BRIEFLY NOTED: Books The following notices were written for the Mark Twain Forum by Kevin Mac Donnell. _Bambino and Mr. Twain_. By P. I. Maltbie. Illustrated by Daniel Miyares. Charlesbridge, 2012. Pp. 33. Hardcover. $15.95. ISBN 978-1-58089-272-9. This book is a charmingly told, sweetly illustrated, fictionalized account of an incident that took place in April 1905, when Mark Twain was living at 21 Fifth Avenue in New York with his daughter Jean. Both were grieving Livy's death the previous June. Clara, depressed and unable to cope with the loss of her mother, was recovering at a sanitarium, but was not allowed to keep her cat Bambino there, so Bambino was staying with Twain and Jean at Fifth Avenue. Bambino vanished around midnight on March 31. A notice offering a $5 reward was sent to at least two newspapers, but Bambino reappeared that evening about four blocks away, and Mark Twain's secretary Isabel Lyon and her mother chased him down the street and brought him home. Twain was overjoyed to have Bambino back and carried him around his library asking him about his exploits and guessing at how many harlots he had enjoyed while away on his adventures. A week later, Zoe Anderson Norris, a reporter from the _New York Times_, unable to interview Twain himself, published an interview with Bambino instead. About a month later Bambino briefly vanished again during the day, and returned smelling "streety" according to Lyon. A decision was made to find another home for him, and one of the Italian household maids found him a home with one of her friends on May 1. Caio, Bambino! In Maltbie's fictionalized account of the adventures of Bambino, Twain has shut himself off from the world mourning for Livy, and one day watches helplessly as Bambino jumps out a window to chase a squirrel and remains missing for three days, all the while with people showing up at the door offering their own cats in response to the newspaper notice. When Bambino reappears on the morning of the fourth day Twain is overjoyed and learns the lesson that "there's a whole world outside of this house to enjoy" and he decides to engage life again. Although a work of fiction most of the details are fact-based and the illustrations accurately portray Twain, Jean, the Fifth Avenue house, the household furniture, Twain's billiard table, Livy, and later on, Stormfield. The details that are factually incorrect are trivial: Isabel Lyon is never mentioned in this account, Bambino's eyes were yellow rather than blue, and he was barely gone a day. Although several cats lived happily ever after at Stormfield, Bambino was not among them. But this story succeeds on its own merits and delivers a lesson without sermonizing. Maltbie provides a factual--if not complete--account of Bambino's 1905 vanishing act at the end of the book. She lists her sources which include Clara Clemens's _My Father, Mark Twain_, Katy Leary's _A Lifetime with Mark Twain_, Ron Power's _Mark Twain, A Life_, and the book based on Ken Burns's PBS film about Twain _Mark Twain: An Illustrated Biography_. Most children would beg to hear this story told more than once at bedtime. The amazon web page for this book is: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1580892728/twainwebmarktwaiA _The Accursed_. By Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco (HarperCollins), 2013. Pp. 669. Hardcover. $27.99. ISBN 978-0-06-223170-3. Joyce Carol Oates, the award-winning author of more than fifty books, has written a book that could serve as bedtime reading for many bedtimes. Weighing in at nearly 700 pages and more than 2 pounds, this brick of a novel takes place just as Bambino's big adventure ends, spanning the summer of 1905 to the summer of 1906, and takes place mostly at Princeton University and in Bermuda. The book includes in its cast of characters Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, President Teddy Roosevelt, President and Mrs. Grover Cleveland, future President Woodrow Wilson, Wilson's rumored mistress Mrs. Mary Peck, some ghosts and vampires, and maybe Satan himself. Twain is featured at pages 343-66 and 575-87, and mentioned in passing on five other pages. It also includes plenty of sex, a rape, an Antarctic voyage, a murder, parallel worlds, spiritualism, a wife-beater, a lynching, a kidnapping, a "snake-frenzy," strange dreams, satire, paranoia, gossip, side stories, socialism, and a confessional sermon whose deliverance is interrupted--said some--by a ten foot snake that strangled the man at the pulpit. It's downright gothic, and maybe even epic--the publicity material says its structured using the Homeric ring structure of Homer, Ovid, and Milton, which will make it an irresistible read to many. Mark Twain, wearing his white suit and smoking stinky cigars, is part of the action along with Woodrow Wilson and Mrs. Peck in Bermuda. In April of 1906 a reference is made to the recent death of Twain's daughter, but Susy died in 1896, Jean would live three more years, and Clara outlived them all by five decades. Mere fiction, or did Oates have Livy in mind? Oates writes that Twain was in love with Mrs. Peck and had met her several years before the time of this story, another fiction. Rumors of an affair between Mrs. Peck and Wilson circulated, and Wilson's letters leave no doubt that he was infatuated with her. Oates suggests that Twain introduced Mrs. Peck to Wilson to see if Wilson would succumb to her "charms." However, in reality, Wilson spotted Peck when she walked across the dining room while he was eating alone in a hotel and later met her at a party. The time sequence of Oates's story is at serious odds with historical truth. Mark Twain was not on the island during the period in which this novel takes place. In the context of this sprawling novel and given the way these facts are presented as rumors and put in the mouths or letters of other characters who may have it all wrong, it would be unfair to take the author to task solely for her infidelity to historical fact. This is a work of fiction, after all. What is somewhat regrettable is that Twain had interesting connections with some of the other historical figures who populate the pages of this novel, but Oates does not make these connections. Twain was familiar with the works of Upton Sinclair, and had read and praised _The Jungle_, and corresponded with Sinclair and dined with him in Bermuda. The publication of _The Jungle_ and its influence and reception get a lot of attention in these pages, but Twain does not share those pages. At one point (p. 511) Oates's fictional Jack London makes fictional comments on Twain's defense of Jews, putting London's anti-Semitism on ugly display. Oates repeatedly includes comments by Sinclair and London about a coming socialist revolution, but she does not include the historical Mark Twain's lacerating remark about the historical Jack London's hypocrisy; Twain had commented that the wealthy London would have to call out the army to collect his royalty checks if those dreams of a working class revolution ever came true. Twain certainly had strong opinions of Teddy Roosevelt (and Roosevelt of him) and he had met with Roosevelt at the White House, just as he had met Grover Cleveland and his wife. But these connections are unexploited. Twain was on familiar terms with Satan, but when Satan appears incarnate in the story Twain is not around to engage him. Of course, Oates was free to bend history to her fictional purposes, but these unconnected dots were surely not left unconnected for lack of room or a potential unraveling of the warp and weave of the plot. What _is_ most disappointing, is that when Twain does make an appearance, he is invariably mentioned in a negative light. He is by turns rough-hewn, ill-mannered, smelly, condescending, strangely aged, drunk and unsteady on his feet, and even his teeth are stained from smoking. In her previous treatment of Twain in her fiction, a short story entitled "Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish" (collected in _Wild Nights_, 2008), the story itself is an unpleasant misreading of actual events and Twain is depicted as an unsympathetic negative figure. Oates does not seem to like Mark Twain, or Sam Clemens either. In the novel itself some fictional sources are cited, all part of the fun of fiction. But when Oates reappears on the very last page (p. 669) to acknowledge her actual sources for this novel she declares that "the truths of fiction reside in metaphor; but metaphor is here generated by History" and she then lists her actual sources. Eight books about Woodrow Wilson are listed, one book about the Antarctic and two about New Jersey, one each about Jack London and Upton Sinclair, and a book about lynching, but nary a Twain source among them. Clearly, the metaphoric Twain she creates was not generated by "History." This book provides some thrilling reading and fine satire and could be judged someday as Oates' epic masterpiece, but as Twaints go, it just ain't. (For the definition of 'Twaint' the reader is referred to the Mark Twain Forum review of Bill Macnaughton's _Mark Twain's Civil War_ which appeared on the Mark Twain Forum March 4, 2013). The amazon web page for this book is: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0062231707/twainwebmarktwaiA