Discomfort zones and creative spirits

Book cover for Wild Nights by Joyce Carol Oates. Photo / Supplied

The paperback edition of one of Oates' recent publications (she's scarily productive and seems to release a couple of significantly sized works of fiction a year) is among her more Gothic efforts. Its five stories each takes a major American author and uses his/her "last days" as the starting point for a virtuoso exercise of style and imagination.

Ernest Hemingway, hating women, the world and himself, convinced his brain and body are full of pus, prepares the shotgun to kill himself ... maybe. An Edgar Allan Poe livealike and his love retire to a lighthouse so the tormented narrator can convalesce, but madness comes crawling over him again. Less melodramatically, but just as disturbingly, Samuel Clemens conducts one of his squirmy correspondences with an adoring pubescent girl, before abandoning her, Lewis Carroll-style, when she threatens to grow into a woman. Most remarkable (and most unsettling) is the story of a couple yearning for "more life! more life!," who buy a "brilliantly rendered mannikin empowered by a computer programme that is the distillation of the original individual."

The individual they choose is elusive, obsessively private, unworldly Emily Dickinson, so it all turns to grotesque and tragic custard. Most restrained (and most successful) is Henry James in a British military hospital during World War I. "The Master" becomes the servant of once-beautiful young men whom the civilisation he renders so intricately has wrecked. This is the narrative where JCO pauses to comprehend and capture her protagonist most convincingly.

The pieces are pastiches of the style and/or mood of each author. We get Poe's florid fevers; Hemingway's bullish, brutish cadences; James' labyrinthine musings. The quintet don't really cohere. Each swells to make his or her own surreal world. The reader is simultaneously seduced by the technical brilliance and repelled by the manias, perversions and excesses. As she so often does, Oates shoves you right into the middle of your discomfort zones.

Early winter, 1916. In a lighthouse on the Californian coast, charming and gorgeous Young Man 1 tells his mum that a small boat holding a small man is about to be wrecked on their rocks. The small man is Charlie Chaplin. Unlikely? Almost as unlikely as the fact that in Texas at the very same moment, charming, etc Young Man 2 is on a train steaming towards a town and brass band, while chatting to ... Charlie Chaplin. Improbable? Then how about the other CCs simultaneously sitting on the roof of a Los Angeles Health Club? Or the many others doing many other things in many other parts of the United States?

That's the start(s) of Gold's second, table-bending novel. This is a condensed — slightly condensed — history of early 20th century America, where newspapers publish "Slacker" pages listing names of men who haven't enlisted in WW1, Buffalo Bill makes his geriatric way across continents in a tawdry stage show, and the Allies clandestinely send troops to Russia, to suppress a Bolshevik revolution. As Young Men and Chaplin converge in convoluted ways, it's also a history of early Hollywood: the money, moguls, manoeuvrings and mess-ups; the studios mushrooming out of citrus groves (Gold has many metaphors).

There's Mary Pickford, Rin Tin Tin, Jackie Coogan, Adolph Zukor, Samuel Goldwyn in his beach house. And there's Chaplin: morally flexible and artistically inflexible; casting 25 dogs for his new, unscripted film; vying with Pickford for supremacy; irresistible yet isolated; driven on by his ghastly mum and his creative spirit (Gold also has quite a lot about creative spirit) to make Sunnyside — which he'd planned, in a pit of despondency, to call Suicide.

There are no sins of omission in this book. Everything is included, from Bolsheviks head-down and trouserless in an icy lake, to Douglas Fairbanks declaiming at a picnic, to three Russian princesses defended by a crossbowman in a castle, to Chaplin seducing his latest wardrobe girl. The plot pauses, postures, powers on. Characters arrange themselves in operetta tableaux. Action bits pant past. It's a big, fat, movie-in-waiting. An airport novel? Rather better-written and more socially meaningful than that. And anyway, you'd have to pay an excess baggage charge to take its 550 pages on the plane.

* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.

* Wild Nights! by Joyce Carol Oates (Harper Perennial $24.99)
* Sunnyside by Glen David Gold (Sceptre $38.99)