Wild nights--and last days | Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and...

Beautifully Done | Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway | Joyce Carol Oates

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	• Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway Joyce Carol Oates Ecco, 2008 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Sad Nights

Wild Nights, the latest from Joyce Carol Oates, is a collection of five longish short-stories, each of which fantasizes about the end days of one of America's best known and most respected writers. As indicated by the book's complete title, there are stories about Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemmingway, in that order. And strangely enough, at least to me, the stories seem to have been ordered in such a way that each tops the previous one in degree of sadness the reader will feel on behalf of the author being featured.

Edgar Allan Poe, grateful for having been given the job of lighthouse keeper on Vina de Mar and looking forward to the complete isolation promised by his employer, comes to find that sanity is not an easy thing to hold onto when one's only companion is an independent little dog. Emily Dickinson's end days, as envisioned by author Oates, come in the twenty-first century, not in the nineteenth, and are bought and paid for by a couple who decide to make their home more intellectually interesting by purchasing a robotic replicate of Dickinson's talents, emotions, and memories. The very fact that "Dickinson" would face similar end days numerous times in different homes marks the story as an even greater tragedy than the one faced by Poe.

Next comes the story of Sam Clemens, forced to "perform" as the character Mark Twain in order to make a living because his royalties will not sustain his lifestyle any longer, and desperately unhappy since the deaths of his favorite daughter and his wife. His only comfort is the friendships he so desperately seeks with little girls between the ages of ten and fifteen, something that drives his daughter Clara crazy and that, even in early twentieth century America, had to be a little suspect. This story is more realistic than the first two and it more directly reflects the actual lifestyle of its subject, rating it an even higher notch on the "sadness meter," as a result.

But things get worse because of the way that Henry James, up next, has his days as a London hospital volunteer during World War I so bleakly imagined by Oates. Himself desperately suffering from a heart condition that made physical work dangerous, James, when not debasing himself allows another to do it for him in a most shocking way, a scene that will stick in my mind longer than I really want it to (and, no, it is not the one between James and his favorite male patient).

Ernest Hemingway is saved for last and, although his final days are more familiar to most readers than those of the other four authors, his story seems saddest of all. Oates manages to place the reader into Hemingway's mind in such a way that his ultimate suicide seems almost justifiable due to the man's inability to face the loss of both his physical and his mental powers. It is heartbreaking to see this lion of a man go down with only the slightest of whimpers.

Wild Nights is one of those rare collections of which I will easily remember each of its stories for a long time to come. Joyce Carol Oates has, in a sense, "humanized" each of her subjects by emphasizing their weaknesses, the same weaknesses that, in combination with their particular strengths, made these writers the geniuses they were. Each of her stories mimics the writing style of the author being featured, part of the fun, and yet, part of the sadness that blankets the entire book. I'm not sure what motivated this particular book, nor what Ms. Oates hoped to accomplish by writing it, and I hesitate to recommend it to others because I don't know how other readers will react to the extreme "realism" at its heart. Those afraid to have the images they carry of these authors in their heads changed might best avoid the book because change they certainly will. But those willing to take a chance on it will likely find it to be a book they will always remember in great detail.

This one won't cheer you up, but I guarantee you that this time next year you won't have a hard time remembering what it was about.

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Wild nights--and last days

Joyce Carol Oates notes where the title for this volume comes from, as she quotes verse from Emily Dickinson:

"Wild Nights--Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!"

This is a book, as the subtitle indicates, about the "Last days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway." As such, there is considerable idiosyncrasy and fantasy here. Poe's and Dickinson's last days, of course, were nothing as portrayed here. However, each short story does capture something of their minds and possibly of, in Poe's case, his state of mind "at the end."

There are five stories of endings. Some are fairly "realistic," whatever that term might mean. There is Hemingway. His story begins with his suicide, and then following thereafter is a set of vignettes letting the reader know something of his personality and thinking. Not an altogether pretty picture, whether imagining shooting his father, his macho views of women, his self-loathing as he ages and cannot perform (artistically or physically) as once he could, his disdain for his fourth wife. And always that self-loathing. His drinking? As Oates mentions as Hemingway is depicted as helping with the funeral/burial of his father (who also committed suicide) (Page 207): "Afterward he did in fact get damned good and drunk and the drunk would last for thirty years." A not-very-flattering picture, but the rage and all else seemed to push him to his inevitable end. A powerful piece of work in this book.

Then there is the science-fiction/fantasy story of the last days of Emily Dickinson. She appears here, actually, as a "replicant," smaller than life. A couple with a rather dead marriage purchase her to pacify the wife but also provide something new in the household. The arc of the story, as the reader begins to detect, is going to end up with unhappiness. The ending is ambiguous and telling, although the story does not "catch fire" as a whole.

And Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens. He is near the end of his life, he knows that he has lost his powers as a writer and recognizes the waning of his physical--and even mental--powers. One method for him to soldier forward is development of an Angelfish Club for girls 11-15. What he does is disturbing to the reader, as he uses these children for reasons of his own. In counterpoint to his strange attraction to the young is his cold relationship to his daughter, Clara, who only seems to want to capture his love and affection. This is a distressing and powerful story of "last days."

And the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, not fully convincing, and Henry James, poignantly done. . . .

All in all, a sort of "mixed bag." Some of the stories are genuinely compelling; others are less convincing. As a collection, though, this volume leads to some degree of self-reflection. I caught myself wondering if I could possibly end up like a Hemingway (doubtful) or a Twain (hopefully not!) or. . . . Anyhow, despite some questions about this book, I would rate it worth taking a look at if the premise seems at all intriguing.

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Beautifully Done

This short story collection examines the last days and nights of five prolific American writers, from Poe to Hemingway. Together these five tales describe five eminent writers on the brink of despair and madness that culminates in their deaths. The stories vary in the extent to which they depart from realistic portraits of these authors' deaths. While Oates's treatment of Hemingway's death could conceivably be a factual rendering, those of Poe and Dickinson are far more fanciful, and depart from the historical record. Together, these stories create a riveting and unusual collection. Because the reader knows from the outset that each of these tales ends in death, the narratives flow with significant dramatic tension. From the beginning of each story the reader gets a sense of how each author will meet his or her end. As they move toward this preordained conclusion tension builds for the reader, as he or she discovers just how his or her assumptions will play out. Oates does an excellent job of adopting the voice and persona of each of the writers in question. Each story has its own flavor and style. Hemingway's story reads with the stark prose one might expect from the man, and Poe's narrative reads like a nineteenth-century Gothic tale. Overall, this was a very enjoyable read, one that showcases Oates's remarkable versatility, and reaffirms her place as a master of psychological suspense.

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Oates at her virtuosic best!

In these five stories, Oates imagines the final days of five iconic American writers: Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Ernest Hemingway. Each of these is both an homage to the writer, and an often ironic look at his or her work. The Poe story, for example, was suggested by a one-page draft Poe left behind at his death, and the result is certainly something we might imagine Poe writing. Similarly, the Hemingway story has the cadence and repetition of his prose. The Twain finds the old man fixated on young girls, and dealing with the consequences of that fixation. But my favorites are the Dickinson and James stories. "EDickinson RepliLuxe" finds the poet turned into a reduced scale robot and adopted by an unhappily married couple, while the James story (the most genuinely moving of the five) finds the aging writer working as a hospital volunteer in London during World War One, falling in love with his handsome yet horribly injured patients. This collection is further demonstration of what a genuinely brilliant writer Oates is: well worth reading!

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Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Clemens ("Mark Twain"), Henry James, Ernest Hemingway?Joyce Carol Oates evokes each of these American literary icons in her newest work of prose fiction, poignantly and audaciously reinventing the climactic events of their lives. In subtly nuanced language suggestive of each of these writers, Oates explores the mysterious regions of the unknowable self that is "genius"?for Edgar Allan Poe, a belated encounter with bizarre life?forms utterly alien to the poet's exalted Romantic aesthetics; for Emily Dickinson, resurrected in the twenty-first century in a "distilled" state, a belated encounter with blundering humanity and brute passion of a kind excluded from the poet's verse; for the elderly, renowned Samuel Clemens, a belated encounter with impassioned innocence, in the form of "the little girl who loves you"; for Henry James, an aging volunteer in a London hospital during World War I, a belated encounter with the physicality of desire and the raw yearning of love long absent from the master's fiction; and, for Ernest Hemingway, the most tragic of these figures, a belated encounter with the "profound mysteries of the world outside him, and the profound mysteries of the world inside him."

Wild Nights! is Joyce Carol Oates's most original and haunting work of the imagination, a writer's memoirist work in the form of fiction.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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