Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel

This is a brilliant little novel that is a quick read. It contains phrase after phrase of glamorous prose-poetry that aches to be reread and savoured. It is a complex story of the dying Stephan Crane and his race against time to get as many of the details on paper of Elliot's life as a teenboy street-whore in old Manhattan. There are various narrative voices telling us about Crane's last days and Elliot's life (in the colorful homosexual underworld), both as a real person, and then as a fictional character in something called "The Painted Boy" that Crane is dictacting from his various sickbeds. The details of life in 1900 New York are vivid, especially scenes involving flamboyant drag queens. The vocabulary is sometimes arch and prissy ("glabrous"? "rachitic"?), but the writing is so beautifully sculpted that it is an intoxicating joy to read it. This is rare white marble, not some stiff meringue. Edmund White is a master of gorgeous word-choice. I kept reading eagerly, hoping for another thrilling phrase, and I was never disappointed. It's like Flaubert meets Capote. It's like Mallarme on absinthe. I was hooked by the gossipy nature of the early pages, when famous names are dropped like bejewelled snowflakes and some juicy bits of information are given. (Even if it's not true, it's worth quoting to friends as accepted history.) The plot builds and you end up with a great page-turner as you wonder what is really going to happen to these vividly-portrayed people during the final pages. We get the sense ahead of time of what will happen to Crane, but it is spellbinding to wonder what happens to Elliot and his keeper, Theodore. The technique of rival plot threads going on during different time-frames (not unlike the film version of "The French Lieutenant's Woman") plus the evocation of a soiled era we probably would not have wanted to live through make this one of the best novels of 2007.

Edmund White, gratefully, is a prolific writer, a gifted man of letters who has become one of America's more important authors. While much of Edmund White's oeuvre is about gay life, he does not confine his talent to the one topic: he is a brilliant biographer, a fine man of research, and a poet with prose. HOTEL DE DREAM: A New York Novel is his latest foray into fictional biography and for this reader the book succeeds on every level. The short novel is ostensibly a 'biographical' account of the sadly brief life of novelist Stephen Crane, a nineteenth century literary giant who is best known for THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, but who also wrote a few other short novels and story collections. Basing the concept of this novel on both fact and fantasy, Edmund White gives us the last days of Stephen Crane's life, a tortured existence as he succumbed to tuberculosis, nursed by his beloved mistress Cora, an ex-Madame who had run a bordello in Florida called the Hotel de Dream. Crane had in fact befriended a poor youth who happened to be a male prostitute infected with syphilis: White takes this fact and uses it as a unique approach to explore the mind of Crane, using the fragment of thought that Crane was planning to create a story 'Flowers of Asphalt' based on the sad lad as the impetus for this brilliant book, the composition of a final novel called 'The Painted Boy.' The novel deals with myriad aspects of Crane's life, but in the end it focuses on Crane dictating to Cora a 'fictionalized' story about a married banker, Theodore, who becomes enamored with a teenage, poor, syphilitic hustler named Elliott, only to find that his coming to grips with buried secrets of lust (tenderly satisfied by the very lovable Elliott) plunges him into a downward spiral that ends with a series of tragedies that parallel Stephen Crane's own consumptive death from tuberculosis. As Crane lies dying he shares his ideas for the conclusion of the story with the stalwart Cora, asking her to present the manuscript to Crane's respected colleague Henry James to complete after Crane dies. The story ends with a surprise that traces a circle to the beginning: the period of the turn of the century simply was not the time a story such as 'A Painted Boy' could be published. Edmund White's ability to create a novel within a novel in such a fascinatingly credible manner is matched only by his gift for writing some of the most beautiful prose before us today. He understands character development, he knows the agony of personal tragedy, and his intellectual honesty dissects history so smoothly that his novel feels like true biography. And yet he takes the time to pause for moments of writing that are so touching they make the reader reflect with respect: 'He glanced down and saw that his sheet was stained yellow. He must have pissed himself. He started to cry. So it's come to this, he thought. He'd gone back to infancy and incontinence - with this difference: an infant has everythin

I really enjoyed this book, Mr White has done a very nice job of creating a novel inside a novel. While it has been a while since I read "Red Badge of Courage" I really felt that Mr. Whites channeling of Mr. Crane was effective and realistic. Overall the novel was very tight and the characters seemed to jump from the page.

Edmund White's latest novel HOTEL DE DREAM is as good as anything he has ever written and the best thing he has published since THE MARRIED MAN. It is, in White's own words, his "fantasia on real themes provided by history." Near the end of Stephen Crane's far too short life (he died of tuberculosis at twenty-eight), according to his friend the critic James Gibbons Huneker, he started a novel about a boy prostitute based on a lad he and Huneker had met on the streets of New York but Hamlin Garland convinced him to destroy the manuscript. Mr. White has taken that bit of information, whether real or apocryphal, and has run with it. He acknowledges in his "postface" that Huneker may have been less than honest or a "fabulist." Whether Crane ever began such a novel or not, Mr. White has given us an account of the final days of writer of two of the great pieces of American literature, the novel THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE and the short story "The Open Boat," and a re-creation of a fragment of a Crane novel THE PAINTED BOY, both of which are completely believable. That Stephen Crane who by all accounts was heterosexual could write so convincingly and successfully about a syphilitic, impoverished sixteen-year-old boy prostitute is no stretch since he wrote so brilliantly about war without ever having seen combat (THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE), and sympathized with the downtrodden (MAGGIE, A GIRL OF THE STREETS). White's fiction, on the other hand, is often autobiographical. He certainly could use his own sad experience in caring for a dying lover to create the touching, poignant scenes between Crane and his companion Cora-- not actually his wife since she couldn't find her second husband to divorce him. Crane describes dying as "'When you come to the hedge--that we all must go over--it isn't bad. You feel sleepy and you don't care.'" But he almost immediately, so humanly, contrasts his own condition with that of the healthy Cora: "She was partly playing the clown to keep up his spirits, but on another level she seemed perfectly sincere that he was somehow being indulged. Did she seriously not know how every movement stripped him of another erg of energy. . . She was this great strapping thing with the solid legs and firm breasts, the golden hair. . ." White through his character Crane writes of the uncrossable gulf between the sick and the well: "She [Crane's nurse] was a healthly, smug animal, and she looked on his illness as if it were an exception rather than the rule, something queer and other than the fate she would undergo sooner or later. She'd turned his pain and physical disarray into an aspect of her profession." As always with Mr. White's writing, there is a torrent of evocative details. Horses' hooves are as "big as dinner plates." Antimacassars are as "dainty as ocean foam." His characters are firmly lodged in their own time and place, the 1890's in New York, England and Germany. Mr. White has done his homework-- he gives credit to the writer