Product Description

In a damp, old sussex castle, American literary phenomenon Stephen Crane lies on his deathbed, wasting away from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight. The world-famous author of The Red Badge of Courage has retreated to England with his wife, Cora, in part to avoid gossip about her ignominious past as the proprietress of a Florida bordello, the Hotel de Dream.

Though Crane's days are numbered, he and Cora live riotously, running up bills they'll never be able to pay, receiving visitors like Henry James and Joseph Conrad, and even planning a mad dash to Germany's Black Forest, where Cora hopes a leading TB specialist will provide a miracle cure.

Then, in the midst of the confusion and gathering tragedy of their lives, Crane begins dictating a strange novel. The Painted Boy draws from Crane's erstwhile journalist days in New York in the 1890s, a poignant story about a boy prostitute and the married man who ruins his own life to win the boy's love. Crane originally planned the book as a companion piece to Maggie, Girl of the Streets, but abandoned it when literary friends convinced him that such scandalous subject matter would destroy his career. Now, with his last breath, Crane devotes himself to refashioning this powerful novel, into which he pours his fascination with the underworld, his sympathy for the poor, his experiences as a reporter among New York's lowlife—and his complex feelings for his own devoted wife.

Seamlessly flowing between the vibrant, seedy atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Manhattan and the quiet Sussex countryside, Hotel de Dream tenderly presents the double love stories of Cora and Crane, and the painted boy and his banker lover. The brilliant novel-within-a-novel combines the youthful simplicity of Crane's own prose with White's elegant sense of form, offering an unforgettable portrait of passion in all its guises.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #44263 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-01
• Released on: 2007-09-04
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
A biographical fantasia, White's latest imagines the final days of the poet and novelist Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage), who died of TB at age 28 in 1900. At the same time, White also imagines and writes The Painted Boy, a work that he has Crane say he began in 1895, but burned after warnings from a friend. Crane dictates a fresh start on the story to his common-law wife, Cora Stewart-Taylor. Interspersed within White's impressionistic account of Crane's life, The Painted Boy tells the tale of Elliott, a ganymede butt-boy buggaree. Once a farm boy used by his widowed father and elder brothers like a girl, Elliott escapes to New York and begins a new life as a street hustler. Crane, dying overseas, asks that someone skilled and open minded complete the novella. The wry Cora, in her earlier career as a madam at the Jacksonville, Fla. Hotel de Dream, has some ideas of who among Crane's friends fits the bill. Though White's research and marshaling of slang are impressive, The Painted Boy approaches the sexual frankness of porn and reads improbably. But as White's book(s) build up steam, readers will let go of misgivings, caught up in Elliott's tragic love life and Crane's apocalyptic end. (Sept.)
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From Bookmarks Magazine
Rumors of Stephen Crane’s last, lost work have been around for ages, and they give Edmund White an excellent excuse to practice his well-honed brand of invented history in his 19th novel. Problems arise, however, with the overreaching story within a story. The tale of a country boy turned rent boy may have been shocking at the turn of the last century, but it will raise fewer eyebrows today. And it doesn’t do justice to the rich literary talents of Stephen Crane or, for that matter, Edmund White. Luckily, the critics agreed that the gripping, desperate finale of Hotel de Dream contains some of White’s best writing and that the depictions of Crane and Cora, plus a cameo of Henry James, are also very well done.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
Many successful historical novels are not about wars and kings and queens but about, say, artists (for instance, Susan Vreeland's work, including Luncheon of the Boating Party, 2007) and writers (see Colm Toibin's The Master, 2004). The new novel by distinguished writer White is further evidence. The novel's conceit is this: facing death, the tuberculosis-suffering American writer Stephen Crane dictates to his mistress-posing-as-wife Cora his dying effort, reconstructing the pages of a novel he had destroyed years before upon the advice of fellow writer Hamlin Garland, who was scandalized (but also impressed) by the novel's sexual frankness. It was a rent-boy novel, based on a teen male prostitute working the streets of the Bowery with whom Crane had gotten acquainted—but never "used," other than as writerly material. The recomposition of the piece, Cora's point of view as she caretakes and takes dictation, and the fictional narrative itself constitute the three beguiling levels of this imaginative visit to the life of an American master. Hooper, Brad

Customer Reviews

VIRTUOSIC AS EVER
Edmund White has dazzled us before. Those familiar with his writing know to expect perfectly constructed sentences delivering a compelling story. This book is no surprise. Here, the main character is Stephen Crane, the American writer who wrote "Red Badge of Courage" and "Maggie, A Girl of the Streets". Crane dictates a novel to his wife about a fifteen year old male hustler and a married banker that falls in love with him. The dictated novel (which in real life Crane never wrote) is interspersed with the Stephen Crane story line, which is primarily about his decline due to tuberculosis and his desperate attempt to finish the hustler novel before he dies.

It is a testament to White's skill as a writer that we care not just about what happens to Crane, but also about the fictitious creations he is conjuring up in the novel. We care so much, in fact, about the characters we know are fiction, that we have to remind ourselves that the Stephen Crane story line is also made up, a fictitious creation about a real-life American writer. We as readers are transported twice: once into the fictitious Stephen Crane world, and again into the world he creates as he dies.

Edmund White is one of the "grands seigneurs" of modern American literature. Here he does not disappoint.

A missed opportunity
Whether or not the reader accepts the author's hot-house premise (White himself calls the historical evidence for Crane's missing manuscript "uncertain" and "challenging material for a novelist"), the novel's twin stories still don't satisfy completely. Just 220 pages -- White is a quick tale-spinner -- the book's breathlessness is a major fault: realizing this fabrication could collapse at any time, White never lingers on the improbabilities (or awkwardness) of plot, nor seems bothered that the story of "the painted boy" itself becomes an un-Crane-like romantic fantasy at the end. Even considering Crane is dictating from his deathbed to the beloved Cora, very few readers will mistake White's contemporary writing for the real Crane's reporter-like prose.

White does supply a neat twist which would explain the mystery of the "lost" manuscript, and his research into the gay culture of 1890s New York is extensive in detail. He obviously views the gay culture of "Hotel de Dream" as another historical aspect to his own autobiographical work. However the story of Crane's lost manuscript intrigued White as a writer, it would be difficult to find in this short novel more than an interesting idea.

Edmund White writes another winner.
Edmund White has for a long time been one of the three or four most imaginative and original fiction writers in the United States, and he retains that title with Hotel de Dream, a unique recreation of what might have been a novel by Stephen Crane. Crane comes alive in White's words, as does the novel about a young male prostitute in New York in the early twentieth century. Brilliant, as always. Bravo, Edmund White.