Malachi O'Doherty's "I Was a Teenage Catholic": Book Review

Theology vs. decency? During the Troubles, this Belfast journalist mulls over how Irish Catholicism and Ulster evangelicalism tangled his generation. Long an astute observer of republicanism, he proves here a diligent seeker into belief. Stubbornly skeptic, he concludes that in a sectarian North both sides may be groping, along with increasingly secular or agnostic counterparts, towards a simple human need: to test tradition that we're born into against our hard-won experience.

Like the republican and loyalist movements, Catholicism and Protestantism have operated in the North of Ireland upon fundamentalist tenets; their adherents generally claim allegiance not after mature choice, but by habitual upbringing. "I fostered fantasies of my own martyrdom, perhaps because that was all I could ever imagine my teachers would approve in me." (22) Early on, O'Doherty chafes against a 1950s childhood among the Christian Brothers. He insists upon testing what he's told to avow against his own bold life, and he finds wanting the faith of his fathers.

Yet, such a fantasized martyrdom "became more tangible against the background of Northern Irish sectarianism." (28) Circa 1968, "I was deciding that I wasn't a Catholic when others were deciding I had no say in the matter." (53) Losing his commitment before his convictions, his faith withers. He leaves a career in journalism after three years covering Irish strife, and after three aimless years in England he snags a vague job offer to compile a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita for a Hindu sage. He's off in the mid-'70s down the countercultural trail to an Indian ashram outside Delhi.

Swamiji looks like a mop of black hair, whether back or front. Loneliness consumes O'Doherty, and he tells movingly of the despair that kindles desperate trust in a stronger man than what one perceives as oneself. Beaten down by the Brothers as a boy, he struggles as a man nearing thirty to recognize how the soul's longing can or cannot be separated from devotion to a cause. Those who resisted the Christian Brothers, he notes, belatedly became Provos in the IRA, bowing to an Irish need for old conservative ways drummed in by parents and teachers. Threatened early on by the British Army in an home invasion, O'Doherty covers the Troubles for three years, while figuring out how far he can go down the path to belief as a secularized Irish man, schooled in the tenets of a creed and a cause both of which he has disavowed. After England, in India his need for uplift returns. He's attracted to an even more idolatrous manifestation in the utter obesiance a guru demands from a disciple.

He drifts, it seems, into lengthy meditation, mind-expanding to the point he envisions his head swelling like a ball, until he sees a white disc hover before his eyes, after years of relentless practice. Yet, he shrinks from Swamiji's Brahmin disdain for everyone else. O'Doherty, of no caste, is as untouchable as the Hindu tradition he cannot defend for his own adaptation or appropriation. Compared to Catholicism, at least its worst priest, he reflects, would have to care for a beggar he publicly met on the street; gurus like Swamiji loftily disdain any such charity. He grows impatient with O'Doherty's humanism, while Swamiji tries to impel his Irish charge to bend to traditional ways. But, as in Ireland, O'Doherty cannot kneel.

No surrender brings eventually his epiphany: "I cannot die to the world to save my soul." (134) Religion, he reflects, seems in the Irish to be divided between magic and fatalism; neither can soothe his innate rebelliousness. After a year apart from Swamiji wandering India and resuming his writing career, he goes back to the North as a religious affairs correspondent, whose specialty becomes the soundbite from the field, or the parade route, without profanity but with enough naivete or hatred from his earnest or fiery interviewees in the field that will get the best bits aired.

The first part of this narrative began as he braved a protest while working for the BBC in the Protestant enclave of Harryville; as his name reveals O'Doherty's counted among the enemy. After the central Indian portion, the story pivots back to his continued immersion in the North, where religion battles with politics. It's where one standing on the sidelines with a BBC microphone in hand must jump into the fray again, still marked by friend or it seems more often by foe by the faith he left behind. He's a wise interviewer; he stays detached. His discovery: God keeps out of our affairs, entreaties by gurus and claims by visionaries to the contrary. "Our language about God is like the language which in our dreams describes the world. In both we are insulated by metaphor from what we cannot know or must not know." (169)

As expected by readers of "The Trouble With Guns: Republican Strategy and the Provisional IRA" (1998), O'Doherty can be prescient about the dangers of rigid fidelity to irrational ideals and rabid trust in destructive ideologies. He's at home with Irish end-games of all pursuits. I note that he has since written more about republicanism as "The Telling Year: Belfast 1972" and continued decline in Irish religion as "Empty Pulpits." I look forward to these; unlike other analysts of the Troubles and Irish culture, he's able to link the rise and fall of monolithic republicanism and inescapable Catholicism to the maturation of his fellow citizens.

He proposes that the peace process and the collapse of clerical authority came about when "literal minded and obedient religion" dissolved, and when the republican cause found itself concurrently unable to command once unswerving ranks of those who learned that for contraception or decommissioning, "truth itself became negotiable." (137) O'Doherty lacks fellow commentator Eamonn McCann's radical stance, in his similar blends of autobiography and analysis "War and an Irish Town" and "Dear God"; the two authors share an ability to move between the personal and the political nimbly, although McCann's harsher on these twin fallen idols than O'Doherty, whose faith led him not to Marx but to India along the way, expanding his perspective in metaphorical and practical ways neither lad raised in postwar Northern Ireland might have imagined. O'Doherty's tenure in these twin fields of wartime dissension and religious agitation provides many anecdotes, at first appearing perhaps as casually as this short but densely packed and philosophically challenging book's title.

That is, it seems a throwaway line. But, "teenaged Catholic," existing in the past tense for this first-person subject, stands for a whole world-view, one that younger folks like myself (exactly a decade younger), cannot truly remember. O'Doherty's exploration takes familiar topics such as priestly scandal, poverty, hypocrisy, Ian Paisley, theodicy, and the impossibility of proving God's existence. "And if God is a myth, he is the patch we cover ourselves with." But, he's too smart now to deny God. "I take God to be the mirror in space of the whole self, to which nothing need ever to be said, which acknowledged, can be taken wholly for granted." (169-70) Facing death in his family, he accepts it as "Nature's rebuttal of tradition." (166)

This 2003 memoir stands beside his peer's eloquent 1995 defense of a similar agnostic balance that measures an adult's distance from pre-conciliar Catholicism, by the late Waterford-born, Cork-based journalist-poet Seán Dunne. "The Road to Silence" tracked an interior journey paralleling O'Doherty's, if removed from the Troubles in the relative calm of the South and the Continent. Younger journalist-memoirist, Manchán Magan, in his "Manchán's Travels" in early '90s India, provides another skeptic's testimony, another republican-raised Irishman's more recent reaction to Hindu fanaticism and the predicament of outcasts and India's poor. All three writers share respect for their Irish culture, and objectivity about their own loyalties as men who've outgrown their childhood pieties, political or spiritual, while becoming cautious and patient enough to listen to the yearnings and to record the longings of those at home or abroad who hold dogged beliefs or generous decency within themselves as believers.

Enriched by his probably unique comparison of a Belfast boyhood with a Hindu exposure, plus a journalist's objectivity with a cradle Catholic's scrutiny, O'Doherty combines disparate threads and casual scenarios. Upon reflection, for this reader he reveals a carefully arranged pilgrim's progression through the byways and highways that all of us, whatever our denomination or lack thereof-- or muddle between-- can recognize as an modern man's honest tale of how he tried to look God in the eye, and what happened when he faced that moment and decided to turn away.

(I've reviewed Dunne & Magan on my "Blogtrotter" blog and on British & US Amazon; also see my review of "The Miracle Detective" by Randall Sullivan on Amazon US about the Marian apparitions at Medjugorje that O'Doherty also recounts in a vignette here; Posted to Amazon US and Britain 7-25-09.)

Donald Lopez' "A Modern Buddhist Bible": Book Review

>"Tired of listening to eulogistical messages with empty contents," a Thai activist castigates Buddhist leaders for smugly promoting their tolerance, scientific compatibility, and downright goodness while his people starve under dictatorship. The selections compiled show a Buddhism that turns from worship and ritual towards meditation, but also towards social justice. Many books on Buddhism tend to be slim, full of platitudes, and self-congratulatory. This one strives for a truer depiction of how, from 1873-1990, Buddhist leaders and popularizers have engaged contemporary problems, and also have perpetuated modern fantasies, about the truth of the dharma.

Jack Kerouac claimed to have stolen a copy from San José, California's public library of an earlier assembly of Buddhist scriptures arranged by Dwight Goddard as "The Buddhist Bible." The incongruity and the compatibility of such a juxtaposition reveals Western and modern attempts to package dharma for a popular audience schooled in Holy Writ, and then, like Kerouac, wanting to step beyond it or integrate it into a modern encounter between East and West, mystic and mass-market, venerable and hip. Out of such conventional dichotomies, such authors as included here seek also to bridge cultural gaps, correct (or in earlier decades continue or distort) misunderstandings, and to realign Buddha's instructions as operating manuals in an age of faster transport, bolder power, and quicker communication.

The editor introduces modern Buddhism that "rejects many of the ritual and magical elements of previous forms." Instead, "it stresses equality over hierarchy, the universal over the local, and often exalts the individual above the community." (ix)
It does not improve earlier Buddhism so much as-- and the Protestant and/or secular, New Age, and/or rational qualities of many who started the effort from both Eastern and Western backgrounds must be emphasized-- seeking a return to a truer, more primitive, simpler practice. The ancient form is argued to be the most modern.

Lopez, a Tibetan expert, does insert practically verbatim parts from his 1998 debunking "Prisoners of Shangri-La" as he introduces Evans-Wentz' "Tibetan Book of the Dead," for example. Some earlier excerpts such as the historically important Madame Blavatsky with her Theosophical flights of fancy, Evans-Wentz' rather lugubrious interpretations, and Sir Edwin Arnold's once popular "The Light of Asia" will probably bore today's reader. But, they are necessary to show the start of the dialogue between Eastern reformers and Western explorers who discovered Buddhism and wished to present it as an alternative to imperialism, Christianity, and Darwin; or, perhaps rather compatible with at least the last two.

I found my own favorites. Shunryu Suzuki (see my review of David Chadwick's "Crooked Cucumber" biography) sensibly sums up Soto Zen's stress on simplicity. "It is like studying a foreign language; you cannot do it all of a sudden, but by repeating it over and over you will master it. This is the Soto way of practice. We may say either that we make progress little by little, or that we do not even expect to make progress. Just to be sincere and make our full effort in each moment is enough. There is no Nirvana outside our practice." (135)

Alan Watts seems to have fallen out of favor among current audiences, but he prepared the way for Shunryu Suzuki's impact in the San Francisco counterculture. Unlike the Beats (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Snyder) here featured, in his 1959 essay "Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen," Watts appears to have outlasted the Beats when it comes to a prescient observation of the permanence of true insight vs. the fads of a passing trend-- an aspect that continues to color how Buddhism gets marketed globally more than ever. Watts starts by nodding to the Japanese twist. Zen historically attracted the samurai class for its power to get rid of their self-conscious youthful education. But, this plays into the "Japanese compulsion to compete with oneself-- a compulsion which turns every craft and skill into a marathon of self-discipline." I thought of the bizarre game shows that try to humiliate or reward contestants with death-defying or at least stomach-churning feats. Watts finds that Japan's version of Zen "fought fire with fire, overcoming the 'self observing the self' by bringing it to an intensity with which it exploded." (161)
For Westerners raised within a Jewish-Christian culture, whether or not adhering to its beliefs outright, Watts understands the appeal of a Buddhism that the Beats enjoyed, one that did not preach or moralize. Yet, Watts knows the dangers of distorting dharma into existential folly. He insists that anyone from the West must get beyond being "swayed by its promises unconsciously." One must be able to take or leave "the Lord God Jehovah with his Hebrew-Christian conscience" but "without fear or rebellion." A comparison may be Rodger Kamenetz' studies (reviewed by me) in "The Jew in the Lotus" and "Stalking Elijah" about how Jewish and/or Buddhist seekers try to balance their psychic inheritance with their practical search.

Watts finds that unless one is freed from the "itch to justify" one's self, one's

"Zen will be either 'beat' or 'square', either a revolt from the culture and social order of a new form of stuffiness and respectability. For Zen is above all the liberation of the mind from conventional thought, and this is something utterly different from rebellion against convention, on the one hand, or adapting foreign conventions, on the other." (165)

He contrasts the "underlying protestant lawlessness of beat Zen" as calculated to annoy the squares, who seriously try to pursue the "satori" or breakthrough by gaining official stamps of calligraphed approval. Their own spiritual tourism, their rush to wander Asia to find what they can obtain in their own garden, also presents dangers, when such "fuss" gets "mixed up with Bohemian affectations." (168; 171)

Chogyam Trungpa in the last selection, after the next dozen years of the Beats turned hippies found many Americans unable to handle true wisdom, also finds that without a "spiritual friend who is a doctor with a sharp knife," seekers will fail to free themselves from "spiritual materialism" and "shopping" for one layer after another to put on and discard as they wander the bazaar of the next hip spirituality.

Thich Nhat Hanh offers another alternative to such restlessness within the modern heart. "A human being is like a television set with millions of channels. If we turn the Buddha on, we are the Buddha. If we turn sorrow on, we are sorrow. If we turn a smile on, we really are the smile. We cannot let just one channel dominate us. We have the seed of everything in us, and we have to seize the situation in our hand, to recover our own sovereignty." (205)

Allying individual renewal to social transformation, Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, and Taiwanese activist Cheng Yen urge smiles to accompany little shifts in personal behavior that start to ripple out to those around us. While B. R. Ambedkar's Indian manifesto shown earlier tying Karl Marx to a revolutionary dharma may have never come to fruition, nor the Thai Buddhadesa's call for "dictatorial socialism" to overcome the dictators in his homeland, the gentler calls for reform dominate later appeals to apply the dharma to change the world, rather than play into stereotypes of a navel-gazing Buddhism concerned only with monastic ritual, inner exploration, or exotic mantras.

Arranged chronologically by the birth of their authors, the thirty-one selections do not follow any logical pattern otherwise. As with "Prisoners of Shangri-La," this anthology will prove difficult to plow straight through; a glossary does help somewhat, but not a book I'd recommend to beginners. Try Rick Fields' narrative history of Buddhism in America, "How the Swans Came to the Lake," first. Lopez can be less than helpful in some of his too-compressed introductions; I am not sure where a "Calvinist convent" is for Alexandra David-Neel's early education. Some excerpts are astonishingly dull, predictable, or obtuse. Still, this forces the reader like it or not into hearing a diverse array of voices demanding renewal and rebirth of Buddhism. I shared a few of my favorite passages above.

Lopez views the modern Buddhist movements as their own sect. Not mutually exclusive of earlier forms, but often compatible if with "its own lineage, its own doctrines, its own practices." Here, from "a cosmopolitan network of intellectuals," he attempts to present "its own canon of sacred scriptures." (xxxix)

While William Burroughs' rejoinder "Show me a good Buddhist novelist" (155) remains to be proven, given the lack of fiction and not much poetry of any worth within these pages, I do hope a century later readers of a "21st Century Buddhist Bible" may find much to celebrate in the genres not only of polemic, sermon, address, scientific speculation, and inspiration, but in the realms of the creative arts. (Posted to Amazon US today, and also on my shorter blog where many other reviews appear, "Blogtrotter.")

Patrick French's "The World Is What It Is": Book Review.

Patrick French's "The World Is What It Is": Book Review.

This authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul has provoked controversy for its prickly subject, who read the entire manuscript and altered nothing; it's also garnered praise for its author, who drew on the entire archive of what he notes may be the last major writer who's left an entirely paper trail, instead of disc drives. I've only read a bit of Naipaul: "Among the Believers" about his travels in the non-Arab Islamic realm, and "The Return of Eva Perón," essays on Michael X, Perón's Argentina, and Conrad. After finishing French's bold, compassionate, and fair-minded study of this formidable master of masks, I will seek out more. That's a recommendation for both the irascible author and his patient chronicler. This is not a flawless analysis, therefore not five-stars, but French's careful discussion often approaches perfection. I admired (and reviewed) French's "Tibet, Tibet," a brave book that took on an iconic figure and asked similarly tough questions honestly.

Often, reviews have commented on VSN's fearsome reputation more than French's nuanced interpretation. What's needed now: a flavor of French's prose. I will excerpt how he filters VSN. French introduces his aims as a biographer: "not to sit in judgement, but to expose the subject with ruthless clarity to the calm eye of the reader." (xv) The myth, as VSN himself mentions, rests in those who follow; the writer keeps only the control over his books.

His tiny birthplace, forty miles by forty, occupies an uneasy place for self- promoting, self- entitled VSN. Self- described as "a Trinidadian of Hindu descent," he's a British subject unable to find a homeland. Marginalized, he returns to the center of the disbanded empire to seek his rightful place. The colonial society that raised him, divided by castes and religions, ethnicities and politics, could not sustain his energy. To escape, he had to assume the master's mask. Yet, Oxford "was a traditional, English, clubbable, unreal way for a young man from the Caribbean to be living, and it left him feeling lonely and unfulfilled." (91-92)

French evokes well the snobbery of the Isis student magazine for which VSN worked; the insularity of the university clashed with his hopes of a literary career that he desperately pursued while nearly starving in post- WWII, discriminatory, and hardbitten society in London. He and his student- teacher wife, virgins when they met, lived on very little. They moved from friend to flat and back. They were not suited for each other, totally, but at his young age, VSN stayed with the first shy woman who befriended him. He told her, at their age of twenty, how he resisted reforming, rebelling, or resisting. Instead, he insisted to her on being accepted.

He enters Britain at its capital core, pioneering the post- colonial counter- diasporic critique. "Legally prevented" after graduation "from migrating inside the new Commonwealth," VSN in the early 1950s sought a career in a nation with few East or West Indians. This "double exile" as "a deracinated colonial" as the Empire contracted left VSN anxious, yet determined not to retreat. With little steady work, landlords hostile at best to his presence, and widespread prejudice, he complained to his wife, Pat: "That is what the whole policy of the Free World amounts to. Naipaul, poor wog, literally starving, and very cold." (135, 137) The self- pity mingles with a level- headed appraisal of the situation for this internal exile.

"I am the spectator, the flaneur par excellence. I am free of the emancipatory fire." (qtd. 101) French deftly measures Trinidad's racial divide between Indians and blacks, He traces how Eric Williams rose to unsettling populist power there. Later, West Indian intellectual C.L.R. James early on challenged VSN for exposing the depredations of their Caribbean homelands without relativism, without the imperial context of the white man's impact. VSN rebelled against any "betraying his essence" by averting one's eye.

VSN refused to back down; as one character puts it: "Hate oppression; fear the oppressor." The emancipated dark subaltern, VSN warned (in my phrase), could be as dangerous as the retreating British sergeant. He later mused how totalitarianism often disguised itself under an "illusion of serving virtue"; writers seeking truth cannot collude with this pretended core of virtue. (qtd. 469) This confident stance did not endear him to his Black Power peers, nor did it assuage the troubled consciences of many American, European, or Indian liberals.

It's sobering to find, well into his success, that VSN labored nearly destitute. He travelled to India, Africa, Trinidad, Europe frequently, but often relied on expense accounts, wealthier friends, or an absent friend of a friend's flat for accommodation. This led, however, to estrangement sexually and psychologically from loyal but bewildered Pat as his fame spread. The self- pity that he expressed to Pat early on deepened. Depression drove him to prostitutes. Shame grew; so did his capacity to transcribe follies of his fellows. He cultivated his imperious aura.

All along, as to his one-time protegee Paul Theroux, VSN rehearsed a familiar refrain. "Think of it like this: imagine the despair to which the barefoot colonial is reduced when, wanting to write, and reading the pattern books of Tolstoy, Balzac et al, he looks at his own world and discovers that it almost doesn't exist." (qtd. 269) True, but as French delicately counters, this "shrewd piece of self- presentation" repackages scholarship winning, Oxford- educated, critically lauded VSN as irredeemably "unprecedented, underprivileged, alienated." His pride and his determination segregated him from his Third World brethren, whether writers or workers. This pride kept VSN a difficult person to please despite plaudits brought by his fiction and commissions enabling his TV, radio, and print journalism.

"Ambitious, protean, made of smart material, deracinated by the accelerated politics of the end of empire, Vidia made a conscious choice to refashion himself." (209) India attracted him; the West Indies perplexed him. Out of this inability to fit in, overqualified and often overwhelmed by his intelligence and his Oxford education, where he lamented the absence of aristocrats vs. the state- scholarship students like himself and Pat, VSN's drive to succeed at the master's game made him a frank, yet brusque, critic of nearly everyone around him, no matter where he found himself writing, probing, and goading. This quality, as French tells us right away, comes from a Trinidadian "picong" attitude: "where the boundary between good and bad taste is deliberately blurred, and the listener sent reeling." (xi) Many fell for Sir Vidua's conversational bait over six decades. "As an accidental, occidental Indian from 'the most amusing island that ever dotted a sea,' Vidia felt included and excluded," and not only in India. (223)

He did his own including and excluding. "Vidia had a view of the world that he would do anything to maintain, just as he would sacrifice anything or anybody that stood in the way of his central purpose, to be 'the writer.'" (359) French judges that VSN could not countenance Pat as his equal. She, congenitally doomed it seems to play the "great man's wife," was cast aside by VSN as he pursued, on and off interspersed with Pat for many years, the Anglo-Argentinian Margaret Gooding. One of VSN's friends reported that his apparently captivating mistress appeared to have but fifty words in her spoken vocabulary; she does not come across, at least in English, as striking anyone of French's informants as scintillating or smart.

Documenting Naipaul's infidelity and his power over wife and lover, French through extraordinary tact paraphrases VSN's correspondence with both women. Reviewers have been aroused by the hints that French only alludes to (Margaret's literal "phallic worship" seems about it, that and his physical brutality towards her as emotionally against Pat) of sexually charged tension exploited by VSN. He's a ladies' man, despite his boorishness.

Pat reverenced her husband. I found his biographer's considerable discretion equally intriguing. As with the intelligent, isolated Pat's lonely diary and notes to her husband, these indirectly phrased letters to Margaret (who left her husband and her three children behind to be the on- off trophy VSN paraded globally) support VSN's own egotism. He moved between the two paramours; other times he lived alone. As he reduces it, he ruined Pat: "I was liberated. She was destroyed. It was inevitable." (qtd. 313)

His income under a new publisher (and endless lectures, conference invitations, and commissions for articles?) increased sevenfold after "A Bend in the River." By the '80s, he represented the frustrations of "corrected leftists," those who turned to VSN to argue why the Third World remained mired in post- colonial corruption. His judgments in "Among the Believers" appear prescient after 9/11, but when they appeared, he was derided as an Orientalist or apologist. Derek Wolcott, Edward Said, and activists who opposed his disillusion found themselves his targets. They fought back. VSN accepted Hanif Kureishi; he did not support Rushdie against the fatwa, "an extreme form of literary criticism." (qtd. 434) The title of this biography comes from the first sentence of "Bend." "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." (qtd. 386) VSN determined to be "the" writer of the harsh, globalizing, mediated, diasporic decade.

By the end of it, he earned a knighthood. He took the tube to the ceremony. VSN did not mellow, but he did express an admiration of what modernity allowed people such as himself: the pursuit of happiness that traditional mores and creeds did not allow many adherents. His own pursuits, typically, dominated his mature years. Pat died of cancer; French describes movingly their final weeks together. The day after her cremation, Nadira (a younger Pakistani Muslim journalist he had met while working on "Beyond Belief," a sequel to his earlier visits among the non-Arab Islamic world) moved in to VSN's house. Margaret learned of her ex-lover's marriage, two months later, in the newspaper; Pat had found out about-- in similarly roundabout fashion-- her husband's dalliances with prostitutes decades earlier only in a 1994 interview with The New Yorker.

After Pat's death, VSN found few with whom to mourn, perhaps understandably. His lifelong expectation of fealty, his shunning of friends, and his use or abuse of human sources may have helped him with his considerable gifts of extracting the essentials for his own journalism and travel narratives, but they did not win him many confidantes. French enlivens the discussion near the end, with a deeper look into how VSN composed his second Indian study, "A Million Mutinies," and a later Caribbean collection, "A Way of the World." These begin to prove why VSN attained his renown for careful explication; apparently he could usually put down verbatim, without notes on the scene, what he had heard each day from his discussions and observations.

A minor shortcoming of an otherwise impressive account: French tends to skimp on delving into the works themselves, especially earlier ones. He often cites critical blurbs, and summarizes a book's contents, but he tends to quote sparingly. This does quicken the pace. However, if lacking knowledge of the novels and essays first- hand, a reader may wonder why there's briefer coverage of most primary texts. On the other hand, this is not a "critical biography," so this emphasis, given French's need to interpret massive amounts of material (he acknowledges half a million words from interviews transcribed), may be understandable.

French concludes with VSN's marriage to Nadira. He bows out gracefully with a final word, "Enough." But then, typically, he adds his last footnote: "For the moment." It's perhaps a telling sign that French adapts, often, a detachment towards Pat, Margaret, and VSN that reflects his subject's own distance from the contradictions his selfishness creates. This may heighten the verisimilitude for some readers; it may irritate others. So persists his admirable, if also unsettling, diligence in an engrossing perspective on a life that surprised me in its awkwardness, secrecy, bluster, and, despite or because of it all, a wry-- if ultimately too bitter-- honesty. The cover photo by "jumped-up" (VSN's put-down) Lord Snowden shows a playful figure, pulling himself up by the untied shoelace. His shoe, for this frugal man, reveals on its sole a worn-away hole.

(Posted yesterday to Amazon US. Cross-posted to my daily-ish blog, "Blogtrotter.")