It's no Crime and Punishment

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a strange book. Perhaps due to the large amount of changes Wilde made to the text from the original short novel version, including adding six chapters and removing the parts that were seen as too explicitly homoerotic or hedonistic, the pacing is rather uneven. One tedious chapter is mostly copied from various historical guides to Dorian's series of obsessions with precious stones, tapestries and clothing. Passages like this:

When the Duke de Valentinois, son of Alexander VI, visited Louis XII of France, his horse was loaded with gold leaves, according to Brantome, and his cap had double rows of rubies that threw out a great light. Charles of England had ridden in stirrups hung with four hundred and twenty-one diamonds. Richard II had a coat, valued at thirty thousand marks, which was covered with balas rubies....

continue on for quite some time, and don't have much relation to the story.

Wilde uses (and recycles) a lot of epigrams in Lord Henry's dialogue ("Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects."), which makes for entertaining dinner party banter. Later on, Henry's compulsion to pronounce witticisms sometimes gets a bit tiresome, but is perhaps meant to show that the ideas of his that Dorian falls for aren't particularly deeply thought out. "You would sacrifice anybody, Harry, for the sake of an epigram."

I don't think it is just the style of the book that makes it somewhat unsatisfying though. Dorian falls for the hedonistic lifestyle without much of a moral struggle. Any sympathy he elicits as a young, naive youth is disposed of pretty quickly by his lack of remorse for any of his actions. Past a certain point there is no chance of redemption and the rest of the novel is just marking time until Dorian receives his just deserts. Even at the very end Dorian's feeling of remorse is quickly overcome by the desire to simply destroy all the evidence of his past.

But for the most part I found The Picture of Dorian Gray entertaining, and the episode with the young actress was quite effective in its desperate humour. Just don't expect deep and meaningful, capital-L Literature. Like an epigram, it is a bit of fun, but its charm is liable to evaporate if placed under too much scrutiny.