Advertising

The Seattle Times Company

NWjobs | NWautos | NWhomes | NWsource | Free Classifieds | seattletimes.com

The Seattle Times

Books


Our network sites seattletimes.com | Advanced

Originally published Friday, May 9, 2008 at 12:00 AM

E-mail article     Print view

"Wild Nights! " is a surreal glimpse into 5 authors' final days

"Wild Nights! " by Joyce Carol Oates imagines the final days of a famous author, drawing from biographical fact but freely embroidering with Gothic excess.

Newsday

"Wild Nights!"

by Joyce Carol Oates

Ecco, 256 pp., $24.95

The classic authors who appear as fictionalized characters in "Wild Nights!" aren't the ones most of us met in Intro to American Literature.

Edgar Allan Poe copulating with a one-eyed amphibian? Mark Twain pursuing pubescent girls? Henry James clubbing a cat to death? Joyce Carol Oates may cause a few elderly professors to keel over, but the rest of us can take perverse delight in her five tales.

In each, Oates imagines the final days of a famous author, drawing from biographical fact but freely embroidering with Gothic excess. In "Poe Posthumous; or, The Light-House," she places the author of "The Fall of the House of Usher" on a solitary South Pacific island and documents his descent into utter madness (and interspecies sex).

The curious "EDickinsonRepliLuxe" has a modern-day couple purchasing a 4-foot robot modeled after poet Emily Dickinson; her silent hovering and enigmatic pronouncements cause the marriage to unravel.

Twain, in "Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish 1906," corresponds with a 15-year-old whose life he destroys through casual neglect, while James, tending to World War I wounded, wades through blood and human waste in "The Master at St. Bartholomew's Hospital 1914-1916."

The final entry, "Papa at Ketchum 1961," is the least outrageous but most disturbing. Here Oates unleashes the inner turmoil of Ernest Hemingway as he props a shotgun against his chin and prepares for suicide. Oates' Papa is paranoid, misogynistic, boastful and pathetic — an indelible portrait of genius gone sour.

Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company

More Books headlines...

E-mail article Print view      Share:    Digg     Newsvine

advertising

Book review: "The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Pounder": a sweet, spunky dose of Southern charm

James Frey writing teen science fiction novels

A Town Hall talk about urban aesthetics

Federal Way writer wins top prize in bad-writing contest

Local offerings

Advertising

Video

AP Video

Entertainment | Top Video | World | Offbeat Video | Sci-Tech

Marketplace

 
Most read
Most commented
Most e-mailed
 
 
Advertising