Lawrence Patchett
  • Home
  • About
  • Reviews
  • Three Things
  • Contact
  • Links

Joyce Carol Oates: Wild Nights!

6/20/2012

 
Picture
In Wild Nights! Joyce Carol Oates riffs on the deaths of Hemingway, Emily Dickinson and others. Her take on the Great Dead Authors speaks powerfully to current debates about the use of real people in fiction.  

1. I own you, Emily Dickinson
My favourite character is
EDickinsonRepliLuxe, a robotic mannequin ‘animated’ with the soul of the American poet. Oates’ brilliant device for focalising the destructive energies of the fame industry, this mannequin is bought by a couple who hope that Emily Dickinson’s presence will banish the ‘torpor’ of their suburban home. But she and her genius are elusive, and in their rage to own and know her completely—in all senses of that word—the couple freak the poet right out. The wife is over-friendly and the husband so excited by the power of possession that he attempts mannequin-rape: 

‘In a rage the husband tore at these [undergarments], he was owed this, he had a right to this, he’d paid for this, under U.S. law this model of
EDickinsonRepliLuxe was his possession and he was legally blameless in anything he might do with her […] she was his to dispose of as he wished.’

Other
RepliLuxe models for purchase include Freud, van Gogh, and Babe Ruth. Unsurprisingly, most are wrecked by their owners, one way or another, within their first year of purchase ... MORE at Victoria University Press

    3 Things

    3 things that interest me about books I’m reading or listening to.

    Previous Posts

    All
    Amy Head
    Anti Lebanon
    Ashleigh Young
    Carl Shuker
    Cricket
    Daniel Woodrell
    Death On Demand
    Elizabeth Knox
    Frankfurt Bookfair
    Helen Heath
    It Can't Happen Here
    Jim Shepard
    John Wyndham
    Joyce Carol Oates
    Kirsten Mcdougall
    Laurent Binet
    Lynn Jenner
    Patrick De Witt
    Paul Thomas
    Pip Adam
    Rocky Outcrop
    Sinclair Lewis
    Stories
    The Day Of The Triffids
    The Exercise Book Live
    The Sisters Brothers
    Tina Makereti
    Tough
    Wake
    While You Were Sleeping
    Wild Nights!
    You Think That's Bad

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.