→ December 18, 2008
→ By

Nobody’s Fool.

Admin stuff for today: Chat 1 pm EST, and I’ll be on ESPN 710 in Los Angeles at 1:40 pm PST.

Sully had known Rub too long to believe this particular coincidence. He could tell by the way the young man was carrying his large head, like a medicine ball precariously balanced on his thick shoulders, that he was coming to see Sully and that he wanted to borrow money. In fact, Sully could tell just by looking at him how much Rub wanted (twenty dollars), how much he’d settle for (ten), and how long it would take for them to arrive at this figure (thirty minutes).

Sully is the ne’er-do-well protagonist of Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool, written before his Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls and something of a tune-up work, a funny and engaging novel where the reader can see the author working on his craft, particularly his prose.

Sully, né Donald Sullivan, is a sixty-year-old man living in a dying town in upstate New York, a ne’er-do-well in a community short of do-wells of any ilk, although his own brand of doing-not-well is as unique as a fingerprint. He’s surrounded by a cast of believably-crazy locals, from the dimwitted Rub of the above quote to his tightly-wound ex-wife Vera to his landlady Miss Beryl (who talks to her late husband’s picture as well as to the African mask on her wall) and her hyper-ambitious son Clive Jr. Yet Sully is most affected by one character who died before the book even began – his alcoholic, abusive father.

Russo unfolds a tableau more than he tells a straight story, although there is ultimately a central narrative thread revolving around Sully’s relationship with his father and reconnection with his estranged son, Peter, whose own marriage and career are falling apart through bad choices in a higher-rent variation of Sully’s life. The story is richer by far for the additional characters and subplots – although “subplot” sounds so perfunctory for the side stories Russo weaves so well into and around the main narrative – built around well-rounded characters living believable lives and facing difficult choices.

Many of those choices revolve around getting older, whether it’s the infirmities and occasional indignities of aging (faced by, among others, Sully and his wounded knee, and Miss Beryl and her slender threads of independence), or anticipating and then dealing with the death of a parent. Yet despite so many heavy storylines – among others, there’s a man who hunts down and nearly kills his estranged wife – Russo manages to infuse the book with humor, particularly in the dialogue. Sully is the perfect smartass, a lifelong class clown who never stops running his mouth, often to his own detriment – not that that stops him from running it.

Empire Falls is a more complete novel, with a better-rounded storyline and a more empathetic main character, but it doesn’t have the same degree of wit or slapstick as Nobody’s Fool; I preferred the former but would recommend the latter as well. And I credit Russo for acknowledging that life revolves around food by putting that most American of culinary institutions, the greasy spoon, at the center of both novels.

Next up: William Kennedy’s Legs, part one of the “Albany” trilogy that eventually earned him a Pulitzer Prize of his own.

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→ December 17, 2008
→ By

Mary Poppins.

Mary Poppins is one of my daughter’s favorite movies, and I’ve seen it probably 30 or 40 times in the last few months. (“Watcha Poppins?” could get annoying after the hundredth time, except that she’s so excited about it that I could never hold it against her.) So I decided to take a crack at the book on which the movie is loosely based. Mind you, I was unaware that there was a book until a few months ago, and it turns out that there are eight in the series, although reportedly P.L. Travers, the Australian critic who wrote the books, hated the Disney film so much that she refused to allow them to make a sequel.

Even for an adult, the book is fun, although it’s a lot less whimsical than I would have expected from the movie. Poppins herself is not Julie Andrews’ version: She’s quite severe with the children, who are naughtier than their film counterparts, and she’s nowhere near as pretty as Julie Andrews was. Most of the anecdotes in the film come from the book, but with changes:

  • Mary and Bert (who barely appears in the book) do enter into a painting and go to a country fair, but without the children.
  • Admiral Boom, who appears a few times in the film as comic relief, appears just once in passing in the book.
  • The tea party on the ceiling comes doesn’t include the jokes that are central to the film scene. The talking dog that alerts Mary to the problem in the movie is actually part of a different story altogether in the book.
  • Katie Nanna has already quit at the start of the book.
  • Jane and Michael have twin, infant siblings who get their own story in the book.
  • The entire sequence on the rooftops appears to be original – Bert, also called the “Match Man” in the book, is clearly a longtime friend of Mary Poppins’ but only makes his appearance as a street artist, not a chimney sweep.
  • The run on Mr. Banks’ bank and Mrs. Banks’ suffragette efforts are original to the film, and in the book, Mary Poppins stays a year or so, rather than the week of the movie.

Yet at the same time, two of the best stories in the book – which is more a collection of stories than a single narrative – is omitted from the film entirely. In one, Mary takes the children to Mrs. Corry’s for gingerbread cookies, only to learn how the stars ended up in the sky. In another, the twins earn top billing, and the reader sees how infants see the world and that we lose something when we grow out of that stage of life.

The difference in Mary Poppins’ character between the book and the film is enormous. In the film, she’s there for the purpose of bringing the slightly neglectful father who is married to his work and has some rather definite ideas about family life back into the loving-father role. In the book, she’s there to trigger Jane and Michael’s imaginations and improve their behavior; Michael in particular has one story where he’s a real brat, and Mary whisks him and Jane around the world visiting “friends” of hers (they’re animals now, but in the original version were apparently people based on unflattering stereotypes).

Unlike the movie, which has a single narrative and draws you into the story and the two main characters (Mary and Bert), the book is just a collection of fun and imaginative stories that doesn’t create the same connection between the reader and the main character. So while I recommend the book because it’s fun and the magical twist in each story is usually very clever, I wasn’t sucked in the way I have been to other great children’s novels like The Phantom Tollbooth.

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→ December 7, 2008
→ By

The Way of All Flesh.

Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh was #12 on the Modern Library 100 (a cheat, since it was written before 1900 but published posthumously) and made the Bloomsbury 100. I don’t usually give up on books, but I’m setting this one aside, at least for now, after making it through less than 15% of the book.

I’ve got two major problems with the novel. One is the sentences, which are positively Proustian (despite coming years before Proustian sentences existed) and meander between dependent and independent clauses that made me dizzy and, worse, disinterested. But the bigger problem for me was Butler’s creation of a central character for whom he has nothing but a deep, pathological loathing. George Pontifex is a weak, insipid man, barely capable of an independent thought, much less an independent decision, and Butler obviously hates him. George’s father, Theobald, is apparently a stand-in for Butler’s own father, so while I guess it’s OK to work out your daddy issues in novel form, the combination of the two characters makes the book start out at the top of a downward spiral, and 40-odd pages in I was still descending. I guess I should never say never – I did return to Tess of the D’Urbervilles 15 years after putting it down after half a chapter – but it ain’t likely.

Instead I’ll start Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool on the flight to Vegas.

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→ December 5, 2008
→ By

Snow Falling on Cedars.

I meant to write up David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars over a week ago, but I got sucked into Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Novel and kept putting off the review, in large part because Cedars was so blah. It’s a heavy-handed story about racial prejudices on one of the San Juan Islands in Washington state a few years after World War II; a man of Japanese descent who was raised on the island and fought for the U.S. during the war stands accused of killing another local fisherman, and it’s not entirely clear whether the accusation is more than just racially motivated.

While the core story is interesting – I continued reading to find out how the core mystery would be resolved – the novel itself is clumsy and amateurish. Guterson’s prose, which gets plaudits in pull quotes from reviewers, is atrocious, particularly his dialogue, which might as well have been pulled from a Law & Order: SVU episode; there’s one passage where an atheist soldier tells a military chaplain that he’s an atheist, that he’s the exception to the rule about there being no atheists in foxholes … who talks like that? No one I’ve ever met, and trust me, Harvard was full of people who spoke in unusual rhythms and keys.

I also found that Guterson’s back-and-forth technique damaged the flow of the present-time plot line, the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto, and the subplot involving the man who runs and writes the island’s newspaper and Kabuo’s wife, with whom the writer (Ishmael) had a love affair when the two were teenagers. The long and sometimes long-winded flashbacks decapitated the tension that Guterson built up during some of the courtroom scenes. He might have actually been better served cutting back and forth more frequently to keep the digressions shorter.

Guterson also overplays the race card. Rather than letting the main stories – the criminal case, and the rise and fall of the romance between Ishmael and Kabuo’s wife – tell us the story of race, he puts his feelings on the subject into the mouths of his characters. It’s certainly realistic that Kabuo and his wife would complain about racism, but the extent to which they bring it up pushes the book slightly into “preachy” territory.

As for Jonathan Strange, I’m just debating how high up the Klaw 100 it’ll be at the next revision of the list.

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→ December 5, 2008
→ By

The Painted Bird.

Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird (Kosinski, Jerzy) is an awful book. Not a bad book, but an awful one, easily the most graphic book I have ever read in terms of depictions of violence and of violent sex. It’s made worse by the fact that the narrator is a child, aged eight at the start and around twelve at the end, whose innocence is manipulated and destroyed by the people whom he trusts.

The Painted Bird, set during World War II, tells the story of a young boy whose ethnicity is unclear but whose swarthy color and dark hair makes him a potential target for the Nazis. His parents send him to live with a sort of foster mother, but the woman dies and the boy flees, moving from village to village and from one violent situation to another. He is beaten, nearly killed several times, turned over to the Germans twice, witnesses several murders and rapes, and becomes a sort of sponge who absorbs – or just accepts – whatever he’s told about life, or the way the world works. He is almost dispassionate about his suffering; the language of the novel occasionally shows fear when he’s near death, but is otherwise an almost stylistic monotone, reciting the horrors he sees in the way Melville described whales in Moby Dick.

The book reminded me, more than anything else, of The Road (Oprah’s Book Club) . The styles are not similar, and McCarthy’s book has substantially more emotion, but I can’t help but think that McCarthy was somewhat inspired by Kosinzki’s novel. Both books involve a young protagonist moving along an uncertain path towards an unknown destination that might be death. Food and shelter loom large, and there’s constant danger from almost everyone they meet. The protagonist of The Painted Bird is always carrying a “comet,” a tin can with a flame in it that’s used as a light, a heat source, and a weapon; The Man tells The Boy that they are “carrying the fire.”

The primary difference, of course, is in tone. I had a hard time getting to the father-son love story at the heart of The Road because the setting is so bleak. Now, looking back on McCarthy’s book after reading Kosinski’s, it’s much clearer, because Kosinski’s book is completely devoid of love, or much of any feeling at all, other than occasional dread. McCarthy’s book is telling a story; Kosinski’s book feels more like a protest – he wants you to be outraged – but also as a catharsis for the author, whether the experiences were his or just those of people he knew.

I make that last point because there’s apparently a controversy about Kosinski’s work, including whether his work is original and whether he lied about his experiences during World War II. The edition I have is old, from 1976, and predates the plagiarism claims, but he does make it pretty clear that he is not claiming that the work is autobiographical and is dismayed by critics who wish to turn the novel into a work of autobiographical fiction. Neither controversy is mentioned in his entry in Encyclopedia Britannica (although it does claim the novel is a fictionalized account of his experiences during the war) or in TIME‘s capsule on the book from the TIME 100 posting.

Bottom line: I don’t think The Painted Bird is a bad book, but I would in no way recommend it. But after reading it, I appreciate The Road, despite its oppressively bleak setting, a good bit more.

Next up: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , ,
→ December 5, 2008
→ By

The Color Purple.

Listen, God love everything you love – and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God love admiration.
You saying God vain? I ast.
Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.

I’ve mentioned before that I haven’t cared for most of the Jewish-American novels I’ve read, but in fact, I have the opposite feeling about most of the African-American novels I’ve read: With one exception (James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain), I’ve loved all of them. And Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (#5 on the Radcliffe 100, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983) may have helped me realize why.

Purple is narrated by two poor, black sisters, separated in their teenage years by their spiteful father and the new husband of Celie, the “ugly” sister, because he wanted to marry the younger, prettier Nettie but found his advances spurned. Separated by oceans both literal and metaphorical, the women write to each other about their experiences and their struggles, Celie’s in poverty in rural Georgia, Nettie’s on a decades-long mission in Africa. The novel is more Celie’s than Nettie’s, both because Celie’s letters get more airtime, but also because her struggles are more mundane, while Nettie’s letters are there in part to show parallels between the oppression of native Africans and that of African-Americans in the American south.

Celie’s story is also much more compelling than Nettie’s. Celie bears two children by the man she believes is her father, who begins raping her at a very early age and who, each time she bears a child, takes the baby away without telling her where he went or what he did with the child. She marries “Mr. _______” to save Nettie, who is both prettier and more intelligent in Celie’s estimation, from becoming trapped in the same cycle of bad marriages to abusive husbands in which her mother and stepmother were trapped. Through Celie, we hear the stories of her stepson’s wife, Sofia, who is unsatisfied to live the doubly-subservient life of a black woman and pays a heavy price for her defiance; the libertine singer Shug Avery, Mr. ______’s sometime mistress who becomes a confidant/lover to Celie; and eventually see the male characters earn some redemption, albeit only after their women have in some way rejected them.

Despite the fact that the women of The Color Purple (other than Shug Avery, who refuses to be oppressed but has a strong sense of self-preservation) are oppressed in just about every way, from rape to abuse to violence to poverty to lack of education to an instance of female genital cutting in the African branch of the story, the novel is dominated by their love of life, an optimism in spite of themselves and their situations that drives them forward and lets them appreciate little details and blessings even in a life that seems stacked against them:

Nobody cook like Shug when she cook. She get up early in the morning and go to market. Buy only stuff that’s fresh. … By one o’clock everything ready and she call us to the table. Ham and greens and chicken and cornbread. Chitlins and blackeyed peas and souse. Pickled okra and watermelon rind. Caramel cake and blueberry pie.

(I admit that it is not an accident that I chose a quote about food.)

Walker omits most of the normal methods of building narrative greed, aside from a late and almost superfluous question about when and how Nettie will return from Africa, instead letting the characters themselves – particularly Celie and Shug – drive the story forward. You become invested in Celie almost from the beginning as the underdog who doesn’t know she’s an underdog, or perhaps just doesn’t have time to worry about being the underdog because she has to cook and clean and fight and live.

(As for those serious Jewish-American novels I don’t seem to get, the overwhelming sense I get of those novels is of cynicism and ennui – the inability to see life for its better aspects in the face of its struggles. That common theme only became clear to me as I was considering why Walker’s novel, which should be sad in so many ways, was uplifting.)

Next up: It only took a day or so to read Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, another Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, so I should have that review up before the holiday.

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→ December 5, 2008
→ By

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

If books were players, I’d probably grade them out on just three tools, plot, prose, and characters (“personalities” if you want to keep on the alliterative tip). The plot must be credible, tight, and interesting, providing the “narrative greed” to which I often refer, that desire to know what happens next (or last) that keeps you moving through the novel. The prose can’t get in the way, at the least; the dialogue must be believable, the sentence structures can’t impede your comprehension of the topic, and if there’s room for clever turns of phrase or literary devices like metaphors, so much the better. There should be at least one character with whom the reader can connect; whether or not that’s the protagonist isn’t a big issue, but I need some sort of empathetic connection with one of the major characters for the book to hold my interest. For example, if the main character is an asshole, he’d better be a funny one, or I’m checking out before Chapter 3.

I rarely run across books that would earn scores of 80 across the board. The Master and Margarita is an obvious one. The Harry Potter books are probably 80s in plot and characters, although even I (a defender of Rowling’s prose) would have a hard time pushing that score above 60. To Kill a Mockingbird is a three-80s book, as are Emma and Tender is the Night (Fitzgerald’s writing might be the definition of 80 prose). At risk of standing accused of slapping high grades on a book too quickly – the literary equivalent of one-looking a player – I’ll add Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Novel to the list.

In the book, author Susanna Clarke has given us two compelling characters, the magicians of the book’s title, the conservative, brilliant, condescendingly paternalistic Mr. Norrell, and the exuberant, handsome, and wild Jonathan Strange, who becomes Mr. Norrell’s tutor and later his rival. Both are richly drawn, with complex personal philosophies of magic and magical ethics, and, in Strange’s case, a marriage to help flesh out his character even further. Clarke is deft at imbuing even her secondary characters with deep colors and rounded edges to make them more real, yet never floods the book with so many personages that the core story gets lost in descriptive language.

The prose is very Victorian-Brit lit, with shades of Austen (remarked upon by most reviewers of the book, it seems) but also the gothic novelists of the time, such as Radcliffe and Brontë. Although the book has its share of laugh-out-loud moments, Clarke’s prose is suffused with dry wit throughout, and she melds it with strong descriptive prose, including countless brilliant images to evoke scenes in the reader’s mind:

She did not rise at their entrance, nor make any sign that she had noticed them at all. But perhaps she did not hear them. For though the room was silent, the silence of half a hundred cats is a peculiar thing, like fifty individual silences all piled one on top of another.

If any of Jonathan Strange‘s grades was to fall below 80, it would be the book’s plot, and perhaps that is the inevitable consequence of the book’s length (1003 pages in mass-market paperback) and lengthy gestation period (Clarke wrote it over a period of ten years). The story does meander, and many digressions appear to be just that – digressions into character histories or side stories that don’t necessarily advance the plot. Clarke did employ a clever solution, using extensive footnotes to sequester some of her stories from the history of English magic from the body text, helping to speed the plough, and to be fair many seeming digressions end up tying into the main plot once the book heads into its final inning. Clarke’s use of the hoary “prophecy” plot device did exceed expectations both because of how she resolved it and the way she unfolded it in stages, almost giving us a coarse outline for the second half of the novel. If the plot doesn’t get the highest possible score, it couldn’t get lower than a 70; I flew through what is probably the second-longest novel I’ve ever read, and that doesn’t happen if the plot isn’t fantastic.
I wonder how the book will be perceived by the academic community in time – as simply a well-written work of popular fiction, capitalizing on the recent mania for all things magical as long as it’s not too far into fantasy-nerd territory; or as a thoughtful, clever story of two finely-developed characters, meditating on the natures of friendship and on morality, with a fair quantity of nature-based symbolism for deconstructionist-leaning graduate students to analyze to the nth degree for college theses and dissertations with ultimate audiences numbering in the low single digits. I’d like to think that it’s the latter, but there’s a sort of Nichols’ Law at work in literary academe, where the more popular and accessible a contemporary work is, the less it is esteemed by denizens of the ivory tower.

Next up: Back to the TIME 100 with Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird (Kosinski, Jerzy).

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ October 30, 2008
→ By

Swaptree.

UPDATE, June 2012: I no longer recommend Swap.com (formerly known as Swaptree), as their customer service is nonexistent. They have lost their BBB accreditation in part for failing to respond to a complaint I filed.

—

Last December reader Robert asked me if I’d tried the bartering service Swaptree, which I had not. I signed up that week and now, about 40 trades later, I can offer a pretty strong recommendation.

The site’s concept is very simple: You enter a list of books, CDs, DVDs, or video games that you own and would be willing to trade, entering ISBN/UPC info plus a note on the item’s condition. Then you enter a list of items you wish to receive in trade. Swaptree looks for matches between users – direct one-for-one swaps as well as three-person swaps – and notifies all parties when it finds one, giving you a chance to reject the deal if you don’t think it’s fair. You pay the shipping cost, and can print labels directly through swaptree (media mail unless it’s not a book or the package is so light that first-class is cheaper), usually running between $2.20 and $2.80. I send all items in padded envelopes, so my cost per item runs to around $3.50, but some people just wrap books in brown paper or take other shortcuts.

My wife and I went to clear some stuff out of our storage space on Saturday, and I went through a few boxes of books, pulling 20-25 with which I was willing to part. By Wednesday, I’d swapped 15 of them.

I’ve only had one bad experience on swaptree, with an item that was (allegedly) lost in the mail. The sender didn’t use swaptree or another trackable service, so we can’t confirm that the item was ever sent, and there’s really no recourse for me – I was just SOL, having sent a book but not received one. Swaptree’s customer service was close to nonexistent: they contacted the other user, and I guess they’ll suspend someone who has too many complaints, but after receiving their initial automated response to my “I didn’t receive an item” complaint, I didn’t hear back from them again. Looking at feedback for other users, I don’t think non-receipt is a big problem, and I haven’t had any problems with other trades.

Swaptree doesn’t do much to help you browse the often lengthy list of items you can get in trade but that aren’t on your “Items I Want” list. There’s no way to filter books by genre or to tell the system that you already own a book, and since the most popular books on swaptree are, of course, popular books by James North Patterson and Patricia Cornwell and Nora Roberts, browsing really means sifting through a lot of crap in the hopes that you’ll find something that catches your eye. In fact, right now, I can get Snow Falling on Cedars in trade, which is stupid, since I’m reading the book now and I already entered the book as one I own but don’t wish to trade.

On the plus side, I’ve executed some rather absurd swaps that worked out great. I traded an old computer game someone bought me a few years ago – a very bad RPG called Temple of Elemental Evil – for a Janet Evanovich book for my wife. I traded a brand-new Angelina Ballerina DVD that we already had (and watch every night…) for a copy of Lonesome Dove: A Novel (Lonesome Dove). I traded Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus (my least favorite of his novels, which I haven’t touched in over a decade) for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. And so on.

It’s worked out well for us so far – we’ve gotten rid of a bunch of books that we didn’t want, which is good, since our book collection is rather out of control, while we’ve gotten a number of books that we might otherwise have bought new or not bought at all. It’s easy to use, at least in terms of entering your “have” and “want” lists, but you’re relying on the honor system to some degree to get your books, and it can easily take a week or more for a book shipped media mail to traverse the country. (This doesn’t matter to me, since I usually have a backlog of at least a dozen books to read.) Item conditions have nearly always been at or above what was promised. And the cost is slight, even including the $1 monthly fee swaptree charges in months where you use their shipping-label service. They’re currently running a promotion that gives you a free shipping credit if you invite a friend to swaptree who then makes a trade by the end of November. So give it a whirl.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With:
→ October 16, 2008
→ By

Winnie-the-Pooh.

Seriously – A.A. Milne’s first book of stories for his son, Winnie-the-Pooh, is #22 on the Radcliffe Publishing Course’s list of the 20th century’s top 100 novels. They’re pushing the definition of “novel” with this one, both because it’s a collection of stories rather than a novel and because it’s very short, but it’s still a fun read and something I look forward to reading to my daughter.

The stories revolve around the familiar set of characters, including Edward Bear, better known as Winnie-the-Pooh, a “Bear of Very Little Brain” who has a series of minor adventures that typically involve a rescue at the hands of Milne’s son, Christopher Robin. The humor is unmistakably English, almost like Wodehouse or even Waugh for children, and the language used isn’t dumbed down. The characters have actual character – Rabbit is bossy, Owl is book-smart but light on street smarts, Piglet talks a good game but is actually a chicken, and so on. Winnie-the-Pooh is a little dim, but can sometimes be clever despite his diminutive cranium. And I have to admit that I share a certain affinity with the bear:

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”
“What’s for breakfast,” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”
“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully.
“It’s the same thing,” he said.

Speaking of Waugh, I’ve got one more review from my trip, his Decline and Fall, probably coming on Friday.

Also, there is a Klawchat today at 1 pm – HTML page is here but it’s not linked on the baseball page yet.

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→ October 13, 2008
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The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (on the Bloomsbury 100; #34 on the Guardian 100) is a sort of gothic novel that crosses a morality play with the epigrammatic style of his (other) magnum opus, the play The Importance of Being Earnest, employing what today would be called magical realism for the key plot point. The story is a straightforward riff on the Faust legent, but the witty prose – particularly the dialogue given to one character – make it a must-read.

The plot, in case anyone here doesn’t know it, is simple: Dorian Gray is a young, well-off romantic who has his portrait painted by Basil Hallward, who (unbeknownst to Dorian) is obsessed with him. Prodded by the Mephistopheles stand-in Lord Henry Wotten, Dorian utters a wish that the portrait would age and he would remain young, which, of course, comes true. Dorian becomes a heartless, dissolute wastrel as the image on his portrait becomes not just old, but ugly and mangled. There is one small plot twist, but otherwise, you can figure out where the whole thing is headed.

The scene-stealer, however, is Lord Henry, who is the little red devil on Dorian’s shoulder, and who speaks in paradoxes and epigrams that are usually funny and sometimes thought-provoking, but never superfluous. Coupled with the occasional quip from Dorian himself, these bons mots infuse the book from sour morality play with a streak of cynical humor. Some of my favorite lines:

Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us to do masterpieces, and always prevent us from carrying them out.

Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.

Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.

It’s hard for us to see it now, but at the time of its publication, the book was controversial because it was seen as immoral, a stance that Wilde himself contested unsuccessfully by arguing that “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” Of course, the book scolds the reader on the wages of sin, and I can’t fathom how contemporary readers missed that. Dorian lives a hedonistic life, enjoys it less and less all the time, and eventually gets what’s coming to him. How this is an “immoral” book is beyond me. If anything, it was too direct in its moral, but the pedantic style is softened by the cleverness of the language.

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