Jon Clinch’s imagination is a fine gift from the 19th century to the 21st, and it’s one you still have plenty of time to give yourself for Christmas. The characters are much more fully-fleshed than Dickens’ version, both better and worse than we previously knew them to be. Complex, rather than contrived to present a lesson. And this is a darned good Victorian story. I re-read A Christmas Carol after finishing Marley, to verify that Clinch didn’t change anything fundamental from the source. I didn’t catch him taking a single liberty, but even if I missed something, and there is any inconsistency, I’d say Dickens got it wrong. show less
Jon Clinch continues to astound me. This book is so different from [Finn] and [Kings of the Earth], both of which I loved. And yet I loved this one too. Clinch is on Facebook, and in response to a comment I made there, he called [Belzoni] his "silly book". Well, it isn't silly, but it is certainly more light-hearted than the other two, and there is much in it to chuckle at. I'd love to see it made into a movie, à la Indiana Jones, or Romancing the Stone. Clinch has taken much of the show more substance of what is known of the actual man Giovanni Battista Belzoni's life, and turned it into a fictionalized autobiographical account from the deathbed. Belzoni was a very large man, with strength and resourcefulness to spare; his interests included hydraulics and Egyptian archeology, and he made his mark in the world in both fields, in reality doing what we would probably call grave-robbing today. He "gave the world" the 7-ton head of Ramses II, the way Lord Elgin "gave the world" those marvelous Grecian marbles. He also performed in circuses, traveled throughout Europe, married a remarkable woman, wrote about and exhibited his findings, and attempted to travel to Timbuktu. Unfortunately, he died along the way, perhaps of natural causes, perhaps of foul play as suggested by Sir Richard Burton. I was only vaguely aware of Belzoni before reading this novel, but Clinch has made him an irresistible personality, if one whose narration of his own life we might suspect to be somewhat unreliable. Highly recommended. show less
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