In Oates' Stories, Writers Go Wild

By TOM BEER | Newsday

April 20, 2008

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 surreal 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.