The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts by Louis Bayard
Published by Algonquin Books
Publication date: September 17, 2024
Genres: Book Clubs, Fiction, Historical
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Coming from a family where wit (largely sarcasm, but still) is a love language I’ve always been intrigued by Oscar Wilde. I’ve read his works, seen movie adaptations of his plays, and even read about his tumultuous and ultimately tragic life. Now comes The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts by Louis Bayard, an inventive take on the impact on his family of Wilde’s personal life.
In The Wildes it is not Oscar’s perspective that’s shared, namely because it’s been shared often enough. Rather, it’s the quiet Wildes who finally get a chance to speak: Constance, his wife, and Cyril and Vyvyan, his sons sharing their lives in the years after Oscar’s imprisonment. The story begins in 1893 in the British countryside at a cottage the family has rented so Oscar can finish his latest play. Life has settled into a drowsy summer pace when Oscar informs Constance of a new guest arriving shortly, Lord Alfred Douglas, an aspiring poet. This young man, soon to be Oscar’s lover, is also the person who leads to Wilde’s conviction and two-year imprisonment on charges of homosexuality.
Constance opens the novel, drifting through the heat-soaked days of a British seaside vacation, trying to entertain her young son, Cyril, while Vyvan is at home recovering from an illness. Bayard recreates her slow realization that her husband is being unfaithful and with a man, with a tender hand that captures the emotional impact such news would have on a wife in that day and age. What is less expected is the resolve with which she manages the situation; her primary goal being the protection of her two young sons.
For Cyril and Vyvan the fallout is much harder to comprehend. Too young to be told the specifics of their father’s ‘crime’ they are left being shuttled out of England and forced to adopt new identities to avoid the rapacious negative publicity generated by the senior Wilde. The impact is clear in both their parts. Cyril is a soldier in WWI when The Wildes finds him and now fully aware of his father’s sexuality going to extreme lengths to avoid any such connection. Vyvyan appears even later, still in England, as he’s approached by the elderly Lord Douglas who hopes they can be friends.
I was particularly partial to Constance’s story, namely because early in the novel she describes her foot as without feeling even as she tried to stand on it. I recognized multiple sclerosis from the very beginning, but even when these difficulties increase in quantity and significance, she is told they are “female issues”. Treatment, limited and invasive, only makes matters worse. Constance’s hyperawareness of her body and its unpredictability resonated. Her ability to trust is destroyed in every area of her life, be it a body she has no control over or a long-term marriage that feels as if it were built on lies.
After the family’s chapters there is one more act in The Wildes and here their situation is overlaid with a more enlightened mindset. This alternate reality is a bit startling coming at the end of a novel set in the repressive Victorian era. It only works because Bayard’s writing has so skillfully evoked a different time, place, and people in this lush novel of depth and dry wit.
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