In Plato’s Apology, Socrates states that "those…things about which you hear me examining myself and others, is the greatest good of man, and…the unexamined life is not worth living." Certainly the plethora of biographies and autobiographies suggests that the world has taken Socrates’ advice to heart, mostly in lengthy and often multivolume works: Leonard Woolf’s five volumes of self-examination, Leon Edel’s seven volumes on Henry James. Recently there has been a resurgence of interest in shorter and emotionally immediate versions. Echoing Aubrey’s Brief Lives and Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, Weidenfeld and Nicolson in London and Penguin in New York have initiated a series of brief and focused biographies written by nonspecialists who have, however, a special appreciation for their subject: Edmund White on Proust, McMurtry on Crazy Horse, and Gary Wills on Saint Augustine. Happily, the list includes Edna O’Brien on James Joyce.

Joyce’s experience of being banned in Ireland has been repeated in O’Brien’s own life. Perhaps more important, she also shares his love of language:

O’Brien describes Joyce’s "assault on language, his dizzying escalations, words strung together to take on another light, another lustre; multiple meanings" (p. 13).

"Poor joist," as she refers to him, was "a funnominal man, supporting a gay house in a slum of despond" (p. 1). Perhaps, as O’Brien suggests, his "galloping unpunctuated style" (p. 19) came from his mother, but he never mentioned her after her death. His escape from Ireland was a flight from his drunken, profligate father, who had plunged the family into debt and increasing despair. He also left behind the Jesuits of his early schooling and his altar-boy Catholicism. He gave up family, church, and state in order to write as he had to:

O’Brien also captures other aspects of Joyce’s life: his capacity for work (she estimates 50,000 hours to produce Ulysses); his complex, loving, and embattled relationship with his wife, Nora; and his despair over his mad daughter, Lucia. She accurately portrays, in 180 enthralling pages, Nora’s "poor Jim, he was such a great man" (p. 173).

Read this, reread Joyce himself, and read Edna O’Brien!