THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021 71
After serving out his two-year sen-
tence, Wilde left England and Ireland
behind for good in May, 1897, settling
on the Continent. The resolutions he
had made in “De Profundis”—to reject
the traps of the past, Douglas in partic-
ular, and to seek out pastures new—col-
lapsed within a few months. By mid-Sep-
tember, he and Douglas were together
in Naples, where they moved between
hotels and a rented villa until their re-
lationship broke down. At the end of
the year, Wilde completed “The Ballad
of Reading Gaol,” a narrative poem that
was part human drama and part polemic
about the conditions of life in prison. Its
publication marked, as Sturgis writes, “a
triumphant artistic return”: it was “eas-
ily the most successful of Wilde’s books.”
But it was also the last work he pro-
duced before his death, in 1900, despite
plans for a new social comedy, a new
Symbolist drama, a new libretto. His ex-
istence in exile, according to Douglas,
was simply “too narrow and too limited
to stir him to creation.”
Wilde had characteristically bold
ideas—maybe he would go on a Roman
Catholic retreat, perhaps enter a monas-
tery—but what might once have seemed
like bright avenues (or seductive dark al-
leys) for development proved to be dead
ends. Instead, old associations and pat-
terns determined the script. Sturgis is
careful to resist the fatalism of Ellmann’s
account, but in the limitations and rep-
etitions of Wilde’s final years, spent in
Paris, it’s hard not to see a kind of inev-
itability, a convergence of selfhood on a
single point. He circled back to old lit-
erary projects; he found a new set of
“beautiful boy[s] of bad character” to en-
tertain and to compare to ancient Greek
heroes. He had his daily routine of “late
rising and light reading,” drinking and
talking—a predictable rhythm that didn’t
quite amount to a plot.
Ordinary life surrounded him, just
as it had enveloped Dorian in Covent
Garden, but this time the scene lacked
the brilliant illumination of the artist’s
spotlight. A Parisian waiter, Sturgis
writes, later “recalled the sight of him
sitting alone outside a café late one eve-
ning as the waiters cleared up around
him, and the rain poured down.” Usu-
ally, Wilde’s poses were self-conscious;
this, perhaps, was an angle he hadn’t in-
tended for anyone to see.
BRIEFLY NOTED
Late City, by Robert Olen Butler (Atlantic Monthly). This
grandly retrospective novel warns of the political conse-
quences of failures of personal insight. On Election Night,
2016, God visits the deathbed of Sam Cunningham, who, at
the age of a hundred and fifteen, is the last living veteran of
the First World War. God instructs him to narrate his life—
“to live in your stories just as they felt in their own mo-
ment”—and we learn of a childhood in Louisiana, a stint as
an Army sniper, marriage, family, and an illustrious career at
a Chicago newspaper. Cunningham prides himself on his
journalistic acumen but comes to realize that “I reported but
I did not see”—remaining tragically oblivious of intimate
truths about himself and those close to him.Assembly, by Natasha Brown (Little, Brown). The narrator
of this crisp début novel is a young Black British woman,
the child of Jamaican immigrants, who has a lucrative job
in finance, a new flat decorated with good art, and a posh
boyfriend. But, as she surveys her life, success leaves her feel-
ing empty. The novel proceeds in fragmentary fashion, em-
phasizing her alienation, as she ruminates on racism and
sexual harassment. As well as being a shrewd exploration of
the psychological toll of generational trauma and colonial
legacies, the book is also, thanks to its biting humor, a broad
criticism of the absurdity of contemporary life.God, Human, Animal, Machine, by Meghan O’Gieblyn (Dou-
bleday). Having abandoned Christian fundamentalism, the
author of this investigation of human-machine interactions
embarks on a search for meaning. Her pursuit leads her to
the transhumanist movement, whose adherents think that
a natural continuation of evolution requires our minds to
be transferred to supercomputers, making us effectively im-
mortal. The promise of resurrection and immortality is a
fitting replacement for Christian eschatology, and leaves
O’Gieblyn with further questions about how we define con-
sciousness. After dipping into other philosophies and giv-
ing houseroom to a lovable robot dog, she finds that con-
sciousness “was not some substance in the brain but rather
emerged from the complex relationships between the sub-
ject and the world.”The History of Bones, by John Lurie (Random House). The
author, a prolific musician, actor, and painter, guides—or,
more often, catapults—readers through New York’s art and
music scenes of the nineteen-eighties in this wild and en-
tertaining memoir. In a style that suggests an extended mono-
logue, Lurie shares the highs and the lows with equal verve.
His stories often feature a dramatic turn: a warm friendship
with Jean-Michel Basquiat devolves into a bitter feud; a
fishmarket trip for a photo shoot suddenly veers into eel
strangulation, only for the seemingly dead creature to at-
tempt a Rasputin-like escape. In a chapter titled “Paris. Vom-
iting and Then More Vomiting,” a musical triumph is fol-
lowed by a hepatitis diagnosis.