Manny Farber via Reverse Shot

Reading collections of film criticism is always a dissociative experience. By the time the essays have been wrangled into a book, their time-stamps have expired, and the reviews have lost the “now playing in a theater near you!” relevance that inspires most people to first start reading film reviews in the first place. Once anthologized, the essays, like the films themselves, become aesthetic and intellectual markers – documents that may (or may not) have withstood the tests of time and taste. Perhaps because of transience of film and its status as a popular art, film criticism seems especially bound to the tyranny of time, although good critics are recognizable by their ability to make you forget it.

For critics such as Manny Farber, this dissociative quality works in their favor. In Farber’s writing, the foreignness of his subject material (have you heard of 1943’s Stage Door Canteen?) is negotiated by a prose style so bizarre that language tends to rise as the true subject of essays. Farber’s writing – which always hits the ground running – is flush with jokes and allusions, and marked by a conversational quality that makes him an especially astute and sharp-tongued companion.. In lieu of academic criticism – the realm of what he calls “ the professional pipe smokers” – Farber imagines himself as the critic in the bunker, armed with a verbal shotgun and a readiness to take down any film that he deems insufficiently smart or innovative.

On Max Orphuls’ Lola Montes: “Any Orphuls movie is supposed to be fluid magic, but after the first five minutes of circus, it is like hauling an old corpse around and around in sawdust.”

On Scorsese: “Scorsese’s movies are about youth’s dream squelched-by-adult-verities, the charismatic fullness of a jungle cat punk, a feisty ten-year-old, a vulgar and good-natured veteran waitress, and a visceral apprehension about an eager-messy world, a reaction he transmits through a saucing, glamour technique.”

On Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend: “It’s a film which loves its body odor.”

Manny Farber, Drawing Across Time via artnet

Although he always considered himself a painter first, Farber’s career as a critic reads as a roadmap to writerly post-war culture. He wrote columns for The New Republic, The Nation, and Artforum, and despite only publishing one book – 1971’s Negative Space – contributed to almost every film journal of note from the ‘40s up until his death in 2008. While he was never formally trained in film, Farber got his first job as The New Republic’s film critic in 1942 in a way that would make most upstart journalists take pause – he wrote the magazine a letter informing them that he could do the job better than anybody else. He first column ran that February.

Over his thirty-five year career as a critic, Farber’s style evolved from short, punchy, reviews for TNR to sprawling, manifesto-like pieces that eyed larger philosophical and aesthetic trends in film. Never one to give in to outside opinion, Farber’s writing in the 50s and 60s – the heyday of Hollywood and French avant-garde film, respectively – maintained a critical distance from the powers at large while treating the films with the affection of a viewer, rather than an intellectual. In his 1965 essay “Nearer My Agee to Thee,” Farber accuses the “new critics” – Susan Sontag and Andy Sarris – of depersonalizing film, and inheriting James Agee’s “tensionless language with its flagrant escalations.” (Incidentally, Sontag didn’t share the feeling, and once described Farber as “the liveliest, smartest, most original film critic this country has ever produced.”)

Farber’s writing situates itself in contrast to this kind of algebraic intellectualism, and champions the little guys of film – the B-movies, horror films, and spaghetti westerns – that he contends are better equipped to break through the pretensions of High Art and strike at the core of an idea. In one of his most famous essays, 1962’s “White Elephant vs. Termite Art,” Farber attacks high, or white elephant art, as “dehydrated” – comparable to the “boxed-in shape and gemlike inertia of an old, densely wrought European masterpiece.” Against these white elephants – which include Truffaut, Antonioni and Welles – Farber celebrates termite art, which has no “object in mind other than eating away at the immediate boundaries of art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement.” Grounding his criticism in a kind of highbrow populism, Farber recognizes the blood in the medium, and reserves his highest praise for films that evoke a visceral, as well as intellectual, response.

In this vein, the dissociative quality in Farber’s writing isn’t just due to the quirkiness of his prose style, but his allegiance to the quickly forgotten. In a profession characterized by topicality and quick turnover, Farber’s interests always lay in the periphery, and to an extent, this gave him room to philosophize rather than focus on a film’s most obvious details. While it now seems incomprehensible to read about B-movies in the pages of a major magazine, Farber’s ability to analyze without academicizing allowed him to bring lowbrow films into highbrow pages. Ultimately, then, perhaps the best way to describe Farber is to lift a phrase from his own “White Elephant.” Unlike the formulaic writing that pervades most criticism, Farber’s writing, like good film, “goes forward eating its own boundaries… leav[ing] nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.”

Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber was published on October 1st by Library of America.

I have a piece on Argentine author Juan Filloy’s wonderful and deeply bizarre novel Op Oloop in this month’s Believer. Check it out.

Cross-posted at Bookforum

In June, Cass R. Sunstein’s confirmation as Barack Obama’s nominee for regulatory czar was hindered by Georgia senator Saxby Chambliss, who told online congressional newspaper The Hill, “[Sunstein] has said that animals ought to have the right to sue folks.” Chambliss was apparently referring to Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, a book Sunstein edited in 2004, in which he argued that private citizens should be able to defend animals in court. However, when Chambliss’s statement was posted, Sunstein’s nuanced legal thinking was subject to distortion by bloggers and commentators, many of whom took his argument to illogical extremes.

This type of misinformation is a good example of what Sunstein finds problematic about the Internet. In his new book, On Rumors, Sunstein tackles the insidious effect of rumors on “democratic discourse” in our brave new cyberworld. He has written extensively about Internet libel—notably in 2007’s Republic.com 2.0—and has pioneered a field of study around it, merging the disciplines of law and behavioral economics. It is ironic, then, that Sunstein’s confirmation hinged on whether people believed he thought bonobos should take the stand.

Sunstein contends that rumors threaten democracy by undermining public confidence in government. Moreover, he argues, libel and misinformation can now spread at an unprecedented speed, with no way to keep its authors in check. Sunstein makes his case by focusing on two major consequences of transmitting information online: First, it creates a cascade effect, meaning that people are more likely to believe something if their peers do; second, it polarizes people into isolated groups, a trend that leads to ideological extremism (or, at the very least, to parroting Rachel Maddow). As a result, Sunstein claims that Internet news sources create “an architecture of control by which each of us can select a free-speech package that suits our interests.” From this vantage point, the news we read becomes hyperspecialized, and we become alienated from shared democratic experience.

The crux of Sunstein’s argument is that the Internet has become fundamentally antidemocratic—though it is a public sphere—because it allows us to filter out content we disagree with and to personalize information to an unprecedented degree. Consequently, the Internet works poorly as a marketplace of ideas, ghettoizing users along the lines of personal preference. Furthermore, without real oversight or a civic code, truth and falsehood are allowed to exist in equal measure. “Even if the rumors are baseless,” Sunstein writes, “the very fact that questions are being asked . . . will assure a victory for the propagator.” To govern this arena, Sunstein advocates regulatory measures that create a “chilling effect”—in short, mandatory fines for spreading misinformation. A failure to regulate the Internet, he warns, could risk a “dystopian future in which propagators . . . are rewarded . . . for spreading false rumors and showing no concern for the question of truth.”

But identifying rumors may not be as easy as Sunstein makes it out to be. There is a thin line between rumor and opinion; as the recent hysteria over health care reform demonstrates, statements that originated as overheated rhetoric are reported as “news” by the mainstream media. Moreover, if Sunstein plans to level fines on those spreading misinformation, he’ll have to prove “actual malice”—a particularly nebulous legal category—if the government ends up in court. Considering the difficulties surrounding fines (and the fact that rumors, like cockroaches, will likely never become extinct) Sunstein’s approach may be difficult.

But even as Sunstein warns of a coming dystopia, his vision of the Internet isn’t as bleak as it sounds. He believes we’re at a critical moment: We can either accept the perils of a lawless Web or choose a future in which “those who spread false rumors are categorized as such, discounted, and marginalized.” The difference, he argues, depends less on the legal realm than on developing a new code of online social norms. It may not be possible to prevent people from believing misinformation, Sunstein concedes, but until we actively discourage rumors from spreading, the Internet will never be able to live up to its true democratic potential.

Cross-posted at Lincoln Center’s film blog
There’s no shortage of reasons why studio films end up on the cutting room floor: funders back out without warning, directors run into difficulty securing rights, footage gets lost or stolen, and in more exciting instances, directors simply fall victim to the expanding scope of their own visions. Orson Welles spent thirty years obsessively shooting scenes for what he considered the culmination of his life’s work, an adaptation of Don Quixote, only to leave behind 300,000 feet of reel and an unfinished product. Hitchcock’s Kaleidoscope, said to herald a major breakthrough in his cinematic style, was rejected because the protagonist was “too ugly”; and Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon was shut down in production due to staggering studio costs. However, as a number of recent documentaries indicate, for all the films that are abandoned, not all of cinema’s most ambitious discarded projects are entirely forgotten.

The most recent film to receive preservationists’ attention is L’Enfer, the unfinished masterpiece by the great French director Henri-Georges Clouzot. In L’enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Inferno of Henri-Georges Clouzot) documentarians Serge Blomberg and Ruxandra Medrea retrace the project’s collapse – Bromberg came up with the idea after being trapped with Clouzot’s widow in an elevator – overlaying the film’s plot with the story of its production, and adapting the film’s central theme of obsession as a means of understanding Clouzot’s tyrannical directorial style. The result is a documentary that presents itself quietly, if not too much so – to their credit, Bromberg and Medrea allow Clouzot’s vision to stand by itself, but this comes at the expense of critical background about the director’s tormented history and how it may have doomed his most ambitious work.

Nicknamed the “French Hitchcock” for his morbid sensibility, Clouzot came to prominence in the early 1940s by directing thrillers that circumscribed the themes that would later come to obsess him in Inferno: paranoia, jealousy, and the peripheries of sanity and reality. In 1943, he burst onto the European film scene with Le Corbeau, the film that both established and forever tarnished his career when critics condemned it of being anti-French. While Blomberg and Medrea resist delving too deeply into Clouzot’s history, the arc of his creative life often mirrored his personal one: in the years following the Liberation, Clouzot was temporarily banished from filmmaking amid accusations of collaborating with the Germans, and by the 1930s, had been hospitalized for severe depression.

In the summer of 1964, after directing the massively successful La Vérité with Brigitte Bardot, Clouzot set to work on the film that “was to be his masterpiece, L’Enfer, a revolutionary experiment in form inspired in part by Fellini’s 8½.” The plan was to shoot over a four-week period at the artificial Garabit Lake in south-central France (more on this later), followed by 14 weeks in the studio. Armed with an unlimited budget and one of the top young actresses in France – the stunning Romy Schneider – Clouzot spent three weeks obsessively shooting and re-shooting the test shots that would eventually provide the sole remaining documentation of the film.

L’Enfer is shot from the perspective of actor Serge Reggiani – who was selected for having a head “like a chestnut” – and chronicles Reggiani’s increasingly deranged fantasies as he becomes convinced that his wife, played by Schneider, is having an affair with a local mechanic. The daytime scenes, which are shot in black and white, are carefully crafted to offset the rapturous, hallucinatory quality of Reggiani’s visions, which receive full color treatment, and are an early example of Clouzot’s experimentation with kinetic art. While every shot in the film reflects Clouzot’s meticulous artistry, the test shots are nothing short of astonishing. Liberated from the confines of a budget, Clouzot enlisted the top visual and sonic artists of the day to develop a cinematic world characterized by a gorgeous aesthetic schizophrenia, splitting the paranoid imaginings of a madman against the lush landscapes of provincial France. Special effects are used to a degree rarely seen in contemporary cinema, and at one point, Clouzot paints all of his actors green in order to invert the camera’s colors and tinge the lake a crimson red.

Ultimately, while these shots are precisely what’s so alluring about the film, they’re also partially to blame for its incompletion. After three weeks of filming, Clouzot’s fanaticism reached a fevered pitch, driving producers to climb out of bathroom windows rather than be forced to spend every waking hour tending to the director’s whims. Citing health reasons, Reggiani left several weeks into the shoot, and with only days to go before the artificial lake was to be drained, Clouzot suffered a heart attack and production was called off. In the end, all that was left of the endeavor was 13 hours of film fated to spend the next forty years locked away. On Criterion’s website, Michael Koresky wonders what would have happened had the film ever been completed. It’s impossible to know, but at the very least, we should consider ourselves lucky that what did come of Inferno made it off of the floor and onto the screen, in one way or another.

Cross-posted at Idiom

Having no prior exposure to Michael Robinson before seeing his show at tank.tv (September 2- 22nd) I’ll begin this review for similarly uninitiated readers in the most crude and straightforward way possible: by including the notes I took while watching “Light is Waiting,” an eleven-minute video Robinson made in 2007.

Scene from “Full House,” DJ and Kimmy carry TV upstairs, TV falls off balcony, cuts to flashing, epileptic static; focuses on image of sailboat, vague vibrating copy of boat nearby; zooms into airplane, garbled “Full House” voiceover, garbled image; split mirror images of people jumping off waterfall into each other; people assembled in woods with uncanny electronic shadows of themselves; abstract images overlapping images; people gathered around fireplace, Maori (?) tribesmen convening around fire (Kenneth Anger?) tribal ceremony; overlapping hallucinatory images of tribesmen & Westerners dancing; eerie, atonal noises; crowds; man performing onstage; spliced images of DJ, Uncle Jessie and an Olson twin from “Full House”; flashing primary colors cut with mirror images of people performing; white light, inverted, illegible credits. Fin.

As “Light is Waiting” suggests, one of the most striking features of Robinson’s work is his interest in appropriating cultural nostalgia—whether from vintage National Geographic magazines, Barbara Streisand songs or from the early 90’s sitcom “Full House”—and honing in on its uneasy relationship to technology. Capitalizing on the emotive capacity of pop culture—the “Oh! I love that song!” effect—Robinson picks apart familiar sounds and images to expose the pixels and bytes, and in the process, succeeds in making 80s babies distinctly uncomfortable with their not-so-distant media memories. Home movies are edited to resemble “The Ring”, Disney cartoons are spliced with their own negatives, and flashing primary colors are used as a weapon of estrangement. Like a literary theorist, Robinson parses familiarity down to its component parts then summarily turns them inside out, using the leftover pieces to launch viewers into unfamiliar—albeit uncanny—new media landscapes.

Michael Robinson, still from and we all shine on 7:00, 16mm color film with optical sound, 2006

In “And We All Shine On,” a work from 2006, the viewer is subjected to a virtual UFO abduction, with likely perpetrators being a ham radio and an Atari console. The film opens on a barely visible night shot of a tree, with static hanging in the background. After a moment, the static gives way to radio tuning, and the viewer is lifted out of the scene and dropped into the Technicolor landscapes of an 80s video game. The music gains coherence, and stills from the games are punctuated by flashing screenshots to a hypnotic, hallucinogenic effect. Eventually, the music fades into cacophony and Robinson cuts back to the darkened tree before the film ends.

Through manipulating the viewer’s relationship to content, Robinson’s focus is less on the material itself than on the question of representation—that is, whether or not film as a medium is inherently untrustworthy. In his work, photos of trees are treated with the same reverence as trees themselves, confounding hierarchies of perception and raising all sorts of Benjaminian questions about reproducibility. If the camera denies us the ability to know whether we’re looking a thing or its simulacrum, Robinson’s work seem to ask, how can film or photography ever promise an authentic experience of viewership? Moreover, what does it suggest about us that the mechanization of experience is no longer a barrier to forming genuine emotional attachment? Rather than answering these questions, Robinson instead revels in the aporia, describing his work as an exploration of “the poetics of loss and the dangers of mediated experience.”

With regard to mediated experience, the only real complaint I have about the show is its actual presentation: while tank.tv’s minimalist aesthetic certainly looks good – the site features skeletal white and grey text against a black background – it could stand to include a little supplementary material. Information about Robinson isn’t easily accessible online (a Google search might lead one to conclude that he moonlights as a San Francisco 49ers running back) and given how essential pop culture is to his work, biographical background would also be helpful for contextualizing him within it.

Micheal Robinson, still from you don’t bring me flowers, 8:00, 16mm color film with optical sound, 2005

Finally, it’s important to note that while Robinson’s aesthetic skews towards the apocalyptic, his films are anything but bleak renderings of dystopian futures. Instead, an undercurrent of humor pervades his work, adding a darkly euphoric quality to otherwise troubling themes. In 2008’s “Carol Anne is Dead,” Robinson recycles a campy, home movie version of Poltergeist – which happens to star a ten-year-old version of himself. “Hold Me Now,” another film from 2008, partitions a scene from “Little House on the Prairie” through periodic flashes of a strobe light, and sets the clip – which features Mary flailing in bed – to a karaoke version of the Thompson Twins’ song, “Hold Me Now.” In work like this, Robinson acknowledges the technological anxieties of the eighties and plays with them, suggesting that the proper vehicle for navigating our brave new world could very well be a karaoke machine or an Atari spaceship.

Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius by Colin Dickey

Unbridled Books, 272 pp., $25.95

Cross-posted at Second Pass

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The early nineteenth century was an especially tumultuous time in global history – the Napoleonic Wars were raging through Europe, the Enlightenment was giving way to modernity, and science was beginning to shed its allegiance to metaphysics and take the form we recognize today. To paraphrase historian Eric Hobsbawm, the long nineteenth century was just starting to get underway, and it came with all the attendant problems and anxieties of a new historical moment. In the midst of all this, Franz Joseph Gall, a young Viennese medical student, was at work developing the “New Science” that was to grip Europe’s imagination and become a critical instrument for registering shifting attitudes towards science, religion and politics. It was called phrenology.

In Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius, Colin Dickey maps the intellectual history of this science and the people who claimed the coveted bones, often using dubious means. In the years after the rise of phrenology, skull robbery became an international sport, and no less than Francisco Goya, Joseph Haydn and Sir Thomas Browne fell victim to the crimes of graveyard thieves. During this period, the sacrilege of upsetting a grave was offset by the belief that the act was an expression of reverence, and so the skulls of many of Europe’s greatest thinkers were clandestinely shuffled around the continent, leaving behind mysteries and loose ends that often lasted for generations.

Phrenology originated in the latter decades of the eighteenth century under Gall, a neuroanatomist whose scientific legacy was redeemed by the discovery of localization – the notion that different parts of the brain control various aspects of our minds and bodies. At phrenology’s core was the belief that personality – whether that of a genius or a madman – could be explained by the skull’s physical characteristics. “To the phrenologist,” Dickey writes, “the skull had its own landscape, where valleys and ridges told a secret story, a hidden territory to be unearthed. Like a geologist reading a strata of rock, a phrenologist could unravel a decades-old history in the contours of a cleaned skull.” Convinced of the correlation between mental capacity and physical appearance, Gall was very much a product of his time, his work making literal the Enlightenment desire to bridge sight and knowledge.

Cranioklepty opens upon a curious scene: It’s 1820, and Viennese soldiers have entered the home of Joseph Carl Rosenbaum, a clerk to Prince Esterhazy and an old friend of composer Joseph Haydn. They find Rosenbaum’s wife in bed, and reluctant to disturb her, leave. On the orders of Esterhazy, the soldiers were looking for something they had recently discovered missing – Haydn’s skull. As it turns out, the skull was hidden in bed with Rosenbaum’s wife and it would be another thirty-two years before it was returned to the public domain. When it did reappear, it was in the hands of Carl von Rokitansky, a rising star among a new generation of anatomists beginning to tinker with Gall’s teachings.

As collecting became popularized, the unearthed skulls of intellectual celebrities proliferated – at one point, there were two attributed to Swedish polymath Emanuel Swedenborg – and scientists were obliged to come up with new ways to test authenticity. This contributed to the rise of craniometrics – the science of extrapolating “truths” from cranial measurements and averages. In the 1890s, as craniometry provided a flimsy intellectual framework for racism, the brain replaced the skull as the defining feature of humanity, and the brains of famous artists and writers were enlisted to prove the superiority of the white European male. With an average brain weighing 1,400 grams, Lord Byron’s tipped the scale at more than 1,800, while Russian writer Ivan Turgenev’s was a formidable 2,012. These statistics were trotted out as proof of the link between genius and brain weight. The growing camaraderie between ideology and scientific method was largely why, over a sixty-year span from the early 1800s onward, “phrenology moved from a theory to a science to an art and finally to a sideshow.” Ultimately, as Dickey says, it would come to be remembered as “one of the most egregious pseudosciences of the nineteenth century.”

Phrenology took hold in the U.S. in the years preceding the Civil War, as Americans searched for a balm to relieve the country’s deepening divides. “Transcendentalists, abolitionists, hydrotherapy advocates, antilacing societies . . . teetotalers, and vegetarians – all lined up to promote their causes,” Dickey writes. “[P]hrenology took them all in and made them part of its grand scheme.” As phrenologists joined the ranks of snake-oil salesmen, consumers who paid to have their skulls read would receive charts rating their personality traits, with a typical examination gauging levels of Adhesiveness, Concentrativeness, Sublimity and Marvelousness, among other vital qualities. These practices were notoriously suspect, and a famous anecdote has Mark Twain visiting the Fowler brothers’ Phrenological Cabinet in Manhattan on two separate occasions. The first time, he went undercover in street clothes, and was told that an oversized “caution bump” had prevented him from accomplishing anything in life. The second time, he wore his signature white suit, introduced himself as Mark Twain, and was promptly told that he possessed the “loftiest bump of humor [Fowler] had ever encountered in his life-long experience!” The final blow came with the 1911 publication of Ambrose Bierce’s satirical Devil’s Dictionary, in which phrenology was immortalized as “the science of picking the pocket through the scalp.”

While Dickey occasionally gets bogged down in all the historical specifics of bizarre coincidences and serendipity – at some points juggling enough characters to rival a Russian novel – it’s easy to see how this was hard to resist. Under the loose theme of grave robbery, the book constructs a deft intellectual history of the period across disciplines and geography. Grave robbery is one of the great themes of human history, Dickey says, and one that retains its relevance in contemporary times. In February of this year, descendants of the Apache chief Geronimo sued Yale’s secret Skull and Bones Society for the warrior’s skull, alleging it was stolen years before by Prescott Bush – President George W. Bush’s grandfather. More recently, grave robbery has given way to online “ghosting,” or stealing the identities of people who are not widely known to be dead. Science may no longer be based on stolen skulls, but as Cranioklepty suggests, people may never concede to let sleeping graves lie.

Hi everybody,

Apologies for the rather lengthy break — I’ve been in the dual processes of moving and starting a new job. I don’t have anything to post at the moment, although I have a few pieces coming out over the next few months that I’ll cross-post here when they’re officially published. In the meantime, I’m writing for Slate’s new aggregation feature, The Slatest, so check that out. Also, NYFF starts soon, so film reviews to come.

Cross-posted on Bookforum.com

Edna O’Brien opens Byron in Love with a simple question: “Why another book on Byron?” The answer comes in the form of a remark by the poet’s friend Lady Blessington, who once referred to Byron as “the most extraordinary and terrifying person” she had ever met. Within a few chapters, the reader is convinced; O’Brien’s narrative is a compelling account of Byron’s Caligula-like cruelty, his gifts as a narrative poet, his amorous adventures in Europe (and with Cambridge choir boys), and his infamous eccentricities (he paraded around Trinity College with a pet bear and wanted to own Percy Bysshe Shelley’s skull). For O’Brien, a novelist known for employing themes of eroticism and literary history, the opportunity to profile such a character—described by his lover Lady Caroline Lamb as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”—is understandably irresistible. O’Brien details Byron’s life with precision and verve, beginning with his humble birth in London, mapping his ascent to aristocracy at the tender age of ten, and ending with his exile and death in Greece. The tumultuous thirty-six years of Byron’s life resulted in a trail of scorned lovers, abandoned children, and most important, some of the English language’s most celebrated poetry, which, unfortunately, often takes a backseat to stories of the writer’s bawdy escapades.

A slim addition to the tall stack of Byron scholarship, Byron in Love is most remarkable for how much it accomplishes in a mere 240 pages. O’Brien spent two years engrossed in letters, journals, and biographies; her exhaustive research allows her to convey a keen sense of the poet’s life, rich with period detail. She imparts society gossip with a cloak-and-dagger intensity, lushly describes political and social climes, and offers sympathetic portrayals of those in Byron’s orbit who were overcome by the eroticism of his words. O’Brien takes every measure to capture the grandiose (and frequently absurd) atmosphere that Byron inhabited and the violent emotions he invariably aroused.

The intricate sentences and ornate language of O’Brien’s fiction have won her praise from the likes of John Banville and Philip Roth. Byron in Love, however, is a different story. An odd blend of description, scholarship, and primary-source material, the book is a pastiche of multiple voices, which have the effect, as Jane Shilling noted in the London Times, of couching her narrative in “a florid patois.” O’Brien is also fond of switching between past and present tense (sometimes as often as five times in a single paragraph) resulting in a mildly schizophrenic tone, which, while possibly meant to be Byronic, is disconcerting.

Her writing aspires to be Elizabethan theater; or, more precisely, to the melodrama of a Romantic novel: “Augusta, at Byron’s request, has also been invited, but she declines, now finding herself pregnant and therefore queasy and also guessing that she might be a wallflower in that company. Accepting, Byron requests that he be excused from going to the races at Doncaster and also from dining with them, as he does not dine at all.”

Byron was a figure overshadowed by the mythology that grew around him. He apparently mystified even himself—as he said, “I am sure of nothing so little as my own intentions.” It is the biographer’s task to separate history from lore, to untangle the contradictory strands of the subject’s interior life. O’Brien’s book partially succeeds but performs the task with distracting affectations. For the reader willing to brave these thickets of prose, Byron in Love is a solid introduction to the poet’s madness and genius.