Wild Nights!
By Joyce Carol Oates
Ecco, 238 pp., $24.95
This challenging collection - a challenge for the author, that is - lets Joyce Carol Oates display her flair not just as a preeminent fiction writer but as a canny scholar of literature as well. Each of its five short stories requires her to evoke convincingly the stormy psyche and iconic voice of a giant of American letters.
A piece in which Emily Dickinson is projected into the future as a household robot seems little more than a science-fiction gimmick, but the other stories, shrewd exercises in authorial ventriloquism, strike a stronger chord. Here is half-mad Edgar Allan Poe grotesquely unraveling in enforced solitude at a lighthouse off the South American coast; an elderly and bereaved Mark Twain, trying to lighten his declining years with ill-judged attachments to young girls; effete old Henry James, a volunteer on the soldiers' ward of a London hospital during the Great War, receiving Whitmanesque revelations amid the horror and gore. And when a played-out Ernest Hemingway, suppurating with loathing and self-disgust, puts his favorite shotgun to his head, his toe on the trigger, something is flying by evening through the rotting timbers of his mind, though certainly not wise Minerva's owl.
The Book of Getting Even
By Benjamin Taylor
Steerforth, 176 pp., $23.95
In August 1970, Gabriel Geismar leaves home for college, not a moment too soon for this disaffected son of a New Orleans rabbi. A puckish twin brother and sister, Marghie and Danny Hundert, worldly seniors, take him under their wing. When he meets their parents, Hungarian émigrés exuding Old World gravitas and New World intellectual cachet (Gregor Hundert is a renowned physicist, onetime colleague of the godlike Oppenheimer at Los Alamos), Gabriel is convinced that this is the family he was intended for. As charmed by the attentive Southern boy as he is by them, the elder Hunderts enfold Gabriel, who becomes more their natural heir as the years go by than the children nature gave them.
Marghie loves Gabriel, but to no avail, since Gabriel loves Danny, while Danny, slipping into psychological meltdown, is devoted to the tragicomic destiny he has created for himself as a martyr to the cause of protesting the war in Vietnam. War and peace, the fracturing of generations, the sexual revolution and its casualties - with irony and pathos this beautifully written novel treats the defining themes of an era, filtered through the restless, eccentric intelligence of a striking cast of characters.
Forward From Here: Leaving Middle Age- and Other Unexpected Adventures
By Reeve Lindbergh
Simon & Schuster, 226 pp., $24
Where does the time go? Not an original question, but one posed with a sweet mixture of humor and rue by Reeve Lindbergh.
One of the generation who had to get back to the land and set their souls free, Lindbergh is taken aback to realize that she is now past 60 and has lived on her farm in rural Vermont surrounded by chickens and sheep and dogs nearly long enough to be considered a native, not an easy standard to meet in northern New England. She reflects on the passage of time, on the children and stepchildren who have grown up and moved out, the friends and relatives gone forever, the medical crises weathered, the creaks and crotchets afflicting even those who thought they'd never grow old.
From her mother, the poet Anne Morrow Lindbergh, she inherited her lyricism. From her father, the legendary aviator, she inherited a name to reckon with and a shocking legacy, having discovered a few years ago at the same time the world did that Charles Lindbergh secretly fathered families with three different women in Europe. She takes even this news generously in stride, opening her heart to one more plot twist in the imponderable comedy of life.
Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton.
