Reviewing Biography, Part One: Structure and Style

Many years ago, I heard Joseph Ellis mention his disappointment that no reviewers of his Thomas Jefferson biography noticed that in every chapter the biographer had Jefferson entering on a horse. In other words, a biography ought to be assessed for its form as well as its content.Most reviewers ignore structure and style, concentrating in book-report fashion on the what of biography. The reviewer retells the story of the subject’s life, usually assuming an authority that is derived from the very book that is reviewed.Exceptions to this lax standard of reviewing occur, but in the main the biographer usually gets no more than a paragraph to offer a kindly expression of approval, say, or the more usual array of adjectives such as “workmanlike” that consign biography to the second rate.How a biography is put together, how the biographer deploys sources or ignores them, is rarely an issue unless — as in the case of someone like Philip Roth’s biographer, Blake Bailey — the critics are on the hunt for how he has abused the evidence to exonerate, or at least mitigate, his subject’s failings. What is rarely considered is a biography’s provenance. From whence does it emanate? From archives, interviews, other documents, biographies, and histories? Even when I’m not especially versed in the biographical subject I’m reviewing, my first act is to read the acknowledgments to learn what kind of research the biographer has conducted.I scrutinize the source notes to see the extent to which what is said in the narrative is actually confirmed in the book’s sources. Sometimes what is not sourced turns out to be a presumption that cannot be proved. I look at chapter titles and begin to consider how the biography has been organized. Note, I haven’t even started reading the biography. I want to stand back from it and see how it has been shaped.Having indexed many of my biographies, I know that an index will tell me a great deal about how the narrative is arranged, and so I do the same for the biographies I review — though in many cases, they are the work of professional indexers. In a sense, though, the indexer is also providing a review of what I’m about to read.Eventually, I actually read the biography. Soon I learn about the biographer’s vocabulary and phrase-making — for good or ill. If the repetition of certain words and phrases begins to intrigue or annoy me, I search the .pdf for the same or similar constructions.So, you see, I don’t review a biography unless I have a .pdf, which saves considerable time in evaluation, so that I can assemble a sort of concordance. I may also run the book through software that allows me to listen to it. Even better, if an audiobook is available, I get to hear how a biography is subjected to oral interpretation. Listening is not the same as reading, but hearing the words can yield a good deal of data about style. Although the qualitative assessment of a book is paramount, I don’t discount the quantitative — the jarring use, say, of the wishful thinking that goes into repetitive phrases such as “must have been” or “must have felt.”Reviewers, I realize, usually have only a short time to review a book and they cannot approach each biography as a scholar of the genre. Perhaps some reviewers do as I say, but my experience of more than five decades of reading reviews of biography suggests to me that most reviewers do not regard the form of biography with any interest. Indeed, their reviews essentially imply that biographies are formless. The escape clause in positive reviews of biographies may well be a list of superlatives that actually tell you nothing about the book, though you may learn a good deal about the subject of the book. I can’t say that reviews of biographies are inadequate because most reviewers are not biographers, as I’ve noticed many professional biographers write the same kind of book reports I deplore in non-biographers. Are there remedies at hand? I hope I have supplied a few.Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Reading Biography.”

Reviewing Biography, Part One: Structure and Style

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