Dorian
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“The most significant way in which Self’s book differs from its predecessor is in its very freedom and frankness. . . . There’s no denying Self’s novel’s cleverness, best displayed in its neatly postmodern ending.” —Sophie Harrison, The New York Times Book Review
Set against the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s, Will Self’s Dorian is a shameless reworking of our most significant myth of shamelessness. It is the summer of 1981 and Henry Wotton, uneasily gay, egregiously drug addicted, and queasily snobbish, is at the center of a Chelsea clique dedicated to timeless dissolution. His friend Baz Hallward, a sometime Warhol acolyte and video installation artist, has discovered a most remarkable young man, the very epitome of male beauty, Dorian Gray. Hallward’s installation, “Cathode Narcissus,” captures all of Dorian’s allure, but perhaps it’s captured another more integral part of him as well?
Certainly, after a night of debauchery that climaxes in a veritable conga line of buggery, Wotton and Hallward have been snared by a sinister retrovirus that becomes synonymous with the decade. After sixteen years of delirious drug taking and ruthless fornication, their playmates have succumbed to the disease de jour. But what of Wotton and Hallward? How have they fared as the stock market soared and their T-cell counts plummeted? And what of Dorian, a sultan of style in an era of mass superficiality? while all around him shrivel and die, how is it that he remains so unsullied—so vibrantly alive?
By one of our most wildly imaginative novelists—who has been praised by The New York Times Book Review as a “high powered satirical weapon”—Dorian brilliantly evokes the decade in which it was fine to stare into the abyss, so long as you were wearing two pairs of Ray-Bans.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this retelling of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, most of the original's characters are cleverly transmuted into their late-20th-century counterparts: dissolute Henry Wotton, now openly homosexual with a nasty heroin habit; his prot g , eager young video artist "Baz" Hallward; and the title character, the quintessential amoral narcissist and a "seducer par excellence" (of men and, occasionally, women). In the summer of 1981, Hallward captures Gray's youth and beauty in a video installation that he titles "Cathode Narcissus." He and Wotton take Gray under their wing and school him in the ways of profligate London living, early '80s-style. By 1997, all three are HIV-positive, though Dorian, of course, shows no sign of illness. Self uses Wilde's plot to examine post-Stonewall gay life, from its drug-fueled hedonistic excesses to the reckoning of the AIDS epidemic. The novel skewers every layer of British society street hustlers, members of Parliament and the idle rich. Real-life figures also appear, most notably the "princess of bulimia," Diana Spencer. The prose is laced with epigrammatic, lightly amusing pseudo-Wildean wit ("I want my sins to be like sushi fresh, small and entirely raw," says Wotton), but its wordplay and evocation of debauchery also owe something to Evelyn Waugh and Martin Amis (channeling Hunter Thompson and Irvine Welsh). Self's mannered prose can grow tedious, and there's hardly a sympathetic character to be found, but the writer has undertaken and largely succeeded in pulling off a daring act of literary homage.
