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timvindigni's review against another edition
3.0
Exquisitely written. The thought to annotate crossed my mind a little too late for my perfectionist brain. Maybe if I ever re-read. 3 stars though because it was confusing and pretentious as fuckkkkkk
millennial_dandy's review against another edition
3.0
'The Picture of Dorian Gray' but 100 years later, in the 1980s to mid 90s. And like most media from or set in the fin de siecle of the 20th century, the reading experience is heroin chic; sleek and glamorous, but grimy, kind of like running your hand along the edge of a neon sign in Times Square and then immidiately wondering where you can wash your hands. But you're still kind of glad you did it.
After reading over a decade and a half's worth of reviews on Goodreads covering this novel, it's clear that this is one of those 'minefield' works that everyone seems to love or hate, to find over-written or perfectly written, offensively brutish or daring to go where the original couldn't or wouldn't. Some people think it's a poor man’s Oscar Wilde pantomime, some people think this is better than its 1890 counterpart. Some people thought the reframing of the story around the AIDS crisis was brilliant, but there's also the question of the ethics (perhaps) of someone from outside the queer community writing a story like that.
Needless to say: there's a lot to unpack and even more to wade through before that unpacking can even begin. I get the impression, without even knowing much about the author, Will Self, that that's kind of the point. To that end: mission accomplished.
To start off, I think that we have to be very careful when criticizing works about queerness on the grounds of whether or not the author is themself queer. Unlike other marginalized identities (with some exception), queerness isn't something visible. Without getting too in the weeds about 'gay affects' and so on, suffice it to say that coming out is an experience largely unique to queer identity, with the exception of disability (a topic for another time).
I think a lot of times we forget that coming out, even now in the 2020s, can come with some hefty blowback, and that people who do can stand to lose a lot by doing so. So it's not really a surprise that many people choose not to, especially publicly. All this to say that forcing someone to come out for the sake of optics is...not good.
Having authentic representation in media is obviously very important, but it can be a bit of a teeter-totter, and we have to be careful, that's all.
Besides, it's not like something being 'authentic' automatically makes it good. There are plenty of 'pick-mes' out there who are more than willing to lick the boots of anyone who'll offer scraps of social mobility and clout even if it means throwing their community under the bus with their work.
Does it matter to me whether or not 'Dorian' is an authentically queer story from a queer writer? In this case, honestly, not really.
The criticism of 'Dorian' isn't whether or not it's 'authentic' (unlike something like the 'Three Day Road' Joseph Boyden scandal), it's whether or not it's homophobic, and even queer people can manage that on occasion. So let's explore.
Though published in 2002, 'Dorian' takes place between 1981 and the late-ish 1990s. This works well as a parallel to the original, setting both at the turn of their respective centuries, and using the AIDS crisis as an explicit plot point rather than the maybe, blink and you'll miss it implication of venereal disease in Wilde's novel. The heavy drug use implied in 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' is brought to the forefront in 'Dorian.'
The bare bones of the plot itself faithfully follow the original ... to a point (and we'll get to that), so it's certainly recognizable to anyone familiar with the 1890 version. And really, I think that's who this is for. You don't have to have read 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' to get what Self is doing with this retelling, but I just don't know why a person would pick this up unless they were a fan of Wilde's story.
Let's return to the explicit drug use and sex and the AIDS crisis. These are both the strengths of 'Dorian' and also the things that make it so dicey.
The explicitness of the drugs and sex, and the direct connection of those things to the AIDS crisis are strengths because they allow for clearer stakes than 'The Picture of' had. In 'The Picture of' we're told that Henry Wotton is the poisonous influence that sends Dorian off along the track of a dangerous hedonism, but that Henry doesn't truly engage in this philosophy himself, at least, not in any serious capacity. How could he? Everyone would be able to see if he was indulging in the degree of opioid abuse Dorian is implied to indulge in, and it would at some point become obvious if he contracted one of the pesky STIs making the rounds in Victorian London at the time. And as a society man, that simply wouldn't do -- he'd be outcast.
But in Self's 'Dorian' Wotton does in fact practice what he preaches, and it does show, and in the end, well...let's just say he loses a lot because of it. This was cool, because it gives us this sharp contrast between the reality of heavy drug use and reckless, unprotected sex, and the glamorous fiction we get of such things through media and advertising through the paralleling of the experiences of Wotton and Dorian.
Self very cleverly ties the idea of the glamorization of drugs and sex in the age of television to Dorian's portrait by having the portrait in this version be a video installation. Very fitting, albeit a little bit clunky in practice (in a literal sense, there's something just inherently clunky about the idea of nine tvs stacked on top of each other).
I really liked the video installation angle, both for this aforementioned reason, and also because film lends itself better to the idea of the 'portrait' being alive than an actual portrait does. Here, as the ravages of drugs and disease and immorality take their toll on the installation, the increasingly horrific Dorians on screen cavort about rather than just sitting there getting more repellent looking. The grotesqueness of these moving figures was so much more horrific and disgusting, and allowed the 'portrait' to feel sentient in a way I never got in the original.
Loved that.
Now, to the elephant: the AIDS crisis.
Eep.
This is where we start to get into the territory of 'things that make you go hmmm...'.
I don't think it was a bad choice to set this novel during the AIDS crisis, nor do I even think that Self's decision to turn Dorian into this angel of death figure who spread AIDS on purpose to his sexual partners was bad (it certainly gives us a clear example of what it was that made Dorian such a menace), but combined with the fact that every character we follow (Henry, Basil, The Ferret, Dorian) is a gay man who is a drug addict and engages in what Self goes out of his way to describe as debaucherous sex there are...implications.
I hadn't even been born yet when all of this was going on, but it's still a sore point in the queer community of today. The mismanagement of the crisis at the time, and the flagrant demonization of the (mostly) men suffering from the virus as merely reaping what they'd sown, of recipients of 'god's punishment' for sinful behavior-- something joked about by then press secretary to Ronald Reagan during a press conference where AIDS was referred to as the 'gay plague'-- did a lot to re-enforce already negative attitudes towards the gay community. Attitudes that were still incredibly prevalent when this novel was published in 2002.
But Self is British, writing a story that primarily takes place in London (with a few forays into the NYC art scene of the 80s). Maybe the Brits had a different, more measured, compassionate take?
Well. I think this quote from the then constable of Greater Manchester about covers it. According to
an article published on the BBC History Magazine website, he said of people with AIDS: "[they're] swirling around in a human cesspit of their own making."
Ok, so, comparable.
And Self, having been a heroin addict at the time this was all happening, definitely knew this.
Yet, in 'Dorian' while we get a perfect caricature of the 'human cesspit' (gay men and drug users--or both) that so many people believed spawned a disease that killed thousands and thousands of people, there is pithy little nuance, if any at all.
Henry Wotton is, by all accounts, not a nice guy, so doesn't he... deserve to be punished for that? And what of our 'angel of death', Dorian. Surely he, who knowingly transmits HIV to two innocent women (that we know of), and murders a few of his friends and allies, surely he deserves to be punished, right?
Even if I were a believer in punitive justice, I just can't imagine reading this without wincing a little, not least because Dorian Gray is well known as a cautionary tale, a parable about vice, with a very clear message: even if you could 'get away with it', you can never really get away with it, because the only way to 'get away with it' is to be damned. And staying young forever isn't worth that now, is it?
But Self didn't create a story weighing the pleasures of vice against eternal damnation; certain choices made in the epilogue make that clear by stripping back the 'magic.' So, what are we talking about? If this isn't a quasi-religious parable, then what exactly makes drug use and (gay) sex 'vices' worthy of punishment?
Something in that just feels a little off to me. At the very least it's a nuance that's missing, and it makes the novel weaker for its absence. Because all it leaves us with are: drug addicts and sexual degenerates (*source missing) are icky for...reasons.
Similarly, Self's employment of non-white characters as shorthand for 'slumming it' felt at best, thoughtless, and at worst, well...racist. Again, with a bit of nuance, it could have been fine. It's true that a lot of people of color get and got caught up in the worlds of drug abuse and prostitution, but Self doesn't explore that at all; these characters are just props. And even that could have been a fine choice if it had felt intentional, like that was how the Henry Wottons and Dorian Grays viewed these people--because they were titillated by the idea of 'slumming it', because they came from privileged backgrounds and saw no issue with using people from these marginalized groups as props. But we don't get that.
It's hilarious to me that one reviewer compared this novel to Hollinghurst's 'Line of Beauty' which also deals with the AIDs crisis and its impact on the gay community because while that may well be true, it reminded me of Hollinghurst for a totally different reason: Hollinghurst did this exact same thing in 'The Swimming-Pool Library': he used black and brown characters as props to demonstrate that many of his rich white characters liked to 'slum it.' Now, to be fair to Hollinghurst, I did note in my review of that novel that attempts were made at some kind of commentary, but here in 'Dorian', not even a whisper. And by saying nothing at all...he says a lot.
Well, geez, Ren, if you thought this was so reckless and possibly racist, what the hell are the 3 stars for: lambast it!
The truth is that despite these pretty fatal (at least to me) flaws, I did like a lot of it. As I said, I think some of the ideas are good ones. But we don't have to label heavy drug abuse and addiction as a 'vice' to recognize that it ruins lives, and that the dangers of it are oft at odds with the casual and often glamorized depiction of drug use in a lot of media. And we don't have to label people who enjoy casual sex as degenerates to recognize that that lifestyle comes with risks that a lot of people aren't educated to protect against. Especially queer people, who often aren't included in the already lacking sex education we get in school (if we do at all).
And it's not untrue that gay culture, or at least parts of it, do worship youth and beauty in unhealthy ways (but let's not pretend that the AIDS crisis had zero impact on that when for a lot of people there was an entanglement of youth and beauty equating being healthy). Self goes into this through the mouthpieces of two of his few straight characters, but his analysis lacks empathy, and again, the narrative is weaker for this.
But the writing, ooh, the writing. Self has some writing chops on him when we just look at the language and kind of ignore what it's saying. Apparently, it's typical of Self to juxtapose clever, satirical, and sometimes very beautiful writing with grotesque or otherwise dark subject matter. And boy is 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' the perfect story for that. Indeed, while Wilde used pretty, witty prose to skate over much of the debauchery and grime, Self uses pretty, witty prose to revel in it.
And we do get the witticisms, most of them (true to type) from Henry Wotton, and a lot of them are pretty good.
"Basil: don't they object to you smoking in here?
Henry: they object to just about everything I do in here, Baz. It's peculiar how terminal illness is so constrained; it explains what martyrs mean when they describe death as "liberation", hmm?" (p.92)
"It was amazing that he believed himself enough of a pussycat to affect a purr." (p.123)
"Neither death nor vulgarity is likely to be cured by modern medicine." (p.126)
"It's true that you're the spirit of the age, but it's drunk so much of you it's become cirrhotic." (p.243)
None of this touches on the cynical commentary on art that twines its way through 'Dorian', and which is probably worth a second read. And yes, I do think it's worth a second read, questionable though its intentional or unintentional politics might be, because the bones of a truly great 'Picture of Dorian Gray' redux are right there. If I do come back to this at a later point, I'll follow Henry's advice:
"You tell me how it was, Baz-- I'll listen to how it should have been." (p.92)
After reading over a decade and a half's worth of reviews on Goodreads covering this novel, it's clear that this is one of those 'minefield' works that everyone seems to love or hate, to find over-written or perfectly written, offensively brutish or daring to go where the original couldn't or wouldn't. Some people think it's a poor man’s Oscar Wilde pantomime, some people think this is better than its 1890 counterpart. Some people thought the reframing of the story around the AIDS crisis was brilliant, but there's also the question of the ethics (perhaps) of someone from outside the queer community writing a story like that.
Needless to say: there's a lot to unpack and even more to wade through before that unpacking can even begin. I get the impression, without even knowing much about the author, Will Self, that that's kind of the point. To that end: mission accomplished.
To start off, I think that we have to be very careful when criticizing works about queerness on the grounds of whether or not the author is themself queer. Unlike other marginalized identities (with some exception), queerness isn't something visible. Without getting too in the weeds about 'gay affects' and so on, suffice it to say that coming out is an experience largely unique to queer identity, with the exception of disability (a topic for another time).
I think a lot of times we forget that coming out, even now in the 2020s, can come with some hefty blowback, and that people who do can stand to lose a lot by doing so. So it's not really a surprise that many people choose not to, especially publicly. All this to say that forcing someone to come out for the sake of optics is...not good.
Having authentic representation in media is obviously very important, but it can be a bit of a teeter-totter, and we have to be careful, that's all.
Besides, it's not like something being 'authentic' automatically makes it good. There are plenty of 'pick-mes' out there who are more than willing to lick the boots of anyone who'll offer scraps of social mobility and clout even if it means throwing their community under the bus with their work.
Does it matter to me whether or not 'Dorian' is an authentically queer story from a queer writer? In this case, honestly, not really.
The criticism of 'Dorian' isn't whether or not it's 'authentic' (unlike something like the 'Three Day Road' Joseph Boyden scandal), it's whether or not it's homophobic, and even queer people can manage that on occasion. So let's explore.
Though published in 2002, 'Dorian' takes place between 1981 and the late-ish 1990s. This works well as a parallel to the original, setting both at the turn of their respective centuries, and using the AIDS crisis as an explicit plot point rather than the maybe, blink and you'll miss it implication of venereal disease in Wilde's novel. The heavy drug use implied in 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' is brought to the forefront in 'Dorian.'
The bare bones of the plot itself faithfully follow the original ... to a point (and we'll get to that), so it's certainly recognizable to anyone familiar with the 1890 version. And really, I think that's who this is for. You don't have to have read 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' to get what Self is doing with this retelling, but I just don't know why a person would pick this up unless they were a fan of Wilde's story.
Let's return to the explicit drug use and sex and the AIDS crisis. These are both the strengths of 'Dorian' and also the things that make it so dicey.
The explicitness of the drugs and sex, and the direct connection of those things to the AIDS crisis are strengths because they allow for clearer stakes than 'The Picture of' had. In 'The Picture of' we're told that Henry Wotton is the poisonous influence that sends Dorian off along the track of a dangerous hedonism, but that Henry doesn't truly engage in this philosophy himself, at least, not in any serious capacity. How could he? Everyone would be able to see if he was indulging in the degree of opioid abuse Dorian is implied to indulge in, and it would at some point become obvious if he contracted one of the pesky STIs making the rounds in Victorian London at the time. And as a society man, that simply wouldn't do -- he'd be outcast.
But in Self's 'Dorian' Wotton does in fact practice what he preaches, and it does show, and in the end, well...let's just say he loses a lot because of it. This was cool, because it gives us this sharp contrast between the reality of heavy drug use and reckless, unprotected sex, and the glamorous fiction we get of such things through media and advertising through the paralleling of the experiences of Wotton and Dorian.
Self very cleverly ties the idea of the glamorization of drugs and sex in the age of television to Dorian's portrait by having the portrait in this version be a video installation. Very fitting, albeit a little bit clunky in practice (in a literal sense, there's something just inherently clunky about the idea of nine tvs stacked on top of each other).
I really liked the video installation angle, both for this aforementioned reason, and also because film lends itself better to the idea of the 'portrait' being alive than an actual portrait does. Here, as the ravages of drugs and disease and immorality take their toll on the installation, the increasingly horrific Dorians on screen cavort about rather than just sitting there getting more repellent looking. The grotesqueness of these moving figures was so much more horrific and disgusting, and allowed the 'portrait' to feel sentient in a way I never got in the original.
Loved that.
Now, to the elephant: the AIDS crisis.
Eep.
This is where we start to get into the territory of 'things that make you go hmmm...'.
I don't think it was a bad choice to set this novel during the AIDS crisis, nor do I even think that Self's decision to turn Dorian into this angel of death figure who spread AIDS on purpose to his sexual partners was bad (it certainly gives us a clear example of what it was that made Dorian such a menace), but combined with the fact that every character we follow (Henry, Basil, The Ferret, Dorian) is a gay man who is a drug addict and engages in what Self goes out of his way to describe as debaucherous sex there are...implications.
I hadn't even been born yet when all of this was going on, but it's still a sore point in the queer community of today. The mismanagement of the crisis at the time, and the flagrant demonization of the (mostly) men suffering from the virus as merely reaping what they'd sown, of recipients of 'god's punishment' for sinful behavior-- something joked about by then press secretary to Ronald Reagan during a press conference where AIDS was referred to as the 'gay plague'-- did a lot to re-enforce already negative attitudes towards the gay community. Attitudes that were still incredibly prevalent when this novel was published in 2002.
But Self is British, writing a story that primarily takes place in London (with a few forays into the NYC art scene of the 80s). Maybe the Brits had a different, more measured, compassionate take?
Well. I think this quote from the then constable of Greater Manchester about covers it. According to
an article published on the BBC History Magazine website, he said of people with AIDS: "[they're] swirling around in a human cesspit of their own making."
Ok, so, comparable.
And Self, having been a heroin addict at the time this was all happening, definitely knew this.
Yet, in 'Dorian' while we get a perfect caricature of the 'human cesspit' (gay men and drug users--or both) that so many people believed spawned a disease that killed thousands and thousands of people, there is pithy little nuance, if any at all.
Henry Wotton is, by all accounts, not a nice guy, so doesn't he... deserve to be punished for that? And what of our 'angel of death', Dorian. Surely he, who knowingly transmits HIV to two innocent women (that we know of), and murders a few of his friends and allies, surely he deserves to be punished, right?
Even if I were a believer in punitive justice, I just can't imagine reading this without wincing a little, not least because Dorian Gray is well known as a cautionary tale, a parable about vice, with a very clear message: even if you could 'get away with it', you can never really get away with it, because the only way to 'get away with it' is to be damned. And staying young forever isn't worth that now, is it?
But Self didn't create a story weighing the pleasures of vice against eternal damnation; certain choices made in the epilogue make that clear by stripping back the 'magic.' So, what are we talking about? If this isn't a quasi-religious parable, then what exactly makes drug use and (gay) sex 'vices' worthy of punishment?
Something in that just feels a little off to me. At the very least it's a nuance that's missing, and it makes the novel weaker for its absence. Because all it leaves us with are: drug addicts and sexual degenerates (*source missing) are icky for...reasons.
Similarly, Self's employment of non-white characters as shorthand for 'slumming it' felt at best, thoughtless, and at worst, well...racist. Again, with a bit of nuance, it could have been fine. It's true that a lot of people of color get and got caught up in the worlds of drug abuse and prostitution, but Self doesn't explore that at all; these characters are just props. And even that could have been a fine choice if it had felt intentional, like that was how the Henry Wottons and Dorian Grays viewed these people--because they were titillated by the idea of 'slumming it', because they came from privileged backgrounds and saw no issue with using people from these marginalized groups as props. But we don't get that.
It's hilarious to me that one reviewer compared this novel to Hollinghurst's 'Line of Beauty' which also deals with the AIDs crisis and its impact on the gay community because while that may well be true, it reminded me of Hollinghurst for a totally different reason: Hollinghurst did this exact same thing in 'The Swimming-Pool Library': he used black and brown characters as props to demonstrate that many of his rich white characters liked to 'slum it.' Now, to be fair to Hollinghurst, I did note in my review of that novel that attempts were made at some kind of commentary, but here in 'Dorian', not even a whisper. And by saying nothing at all...he says a lot.
Well, geez, Ren, if you thought this was so reckless and possibly racist, what the hell are the 3 stars for: lambast it!
The truth is that despite these pretty fatal (at least to me) flaws, I did like a lot of it. As I said, I think some of the ideas are good ones. But we don't have to label heavy drug abuse and addiction as a 'vice' to recognize that it ruins lives, and that the dangers of it are oft at odds with the casual and often glamorized depiction of drug use in a lot of media. And we don't have to label people who enjoy casual sex as degenerates to recognize that that lifestyle comes with risks that a lot of people aren't educated to protect against. Especially queer people, who often aren't included in the already lacking sex education we get in school (if we do at all).
And it's not untrue that gay culture, or at least parts of it, do worship youth and beauty in unhealthy ways (but let's not pretend that the AIDS crisis had zero impact on that when for a lot of people there was an entanglement of youth and beauty equating being healthy). Self goes into this through the mouthpieces of two of his few straight characters, but his analysis lacks empathy, and again, the narrative is weaker for this.
But the writing, ooh, the writing. Self has some writing chops on him when we just look at the language and kind of ignore what it's saying. Apparently, it's typical of Self to juxtapose clever, satirical, and sometimes very beautiful writing with grotesque or otherwise dark subject matter. And boy is 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' the perfect story for that. Indeed, while Wilde used pretty, witty prose to skate over much of the debauchery and grime, Self uses pretty, witty prose to revel in it.
On the windowsill the con-air unit gurgled and spat out tuberculosis air, while the roaches looked up quizzically from their lunch. They always do that, New York City roaches--look up quizzically from their lunch. It's as if they're constantly being reminded by each human arrival of the injustice of their position, caught with their mandibles rasping the cardboard trash instead of ordering their own fucking pizza on the phone." (p.85)
And we do get the witticisms, most of them (true to type) from Henry Wotton, and a lot of them are pretty good.
"Basil: don't they object to you smoking in here?
Henry: they object to just about everything I do in here, Baz. It's peculiar how terminal illness is so constrained; it explains what martyrs mean when they describe death as "liberation", hmm?" (p.92)
"It was amazing that he believed himself enough of a pussycat to affect a purr." (p.123)
"Neither death nor vulgarity is likely to be cured by modern medicine." (p.126)
"It's true that you're the spirit of the age, but it's drunk so much of you it's become cirrhotic." (p.243)
None of this touches on the cynical commentary on art that twines its way through 'Dorian', and which is probably worth a second read. And yes, I do think it's worth a second read, questionable though its intentional or unintentional politics might be, because the bones of a truly great 'Picture of Dorian Gray' redux are right there. If I do come back to this at a later point, I'll follow Henry's advice:
"You tell me how it was, Baz-- I'll listen to how it should have been." (p.92)
caitpoytress's review against another edition
2.0
I kind of feel bad giving this two stars. I can appreciate what he did with the story, I just didn't particularly enjoy it.
dansquire's review against another edition
3.0
I thought this book was okay, but didn't enjoy it that much. Took a while to get through it, in part because of the distractingly verbose language (not necessarily a bad thing, but it does make a bit of a slog unless you're willing to ignore that you don't understand some of the sentences and plow ahead). Interesting reframing of the classic Wilde novel, and the twist at the end (no spoilers) is the best part of the story. Not a bad book, but also not a great book either - wouldn't recommend it to friends.
mosswood's review against another edition
dark
funny
mysterious
medium-paced
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
This was such a thought-provoking book, very intimate and beautifully detailed just like the original Dorian Gray. The ending is great and the story progresses, despite being non-chronological in such a strong way. Really wonderful, didn’t impact me as much as I’d hoped if I’d understood the characters a little more.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Alcoholism, Drug abuse, Murder, Physical abuse, Sexual violence, and Homophobia
jana_lotte's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gore, Murder, Suicide, Terminal illness, Drug use, Homophobia, Sexism, Cursing, Injury/Injury detail, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Rape, Toxic friendship, Addiction, Blood, Body horror, Drug abuse, Excrement, Misogyny, Toxic relationship, Violence, Alcohol, Death, Mental illness, Racism, Alcoholism, Chronic illness, Infidelity, and Medical content
Moderate: Animal cruelty, Pedophilia, Vomit, Stalking, and Adult/minor relationship
Minor: Car accident
batbones's review against another edition
5.0
A wicked and very satisfying homage. Twisted, clever and tongue-in-cheek, it goes beyond reproducing a classic work, adding fresh detail and essentially enacting its rebirth in new times. Self's sense of humour is to die for, as is his ice-water plunge of Wilde's highly ornate novel into a squalid realism.
diana_eveline's review against another edition
(I want to wait with my final judgement until after class in a few days because I need some discussions and different input to process this)