Twain meets Stanley in final Hijuelos novel

Even up to the day before his unexpected death in 2013, Oscar Hijuelos (the Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love) was at work on his weighty and intricately conceived final novel.

In Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise, he imagines the intersecting lives of two of the 19th century’s most famous men, from their meeting on the Mississippi River to their eventual rise to preeminence — Mark Twain as America’s foremost man of letters, and Henry Stanley as the explorer who captured the world’s imagination by trekking through unknown Africa to utter his famous “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” line.

Though the two men get equal billing in the title, Stanley’s life forms the novel’s spine. Even at the time of his arrival in New Orleans as an impoverished Welsh orphan, Stanley, like Hijuelos, read widely and deeply, finding a home for himself in literature and ideas: “If some men went after women or became rhapsodic with alcohol, my addictions, I discovered, were to work and to read what I construed as literature.” Little wonder that his chance meeting with Twain on the Mississippi would lead to a lifelong friendship, with each man informing and expanding on the other’s view of the world.

Twain is a charismatic, lively figure, and by comparison Stanley comes across as studied and melancholy. But both men, as imagined by Hijuelos, showed broad empathy with the outside world, and one of the greatest pleasures of Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise is to watch the intellectuals’ viewpoints evolve in tandem. They witness firsthand the beating of slaves during their early Mississippi River days, and threads of that foundation trace through their later work, from Twain’s depiction of Jim in Huckleberry Finn to Stanley’s complicated relationship to the colonial brutality in the Belgian Congo.

This is a novel, not non-fiction, however, and for long stretches of the text the reader is left in a mediated and muddy place. Though this stylistically adventurous book ranges from diary entries to letters, as if it were a compilation of found documents, every word of the text is the product of Hijuelos’s imagination, so it lacks the factual certainty that girds the backbone of non-fiction. On the flip side, Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise maintains an emotional distance, as if journalistic integrity has inhibited Hijuelos from getting deep into his characters’ feelings. The reader is too often left without an emotional foothold into the story.

Though hamstrung by the double limitations of both non-fiction and fiction, Twain & Stanley will make illuminating reading for Hijuelos fans. Of particular note, given the author’s recent death, is the novel’s interest in mortality itself, which Stanley sees as “but a measure of mutually agreed-upon units marking our passage through the world.” Witnessing two great minds meditate over the beauties and outrages of existence begins to feel like a portrait of Hijuelos himself, an august writer reflecting on his legacy as he prepares to leave the world.

In Twain’s words, as imagined by the author: “I am my books, and I am not. I admire them, and I do not. It was me, and it wasn’t, but I hope the effect on the reader remains the same.”

Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

By Oscar Hijuelos

Grand Central, 465 pp.

2.5 stars out of four

Eliot Schrefer is the author of the 2014 National Book Award finalist novel Threatened.