Review: The Wildes

(This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.) The Wildes seems at first blush to promise a very intimate tale of a very public man, something along the lines of Louis Bayard's earlier novel Courting Mr. Lincoln. until we realize at what point we've been dropped into this tale. The story begins just before what most people would consider The End of Oscar Wilde: not his death, but his death-in-life, the accusations, the trial for slander, and the consequences. This story could be called the aftermath of Oscar. Oscar, in life always at center stage, must give up the spotlight on this occasion. This time, the walk-ons speak.

The story begins with an idyll, a brief time snatched from time in an Edenic inglenook of Norfolk where the Wildes, along with sundry supporting characters, have decamped, ostensibly to give Oscar the peace necessary to finish his latest play, although other motives are at play. And the novel keeps returning to that time, those events, that last weekend in particular, trying to make sense of it all, of how the family was cast out of Eden forever, when they might have stayed.

The style of Wilde himself seeps through the prose in a pleasing manner: epigram and paradox are the novel's shield maidens.Yet at the same time there's an elegiac quality to this novel, as though it were all epilogue. The wake of  the good ship Oscar Wilde upsets all the little boats of those he loves, his wife, his two sons, and even the snake in the garden, Lord Alfred Douglas, the catamite. We bear witness as a forgiving wife and loving sons are helplessly dragged away by an inexorable pitiless tide from Wilde's rocky shores and from each other.

There's a reason the book is subtitled A Novel  in Five Acts. There's a self-conscious theatricality to all the characters, as if Wilde's personality is so powerful that even those closest to them are reduced to supernumeraries in the tragicomedy of his life. Oscar's mother, Lady Wilde, takes on the role of Lady Bracknell from The Importance of Being Earnest, lobbing paradoxical bon mots like live grenades wherever she goes. Constance Wilde is cast in the titular role of  A Woman of No Importance. And the denouement is carried out in exclusively theatrical terms.

There's a sense in all of Oscar Wilde's comedies that their characters are so enmeshed in society's mores and expectations that they have no choice but to follow the script to its inevitable conclusion. That is, paradoxically, the definition of tragedy. Life always begins as comedy and ends as tragedy. So it is in this delicate, superbly wrought tale. You'll leave the theatre quietly, but wanting to cheer.

 The Wildes is available here on Amazon.