Any sports fan can tell you sometimes you watch a game just because you like the sport. It doesn’t matter who is playing, and thus you don’t really care who wins.

Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” is like that. It’s hard to find someone to really get behind, but the event, the story is such that you still need to know what happens.

This is the first book in the project to be recommended by a friend. Well more like endorsed after I had selected it, but whatever. It’s always nice to know someone you can discuss a piece of art with, especially after you’ve invested so much energy in enjoying it yourself.

And especially when you’re trying to figure out who the “good” guy is in the story.

I can’t remember reading a book where the protagonist didn’t live up to the “pro” in his name. Maybe I’m completely blanking, but it seems to me the basic structure of effective storytelling in novels usually involves the reader’s support of the main character.

Dorian Gray is a hard guy to support. He’s rich. Everyone tells him he’s the most beautiful person they’ve ever seen. He doesn’t work. He’s moody. He’s incredibly vain. All he needs is a small dog to carry around everywhere and a catch phrase like “that’s dandy” to make him a 19th century British Paris Hilton.

And who wants to root for that? You’d be more likely to wish for his hansom to run off the side of a cobblestone street and run into a tree.

Yet Wilde creates this life for Gray and the people around him that is so intruiging you have to keep reading. Maybe it’s the fact that the obvious outcome is to have Gray or one of his cohorts to have some sort of revelation and become a good person. You want to see that happen as a confirmation that you’re on the right side of the moral fence.

If the Oscars were handed out to books in Wilde’s day, the Best Supporting Actor would go to the most pessimistic man ever written. Yet his diatribes are some of the best parts of the book:

“The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbor with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us…I have the greatest contempt for optimism. As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.”

This is the epitome of Lord Henry. The first half of his speech is off-putting; what’s so wrong with having a positive outlook? Then he comes back with a better point about personal growth–it doesn’t matter what you are doing, just keep working at improving yourself in some way.

This is the man giving advice to “Paris.” It’s like having multiple people who are so rich they don’t have to work, who value beauty and societal stature above just about anything, who KNOW they are better than everyone and live with a complete disregard for normality all running around one of the world’s largest cities together. If only Wilde had written with a little more verisimilitude…

Quick side note, verisimilitude is one of my favorite words that you really have to try to incorporate in everyday use. That’s probably the first time I’ve ever done it. I’m excited. And to save you the trip to the dictionary website, it’s a noun meaning the depiction of reality (as in art or literature).

I took a chance in grabbing this one on a bookstore trip, expecting maybe a B experience. But Wilde delivered a solid A in one of the surprisingly good reads I’ve had in a while. If you like some of the “classic”–Dickens/Hugo-esque stuff, you’ll enjoy it.

Next up: Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope”