Q&A with Louis Bayard

 

 

Louis Bayard is the author of the new novel The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts. His other books include Jackie & Me. He taught at George Washington University and chaired the PEN/Faulkner Awards.

 

Q: Why did you decide to focus on Oscar Wilde and his family in your new novel?

 

A: It was the family, really. So many people I’ve met don’t even know that Oscar had a wife and children. And the more I learned about their story, the more I realized it had to get out in the world.

 

Q: How did you come up with the idea for the novel's structure—"a novel in five acts," as the subtitle says?

 

A: Well, the problem for me initially was that the story – in historical terms – ends so goddamn sadly. But then I thought about Wilde’s plays, which are always entwining tragedy and comedy, and I got the idea of working against the grain by writing it all as an Oscar Wilde comedy. Which descends, as needed, into sorrow.

 

Q: The writer Joyce Carol Oates said of the book, "The Wildes is a boldly audacious re-visioning of the martyrdom of Oscar Wilde, one which would have astonished Wilde himself." What do you think of that description?

 

A: You know, I can’t imagine Wilde being astonished by much. If we were to drag him here via time machine, I think he’d just blink a few times and carry on. But the one thing that might give him pause is the martyrdom that his actions visited upon his wife and children. I think even in his life he was haunted by that.  

 

Q: What would you say are some of the common perceptions and misconceptions about Wilde?

 

A: Well, he was Irish, let’s start there. He sloughed off his accent somewhere in Oxford, but he never ceased to be an outlier – culturally, sexually. For me the real purpose of the book is to out him as a family man – somebody who dearly loved his wife and children and who, no matter what, hoped to be reunited with them.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Beats hell out of me, Deborah. I’ve kicked the tires on a nonfiction book, and I have the kernel of an idea about another fraught Victorian marriage, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Just that, in the course of writing this novel, I fell in love with the entire Wilde family. This book is my way of bringing them back together again after 125 years.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Louis Bayard.