• THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
• by Oscar Wilde
• [rated by PBS readers as #55
• 213 pages

What a difference a couple of months make! When I first ordered and got Dorian, I read a couple of pages and thought it was so hip and current and stuff like that. But I had something else to finish first.

Now I have just finished it, after picking it up several months later. But I didn’t have that experience. In fact, I’m not sure what experience I did have.

No one who is either creative and/or surrounded by gay people that they love will ever dislike Oscar Wilde. His wit, his talent and his terrible life story is the stuff of legend. And his work, like that of so many truly gifted people, transcends those barriers.

I know I’m not a stickler for studying period stuff. And I have no foundation of what the writing styles were like at Wilde’s own time…so I’ll just say it – everything about this story is so gay! On just about a million layers! Which is, in a way, the most exhilarating thing about it.

You almost feel like a co-conspirator while reading it – that he manages to infiltrate his own art and culture with so much truth about himself – and right under their sneering noses!

Anyway, I should read some funny Oscar Wilde. But not anytime soon. Nothing wrong! Glad I read it. And I’ll add to this if more of its meaning if it occurs to me later.

PS This is one book I would love to hear your takes on. Very hard to summarize. You kind of want to do it simplistically but that seems to undercut. It is a demonic fable. Or is it? I might have searched for depth when there wasn’t any and missed it when it was there.

BONUS ADDITIONAL BOOK – THE GOOD EARTH

Okay, I know that this isn’t even on the list. But in my current strategy of reading 5 books at a time and listening to two more, I came to The Good Earth.

Recently switching over to Audible, I have gone to the dregs of my audio books, determined to finish listening to all of them. I have only four more titles to go. While it is good to be nearing the end of this motley bunch, it also gives you an idea of the enthusiasm level I had to plow into this little beauty.

Here is the first surprise of listening to this book, since that seems to have become my theme in the recent books for this blog.

Over my lifetime, when anyone has mentioned The Good Earth, the people listening get moony-eyed and sigh into saying, “ah, I love that book.” So I’m not sure what I was prepared for, maybe some simple assed story of peasants making it work in ancient China. Oh well. Yawn. Told you I wasn’t enthusiastic.

I was completely unprepared for the wollop this thing brought. At first, when the thing resembled the Chinese Grapes of Wrath, it was one thing. You got your little family starving slowly to death, while he runs a rickshaw and she begs with the kids. And then times turn around and the lead guy shows himself to be shallow, capable of great cruelty and just plain hard to like.

The scene where he gives his first wife’s pearls to his mistress is wholly the most shocking scene I’ve read in many a book past. Murders have never been as shocking as that.

This story and its inhabitants rumble forward like a bat out of hell. The main guy is an antihero and an entirely unapologetic asshole.

But here’s the tweak. This got the Pulitzer Prize – back in 1932! This story barreled at me with huge relevance. How could Pearl S. Buck have had the temerity and the genius to have said this stuff this way in 1932?

Like the experience of Gone With the Wind, so recently, both writers are unbelievable in their ability to juxtapose specific personal details with the huge scope of all that surrounds those moments.

Buck got it right. I didn’t like the main character and specifically didn’t root for him, but his voice will stay with me for a long time (beautifully rendered by actor Anthony Heald, in this audio format).

To think that something that would sock me this hard in 2021 and to think that it was unleashed 90 years before AND that it got the Pulitzer, which meant people got it 90 years ago!

Well, that makes me feel better about the world. Can’t tell you why and don’t want to. This will stay with me for a long time.