The Man Who Was Dorian Gray.

The Man Who Was Dorian Gray by Jerusha Hull McCormack (St. Martin's Press, $24.95) The problem with ambitious books is that sometimes their aspirations outstrip the possibilities of their subjects. That's the case here. McCormack has written an impressionistic, highly fictionalized life of John Gray--proletarian boy made good, sometime lover of Oscar Wilde, Catholic convert (weren't they all?), and, finally, priest. McCormack succeeds impressively in summoning up the shimmering era of the aesthetes, but she's so deeply inside her subject that she loses the sense of proportion needed from biographers. Gray, a talented but minor poet, thus takes center stage, a position he's not suited for.