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.