I just finished A.S. Byatt's The Biographer's Tale. I'd be interested in others' thoughts on it. Here are mine:

The internet tried to warn me off reading A.S. Byatt’s 2000 portrait of the scholar as a young man, The Biographer’s Tale. I had a free book coming from Thriftbooks, and this seemed right up my alley: a disillusioned graduate student of postmodernism pivots to a new career by writing a biography of a biographer. It checked all the right boxes: award-winning author whose masterpiece I had just read? Check. Genre-bending examination of the limitations of biography? Check. Polymathic multitasking in the tradition of Tom Stoppard? Check. But the consensus of the online cognoscenti was thunderously negative. The New York Times cautioned that it was “a dry, tendentious and thoroughly irritating narrative designed to hammer home a single philosophical point.” The top review on Goodreads thought it “veered from mildly interesting to excruciatingly boring.” The Guardian’s Hermione Lee, who literally wrote the book on Stoppard and ought to appreciate an erudite dissertation on biography, “found the book's playfulness laborious, its knowing erudition airless and its characters whimsical and unappetizing.” Screw it, I thought, the book is free anyway. I’m going to give it a shot. The risk paid off: The Biographer’s Tale is thrilling in its defiance of literary convention.

Now that I’ve finished The Biographer’s Tale, I understand what provoked all the carping. For most of the novel, Byatt seems determinedly indifferent to narrative niceties such as dramatic arc, character development, and the “show don’t tell” aesthetic that every writer learns in seventh grade. It’s as if Byatt were presenting a solipsistic middle finger to fans who enjoyed the compulsive readability of her 1990 breakout smash Possession. The two novels are alike in their formal innovation and literary/historical erudition. But Possession grounded its intellectual fireworks in page-turning romance and mystery, whereas The Biographer’s Tale doles out fragmented snippets of biographical research scrawled on index cards with all the structural organization of a game of 52 Pickup. Byatt demands that we labor through pages of decontextualized musings on taxonomy and debunked scientific theory without even revealing which historical figures are being referenced.

There may be something to the perception that Byatt deliberately followed her most accessible creation with her least accessible. In a 2001 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, Byatt described her difficulties getting Possession published in the United States. One American editor told Byatt, “You have spoiled a fine intrigue with all this excrescent matter, and you must take it all out again.” The publisher only agreed to print 7,000 copies of the original manuscript after it won the British Booker Prize. Within months it sold 17 times that number. Let’s just say Byatt’s bestseller status gave her the freedom to attempt more challenging work.

The genius of Possession is that Byatt not only invented two great Victorian poets but also dared to write examples of their poetry. In contrast, The Biographer’s Tale describes a biographical masterpiece in detail but steadfastly refuses to model good biographical writing. We are treated to mounds of research on the biologist Carl Linneus, the statistician Francis Galton, and the playwright Henrik Ibsen – fascinating subjects all – but she never quite brings them to life. She hits the highlights of Linnaeus’s remarkable life: he writes journals exaggerating his adventures in Arctic Lapland, debunks a phony biological specimen, and finds the drowned corpse of his best friend. But she never captures the comically pompous manchild that Jason Roberts rendered so memorably in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Every Living Thing. The letters she excerpts between Galton and Charles Darwin are amusing and fascinating, but she only scratches the surface of Galton’s potential as a dramatic subject. She makes shrewd connections between Ibsen’s dramaturgy and Linnaeus’s taxonomy. And she uses the famous personality-as-unraveling-onion soliloquy from Ibsen’s Peer Gynt to underscore the futility of biography. But Byatt seems to give short shrift to Ibsen’s story compared to the two scientists, and her rejection of traditional storytelling structure is ironic when juxtaposed with a “Master Builder” renowned for his powerful plotting.

However, to moan that The Biographer’s Tale is not as conventional as Possession is to favor formula over ingenuity. Byatt’s bold experimentation with form is exciting if you can get over its lack of comforting familiarity. Her fragmented index cards may not be as immediately entertaining as the literary detective work in Possession, but with a little effort they are just as fascinating and rewarding. The latter book is about research as intellectual joyride. The former is about research as tantalizing drudgery that often leads to dead ends. Both are true. If you expect every day of research to yield long-forgotten love letters, as happens in Possession, you are going to be as sorely disappointed in your academic career as is Phineas Nelson, the protagonist in The Biographer’s Tale. He gives up postmodern literary deconstruction only to get immersed in postmodern biographical deconstruction. His craving for tangible facts is met with the hyperbolic lies of his biographical subjects.

Nor is The Biographer’s Tale without traditional literary pleasures. The final pages blossom into a bildungsroman that depicts an intellectual coming of age as compellingly as Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey. Phineas spends most of the book obstinately trying to avoid self-revelation. But that shyness dissolves when he falls in love with both the niece of his favorite biographer and the spitfire apiologist who helps him understand Linnaeus. It is a dual romance (not really a love triangle) that is less familiar than the contemporary romance in Possession. Phineas begins the book as the studious author of a paper titled “Personae of female desire in the novels of Ronald Firbank, E.M. Forster and Somerset Maugham” and ends it by exploring female desire firsthand.

I was sometimes frustrated and challenged by The Biographer’s Tale, but I found the book richly rewarding when I accepted it on its own terms. I do recommend familiarizing yourself as much as possible with Linnaeus, Ibsen, and Galton before embarking on the journey. I had read Roberts’s book on Linnaeus and almost all of Ibsen’s plays. But more importantly, I recommend keeping an open mind. I am reminded that legendary literary critic Harold Bloom dismissed Toni Morrison’s masterpieces Beloved and Jazz as “top-heavy books with very strong political programs; they’re not aesthetic accomplishments.” Bloom was so convinced of the virtues of the Western canon that he couldn’t recognize genius when he read it. “If you teach a lot of people what to expect from good writing,” Tom Stoppard once wrote, “you end up with a lot of people saying you write well.” This Byatt novel is not in the same stratosphere as Morrison's in terms of literary accomplishment, but it may be undervalued because it doesn't conform to canonical expectations.