How convenient! Just as I finish reading The Picture of Dorian Gray I stumble upon a review by Jeffery Eugenides in LA Weekly (via Cup of Chica). Eugenides, author of The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex as well as the introduction to the Modern Library edition, finds in Dorian Gray hints of Wilde’s struggle to find himself as an artist and a writer:
Wilde wasn’t conflicted only about his personal life. He was still confused, at this stage, about his art. He didn’t yet know who he was as a writer, and so he came up with this monster of a book. It catered to the poet, the wisecracker, the moralist, the fop and the adventurer in him, all those separate selves jostling together, trying to merge into a mature, and incomparable, artist.
I will give my own take on this interesting novel as soon as I have some time to put my thoughts down in an organized (or semi-organized) fashion.
What did you end up thinking of this? It’s one of my favorites. You’ll have to see the movie one day. It Sybil Vane’s whole character and importance (played by a young Angela Lansbury) but the mood and portrait is eerily shocking.