FICTION

WILDE WEST by Walter Satterthwait (St. Martin’s Press: $19.95; 374 pp.) . Is the quip mightier than the six-gun? If you booked Oscar Wilde, the Irish dandy, wit and man of letters, on a lecture tour in Colorado in 1882, would he last any longer than a lonesome dove? Walter Satterthwait thinks so, and he goes about demonstrating his conviction in what turns out to be considerably more than a one-joke novel.

Satterthwait’s Wilde is 25, soft-looking but strong, able to box and ride as well as coin epigrams and dazzle the frontier gentry with his theories of aesthetics. He needs all his abilities, including “poetic imagination,” to cope with the real and fictional Westerners he encounters--gunman Doc Holliday, who takes a strange interest in Oscar; the beautiful Baby Doe, mistress of Leadville silver baron Horace Tabor; and world-weary U.S. Marshal Bob Grigsby, who suspects Oscar or one of his entourage of killing prostitutes in the manner patented a few years later by Jack the Ripper.

Satterthwait (“Miss Lizzie,” “At Ease With the Dead”) has come up with a double-barreled entertainment here. It’s a comedy of mutual misunderstanding between Old World and New, and it’s also a mystery in which nobody is what he or she seems to be, including Oscar’s traveling companions: his business manager, a French countess, a gay poet, a German officer and a drunken newspaperman.

The word entertainment is used advisedly. Wilde remarks: “I’ve always been able to rely upon the fact that, deep down, I’m rather a shallow person.” His work survives because he resisted more seriousness than was good for him. Satterthwait tries to follow suit. He can be serious--”Wilde West” is full of social and psychological insights worthy of a heavier book--but none of it gets in the way of a bon mot, and the unbridled ecstasy of the sex scenes, even the viciousness of the murders, reveals his true aim: to write a page-turner. He succeeds.