Customer Reviews

The Case of the Pederast's Wife

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The Case of the Pederast's Wife, by Blossom Elfman, is an incredibly well researched and written book. the first thing one notices is the quality of the writing and of the scholarship and research. Oscar Wilde was a complex and intereting character and until I read this quite marvelous book, I had no idea that he had a wife! He was, after all, an avowed homosexual. As one reads the book one comes to understand the restraints of the time Wilde and his wife, Constance, lived. Many books, plays and films have been written about Wilde, but Constance, his wife and mother of his two sons, has been neglected, even avoided. Applause and kudos to Ms. Elfman who had the intelligence and wit to discover Constance Wilde and to bring her to life in a wonderfully written book.

This painfully sincere novel fails on many levels. It is haphazardly imagined and arbitrarily constructed, and its characters are cardboard-thin. Its protagonist, physician Martin Frame, is the son of a brutish doctor who treats hysteria with adamantine harshness. Unlike his father, Frame does not believe that women should be treated like barnyard animals; he is interested in applying a version of good old Freud's talking cure to women in distress.

A friend of a patient introduces him to the Wildes, and Frame is smitten with Constance's constancy. Plus, she smells good and appears to be halfway bright. He feels compelled to aid her in recovering from her attachment to Oscar.

This is in some ways an interesting premise, but Elfman doesn't go far enough in imagining these people and what their relationships could have been. Writing historical fiction requires a certain amount of brashness, a willingness to presume to speak for the dead. That doesn't happen here... Elfman seems overwhelmed by the significance of what she is about.

The structure of the novel also leaves something to be desired... chapter epigrams seem arbitrary in this short first-person account; they read like bits of preliminary character sketches and research notes, draft work that should have been edited out of the final product.

What is it about Oscar Wilde that makes him so difficult to capture in print or on film? The recent awful biopic of Oscar was every bit as wooden as this well-meant but unsuccessful novel.