Hitch-22 out tomorrow

Daniel Rothschild
June 1st, 2010
Culture, Politics

Christopher Hitchens’ long-awaited memoir Hitch-22 comes out tomorrow. (Fortunately, the publisher, Twelve, has seen fit to release it same-day on Kindle.) Here’s a partial list (below the fold) of what the reviewers are saying about it. I have it on pre-order; I only wish it had come out in time for the long Memorial Day reading weekend.

Diana McLellan, Washington Post:

“Hitch-22″ (ghastly title) is a fat and juicy memoir of a fat and juicy life, topping 400 pages. As you plunge in for your Zelig-like wallow in the past century’s zeitgeist, you begin to shiver: My God, didn’t this guy leave anything out?… But the truth is, for the memoir of a Trotskyite George Orwell worshiper, “Hitch-22″ (ugh) has a humongous memory hole.

Toby Young, The Observer:

The portrait of Hitchens to emerge from this book, then, is at odds with his self-image. He thinks of himself as an ironist, permanently alert to the contradictions of the world, a master of negative capability. In fact, he’s a born polemicist, only fully alive when marshalling all his forces to advance a particular cause. His critics accuse him of being a professional controversialist, taking up positions merely in order to be given the opportunity to defend them in print and on television. But few traces of such opportunism are detectable in this memoir. On the contrary, it’s the absence of cynicism that’s so striking.

Blake Morrison, The Guardian:

Intellectual history rather than emotional catharsis is the rule here. Hitch-22 sets out to trace the growth of his mind, and certain aspects of his life are deemed irrelevant to that. Lovers and wives retain their privacy. His brother is referred to only in passing. His children are present simply to prompt a mea culpa that he wasn’t, when they were small. By contrast, generous space is given to the many writers, politicians and teachers he has befriended or done battle with over the years. But only if they come up to scratch. George Galloway doesn’t even rate a footnote.

Allen Barra, Salon:

God — if Hitchens will excuse my use of the term — knows that we always need a good, hard-bitten contrarian, but something has become skewed in Hitchens’ vision since 9/11 shifted him to the right. In an article in October 2009 for the Atlantic, Hitchens feigned surprise at discovering that Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Al Franken were … liberal. “Bush’s brain or IQ,” he observes, “is enough to ignite peals of mirth from those in Stewart’s studio crowd, who just know they are smarter than he.” Of course, they are smarter than Bush, and Hitchens surely knows this. He does himself and his readers no service by pretending, even for a moment, that this isn’t true, and he pretends it for more than 400 pages in “Hitch-22.”

Edward Luce, Financial Times:

Even fans of Hitchens – a club to which I have not paid dues but sometimes visited as a guest – might chafe at some of his confessions. Details of a writer’s sex life, including ones as “polymorphous perverse” as those of Hitchens, are not necessarily gratuitous. But in a book that omits many credible expressions of self-doubt – and which therefore largely fails to shed much self-knowledge – such intimate disclosures come across as unearned and excessively stylised.

Joan Bakewell, Times of London:

He dismisses various attempts to define him: “gadfly”, “maverick”, too trivial; “contrarian”, irritating; “oppositionist”, barely acceptable. His final insight is that because he loves an argument he will often protract one simply for its own sake rather than concede even a small point. Within this book we learn why: it displays the best of his persuasive skills, the sharpness of his dismissive put-downs and something else too: self-knowledge.