So, last time I wrote about a book that defied my low expectations by being kind of awesome. Unfortunately, that means part two of this post will focus on a book that defied my high expectations by, well, sucking majorly. I’m going to try to refrain from turning this into a long, whiney tirade about how much I hated the book, because that’s just no fun (although I make no promises). Instead, I’ll try to look at how such a great author could take such a great premise and turn it into such an un-grate novel.
I formed a favorable first impression of Oscar Wilde as a child when I read “The Happy Prince” in the Provensen Book of Fairy Tales (whose awesomeness I’ve already discussed), and I never found cause to revise my good opinion of him until now. In addition to “The Happy Prince”, a story that while perhaps a little preachy has at least the redeeming quality of being beautifully tragic, I’ve also enjoyed his plays in the past, specifically An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. His plays are witty, quippy, and endlessly quotable comedies of manners that rarely fail to amuse and generally delight. Wilde also wrote extensive poetry, and was an erstwhile philosopher to boot. Was there anything the guy couldn’t do? Well, write novels, apparently. After finishing the only novel he ever wrote, I can’t help but wish he’s have stuck to what he knew.
The Picture of Dorian Gray tells the story of a wealthy and beautiful young man who sits for a portrait and, on seeing the finished product, makes an impulsive wish that he might remain eternally unchanged, and that the picture might bear the mark of time in his stead. When he discovers that his bold wish has been granted (by the powers that be?) and that he has effectively sold his soul for eternal youth and beauty, he begins a double life of hedonism and excess, with only the portrait to bear the signs of his true physical and spiritual degradation. This sounds like the premise of a great gothic melodrama, right? Unfortunately, Oscar Wilde is not Mary Shelley. His dark tale of corruption still reads, on the surface at least, a lot like his drawing room comedies, with very odd results. I guess you could say that this book was tonally confused.
Yet my problems with The Picture of Dorian Gray don’t stop there. I also found the book to be quite muddled thematically. It appeared in many ways to be a cautionary tale against vanity and pride, except for the fact that the author spends a great deal of the novel waxing poetic about the philosophy of hedonism and self-indulgence. The chronology was also very rough and ready; the book consists of only a few significant evens/conversations interspersed between awkwardly long jumps in time. And perhaps my greatest complaint with the novel is that the main character is seriously underdeveloped. I’d call him one-dimensional, but honestly he’s not even that well defined. Easily swayed by the slightest influence, Dorian Gray has almost no character of his own. Conveniently spared the burden of guilt for his crimes (which the painting also assumes), he is no more capable of being satisfied with his fate than he is of truly repenting his many transgressions.
I think that, given its chronology and character development issues, The Picture of Dorian Gray could still have made a really great short story. It could have been a good novel, perhaps, if only somebody else had written it. Or maybe if Wilde had had a decent editor. As it so happens, Wilde wrote the book on his own as a full-length novel, and I thought it fell pretty flat. Sheesh, what a bummer.
One last little note in conclusion: whatever else I may say about this book, I cannot deny that, like Wilde’s other works, it is very quotable. It is chock full of witty and original remarks ("All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime"), but I believe it takes more than clever little turns of phrase to sustain a worthwhile novel.
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