Books: New Pleasures and Promises

THE GOD OF MIRRORS

by Robert Reilly

Atlantic Monthly Press

403 pages; $17.95

He was called an "arch-artist" by George Bernard Shaw and "that sovereign of insufferables" by Ambrose Bierce. In The God of Mirrors, Oscar Wilde qualifies for both titles, reducing every crisis to an epigram. Some of them are prophetic. In Dorian Gray, "the bad will suffer. The good will be rewarded. That . . . is what fiction means." Some are merely contrary: "It is always an advantage not to have received a good education." As Wilde arcs over London, he decides that the difference between true love and caprice is that caprice lasts a little longer, and that is his undoing. His infatuation with the unstable "Bosie," son of the Marquess of Queensberry, lands him in court and then in jail, his marriage broken, his reputation ruined. This is the stuff of tragedy, but Wilde will not have it so; the imp of the perverse follows him to the grave. Exiled to Paris, the extravagant drunk regrets that he is dying "the way I lived: beyond my means."

Throughout, Reilly maintains the properly ironic tone. There is no special pleading about British homophobia; Wilde is a collaborator in his own misfortune. Shaw, Max Beerbohm, Frank Harris and the Edwardian elite are given delightful cameo roles, and the prose has the appropriate drawing-room astringency: Shaw and Wilde might have been close friends "if they only had less in common." If this is a novel with an excess of surface, that was, after all, its subject's salient feature. The important part, as Wilde would insist, is that the thing glitter. And so it does.

THE CHRONICLES OF DOODAH

by George Lee Walker

Houghton Mifflin; 246 pages; $16.95