cover image ANTHONY BURGESS: A Biography

ANTHONY BURGESS: A Biography

Roger Lewis, . . St. Martin's/Dunne, $27.95 (434pp) ISBN 978-0-312-32251-9

Lewis, who has chronicled the lives of Peter Sellers and Laurence Olivier, eschews the traditional chronological narrative for a highly stylized, psychodynamic reading of his subjects and their creative work. As it turns out, Anthony Burgess (1917–1994) is ripe for this sort of treatment. Best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange, Burgess was extremely prolific but generally regarded as a great writer who never wrote a great book. Instead, he spread his talents thin (the author of scores of books, he was also a composer, translator and critic) and actively cultivated the myth of his own genius. By this account bombastic, egotistical and sexually eccentric, he responded to even the most profound tragedies of his life with a characteristic intellectual remove and what Lewis terms a "robotic" love of words. Lewis contends that Burgess (born John Anthony Burgess Wilson) was, in fact, several people at once, a "pathological liar" who lived in his books and experienced the world through a refracting set of identities. In perfect schizoid imitation, Lewis captures the Burgess/Wilson kaleidoscope with dramatic tangents, first-person interludes, endless cultural references, overly long footnotes and a charming lack of reverence. While at times Lewis's approach is frustratingly insular, a linear biography could not do this cryptic, difficult figure justice. 8 pages of b&w photos. (Mar. 19)