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Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Edmund White
Publisher: Ecco
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
Buy New: $6.95
You Save: $17.00 (71%)
New (34) Used (13) Collectible (4) from $6.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 42132
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.8 x 1
ISBN: 0060852259
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780060852252
ASIN: 0060852259
Publication Date: September 1, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 9 more reviews...
VIRTUOSIC AS EVER February 26, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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 February 23, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
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.
For more about this book, visit BellemeadeBooks at Blogger.com
 Edmund White writes another winner. February 7, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
Not White's Best Work...Unfortunately January 22, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
First, I think Edmund White is fabulous. I was so excited to get this book for Christmas. I read it within the first week of January, but despite the compelling concept of the book it left me wanting more. The story of the dying Stephen Crane, and parallel story of his unfinished work the painted boy, could have really been a monumental achievement. In the end, however, the prose reads a little flat, and ultimately despite interesting and sympathetic characters, the writing really doesn't draw you in enough to truly FEEL the pain of their traumatic situations. Really only a whisper of an image, not a rich tapestry to revel in.
19th Century Twilight November 21, 2007
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Hotel de Dream, the latest novel from Edmund White, is a well-written exploration of a writer's last days and the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.
The story's chief protagonist, famed American novelist Stephen Crane, is dying of Tubercolosis in the English countryside at the age of 28 as famous contemporaries, including Jospeh Conrad and Henry James, drop in to pay their final respects. His common-law wife, Cora, then accompanies him to Germany (by way of France and Switzerland) for experimental treatment. Cora, the former operator of the Hotel de Dream brothel in Florida, is careless with money, a trait shared with Crane, who has managed to squander the income from well-received novels such as The Red Badge of Courage.
And it is this pressing financial need and a desire to provide royalty income for Cora that prompt Crane's most significant action along his final, painful journey: the dictation of a novel about a 16-year-old male prostitute who hustles the streets of New York City during the late 1890s. This novel-within-a-novel, which foreshadows Nabokov's Lolita in tone and content, is an impressive feat of storytelling, and White ably rises to the challenge of re-imagining Crane and his style. The novel, entitled The Painted Boy, recounts the ill-fated love affair between a 'respectable' bank manager, Theodore, and the poor, akward boy who captures his heart (and a sizable portion of his earnings).
Crane instructs Cora to solicit Henry James' assistance in finishing the novel, a request that undergirds the most profound message of White's work. Crane, a writer who could be considered the first modernist (and certainly one of the first writers of 'hyper-realist' fiction), is juxtaposed against James, a masterful author who is nevertheless dependent on Victorian flourishes, verbose descriptions, and the entire aegis of the 19th century. So it is a cruel irony that Crane, the forward-thinking literary radical, is dying in his youth and dependent on James, a throwback who will nevertheless live to a ripe old age. But, in the real world, Crane's methods and ethos ultimately dominated 20th century literature, finding the acceptance and respectability denied to Theodore.
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