Wilde and wilder: British bad boy Will Self updates Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray with drugs, orgies, AIDS, and Princess Di - Review

Dorian * Will Self * Grove Press * $24

Described by one Victorian critic as rich in "the odor of moral and spiritual putrefaction," Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray was a scandalous hit when published in 1890. Centering around the treacherous Dorian Gray, a young man of matchless beauty and bottomless vanity who forsakes his soul to never age, Wilde's book became viewed as both a product and a critique of gay male narcissism. It was also a fantastically entertaining book.

With Dorian, Will Self, the oft-named heterosexual "bad boy" of English writers, has updated the tale, which now unfolds in the gay London subculture of the 1980s, when England's economy was down and appetites for escapism were perilously high. The characters are the same--the faithless Dorian; the epigram-spouting Wilde alter ego Henry Wotton; the weak-willed, artless artist Basil Hallward--but their sexual proclivities are decidedly different (or at least more open).

Selfs Wotton is now a married, opportunistic, woman-hating bisexual with a penchant for gay "conga line" orgies and ample amounts of heroin. Basil Hallward is an out-and-proud gay video installation artist and recovering drug addict. Dorian is a sexually carnivorous HIV-positive psychopath. Suffice it to say that if you are easily offended by offensive gay stereotypes, this is not your book. If, however, you enjoy a little literary fission in your life, if big words, clever turns of phrase, and rambling, rambunctious satires of English mores and hypocrisy provide your life with a few piquant perks, by all means indulge--but don't say you weren't warned.

Of course, Dorian, unlike Wilde's work, doesn't cover any ground that hasn't been covered before, including by Self himself. Grotesque characters of ceaseless wants and needs, sexual perversions rooted in pain and power--these are themes of many of Self's short stories and intense, hyperactive novels, not to mention some earlier controversial American books. In fact, much of Dorian will remind readers less of The Picture of Dorian Gray than of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. Dorian, like Ellis's Patrick Bateman, is the monstrous spawn of unchecked capitalism whose hunger for stimulation, for control, for blameless blood is voracious and unwavering. He is, in short, tiresome. And that is something that Self, at his iconoclastic best--here skewering London's art scene, philanthropy as fashion, and, as he says, the "Royal Fag Hag" herself, Princess Di--is certainly not.

Bahr also writes for The New York Times, Time Out New York, and Poets & Writers.

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