What should a biography of Steve Jobs look like? The question occurred to me after reading page 230 of “iCon” (Wiley, 368 pages, $24.94):

“We don’t have a way to talk about this kind of thing,” Steve said. “In most people’s vocabularies, ‘design’ means veneer. It is interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”

Here reborn is that Victorian polymath, William Morris, who believed that the furniture, the utensils, and indeed all the furnishings of everyday life ought to have a design, a beauty that should shine in the lives of every human being. “Beautiful things for everyday living” was Morris’s motto.

Like Morris, Steve Jobs has brought an aesthetic to every aspect of his endeavors – revolutionizing electronics, film, and music in the last three decades. In Mr. Jobs, as in Morris, the utilitarian and the artistic are not at odds; in fact, they strengthen one another, making this a more elegant and serviceable world.

From the first Apple computers to the iPod, Mr. Jobs has sought to unify form and function. When he lost his way (hence the subtitle of this biography), it was because he lost touch with the marketplace and with designs that had to be affordable for business and the home. Notoriously arrogant and arbitrary, he is – as his biographers suggest – a Shakespearean character, a kind of Prospero who remains ornery and impulsive but who has tempered his tendency to isolate himself and understands how much his vision has to be a part of the hearts and minds of his collaborators.

If Mr. Jobs succeeds in supplanting Bill Gates as the iCon of communications – which seems an unlikely yet not impossible feat – it will be because ultimately design is not a frill but an intrinsic aspect of the way people choose to communicate and enjoy their lives. I would not count Mr. Jobs out – after all, I write this review on an iBook, having forsaken three years ago my clunky, security-challenged, and unwieldy Windows PC.

If only this biography were written in the spirit of Steve Jobs! It lacks his elegance and polish. Biographer Justin Kaplan wrote that literary biographies should be literary, by which he meant that they should be works of literature, distinguished by graceful language. A Jobs biography ought to do likewise; it should proceed with an efficiency and stylishness that evokes the subject.

I began reading this biography thinking I would sound off about the mean-spirited Steve Jobs who decided to pull Wiley’s books from the Apple stores when he learned the firm was publishing “iCon.” I still think Mr. Jobs and Apple are being petty and that no book – however offensive – should be punished this way. I would also like to think, however, that Mr. Jobs could not abide the idea that this biography was just not good enough for Steve Jobs.

Design ought to be the watchword for Mr. Jobs’s biographers. Instead we get the kind of lumbering prose I hope was not written on an Apple: “When Steve was asked by an interviewer about the new commotion over the technology called the Internet, his answer reflected the family man he had become and a thoughtfulness the new status had brought.” That sentence reminds me of how long it takes to boot up a PC. I put this quotation through a grammar check on Microsoft Word, and sure enough the program did not catch the biographers’ passive voice.

There should be nothing passive about a Steve Jobs biography – and nothing banal. Yet here is the beginning of the epilogue (which repeats a good deal of the prologue): “Every one of us is a walking set of contradictions. The great among us are no different, except that their contradictions tend to run to extremes.” Thank you very much.

Apple aficionados and devotees of Steve Jobs biographies seem to be bored with “iCon.” Jeffrey Young, they say, is rehashing his earlier Jobs biography and borrowing heavily from the research of others. This unauthorized biography suffers from lack of access to Mr. Jobs himself – though Mr. Young was able to interview him during a much earlier period of Mr. Jobs’s ascent as Apple’s chairman. The notes certainly reflect substantial lifting from secondary sources, but that does not trouble me half as much as this book’s trite style.

Yet Mr. Jobs himself is such a fascinating study I was not tempted to skip a word of “iCon.” This biography benefits from a “rising action,” as drama critics put it. Not only does Mr. Jobs resurrect himself after his Apple debacle, having alienated nearly everyone, from the engineers to the executives, his company Pixar comes to dominate animated films and account for nearly half of Disney’s profits, and his Apple innovation, iPod, teaches the music industry a lesson about how to use the Internet for downloading music while cutting down on piracy.

Steve Jobs reminds me of George Foreman. Both champs suffered humiliating knockouts, only to rebound in middle age to enjoy one of those American second acts that F. Scott Fitzgerald avowed did not happen. In both cases the heroes evinced a sensitive humanity neither had ever seemed capable of expressing. But the analogy cannot be pressed too far. Mr. Jobs retains, as his biographers amply document, plenty of the old hubris, and many more acts to his drama may remain.