Dorian

“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. Dorian, then, breaks up with his college girlfriend and takes up with Baz's friend Wotton, a rich, intelligent but affectless homosexual boozer and cokehead (and careless Jaguar driver) who has a loveless marriage of convenience with the socialite Lady Victoria, a somewhat batty woman who is fine to live in denial of her husband's sexuality so long as their marriage keeps bringing in a flood of party invitations. Jealous of Baz's affections for Dorian and eager to see Dorian "thoroughly pleasure this jaded century" via his unparalleled looks and money, he takes Dorian under his wing and Dorian soon grows to prefer the wild, devil-may-care Wotton over the earnest, somewhat pretentious Baz. ("Baz Hallward the wayward acolyte, seething with energy and bumptiousness; while the younger man [Wotton] played the part of his mentor, consumed with cool, eaten up with indifference.") "Dorian knew his own limitation: he had money but no real style. His upbringing had been here and there, on the fringes of film sets, in foreign hotels… It had given him polish but no shine. He lacked the deep lustre of someone like Wotton." But in truth, Wotton is no better himself: "Henry Wotton was subject to saying to anyone who would listen that the chameleon is the most significant of modern types." And while outer appearance would seem to belie this, the truth was that beneath the Planet of Wotton was a realm of complete flux." The characters to which Wotton introduces Dorian are no better: drug addicts who revere Dorian only for his looks and money. As Dorian gets caught up in this world he becomes every bit as superficial as these people: "Dorian had begun to display talents in the only two areas of life that are worth considering, he was becoming a seducer par excellence, and he was transforming himself into an artificer of distinction, a person who is capable of employing all of the objective world to gain his own end." He eventually falls for a junkie named Herman largely for his bea