nonfiction
Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life, by Edna O’Brien, $24.95 “She walks in beauty, like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry skies;/And all that’s best of dark and bright/ Meet in her aspect and her eyes”: tender words for a libertine bard now remembered as the Jim Morrison of Romanticism.
Irish novelist Edna O’Brien’s “Byron in Love” follows the life of George Gordon Byron — who reveled in his noblesse despite personal failings including, but not limited to, drunkenness, infidelity, bankruptcy, syphilis and incest — through his love affairs with nobles and nobodies of both sexes.
“I wanted to follow him in his Rake’s Progress and his Poet’s Progress,” O’Brien says of her decision to write a breezy, character-driven biography of Lord Byron that forgoes lit-crit forensics to focus on the poet’s dastardly deeds.
O’Brien took a similar approach in her lively 1999 examination of her less-than-glamorous countryman James Joyce, but the technique garners mixed results here. Byron aficionados and fans of E! will relish sifting through the mountain of evidence that his lordship fathered a child with his half-sister, but those unfamiliar with early 19th-century Romanticism’s dramatic break with Enlightenment rationalism risk losing the poetry amid the personality.
Still, as Byron himself once wrote, “Folly loves the martyrdom of fame” — and what fun’s a literary life without a little folly?
nonfiction
Broken: A Love Story, by Lisa Jones, $25
Lisa Jones’ memoir is framed by two vivid incidents, both involving horses. At the opening, she watches Stanford Addison, a quadriplegic Arapaho healer and horse whisperer who lives on Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation, teach clients the art of gentling. Later, Addison supervises a horribly botched gelding.
Jones is far more focused on what the first event says about Addison than on the implications of the second. She becomes a frequent visitor to Addison’s home and a believer in his mystical powers.
Her spiritual search is at the center of the book, but it is not the most interesting part. Self-searching is a tricky topic, and it is also hard to see Addison in the same idealized light that Jones does. Fortunately, Jones has a keen journalist’s eye, and she provides all kinds of details, such as the many small ways Addison’s family cares for him. She also describes without judgment the dysfunction she encounters and the self-destructiveness of some of the reservation’s young men.
Jones writes beautifully about the natural world, knows how to bring the people she encounters alive on the page and tells a gutsy, moving story about a significant passage in her own life. But though her romanticizing of the world she encountered has its appeal, a clearer vision might have served even better.
