Burning man The trials of D.H. Lawrence

Biographer Wilson (Guilty Thing) focuses on D.H. Lawrence's "decade of superhuman energy and productivity" in this ambitious but flawed study. Between 1915 and 1925, when Lawrence produced some of his most defining works (including Women in Love and The Plumed Serpent), Wilson argues that Lawrence structured his life on Dante's "Divine Comedy," a neat conceit that drives the structure of the narrative. His life looked like roving chaos to most biographers, Wilson writes, but a more accurate approach would be to "unfold his journey in terms of descent and ascent." Wilson creates a fascinating portrait of Lawrence from his childhood in the coal fields of Nottingham to his prolific drive to write, and as intriguing a figure as Lawrence is, he shares the spotlight with the eccentric characters who surrounded him and influenced his work. Such artists include poet Hilda Doolittle, doomed criminal and memoirist Maurice Magnus, and theosophist patron of the arts Mabel Dodge Luhan. Crucially, though, Wilson fails to demonstrate that Lawrence's work--or life--was directly modeled off a Dante-esque worldview. While Wilson's creativity and erudition shine, the conceit falls flat, and the account of Lawrence fails to reveal fresh insight into the writer's life and work. (June)

A fresh study of D.H. Lawrence's enigmatic life and writing. In her latest, noted literary critic and biographer Wilson delivers an absorbing, eccentric work of imaginative biography, a text that is by turns deeply revelatory, opinionated, and occasionally rambling. The author focuses on the middle years of Lawrence's writing career, from 1915 to 1925, and she allegorically frames the three sections of his journey around Dante's Divine Comedy. "Inferno" covers Lawrence's years in England while writing The Rainbow and Women in Love and his early years of marriage to Frieda. In "Purgatory," Wilson chronicles his years in Italy, which featured a murky series of financial and possibly intimate intrigues with American traveler and writer Maurice Magnus. "Paradise" takes us to Australia, which inspired his novel Kangaroo, onward to the American Southwest and Mexico, and up to his tuberculosis diagnosis. Interweaving entertaining accounts of his travels and his relationships along the way with examples of his writing, Wilson skillfully evokes Lawrence's restless spirit while partially penetrating his contradictory manners and impulses. "His fidelity as a writer was not to the truth but to his own contradictions," she writes, "and reading him today is like tuning into a radio station whose frequency keeps changing….Of all the Lawrentian paradoxes, however, the most arresting is that he was an intellectual who devalued the intellect, placing his faith in the wisdom of the very body that throughout his life was failing him." Wilson casts a vivid light on his many notable associations--among them, Katherine Mansfield, Norman Douglas, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Ottoline Morrell--many of whom published books on their experiences with Lawrence. With more than a hint of misogyny found in some of his fiction, Lawrence is not a particularly relevant author for our times, and Wilson's effort may not elicit renewed interest despite the author's colorful depictions of his travels and provocative analysis of his work and personal shortcomings. A distinctly original perspective on an iconic writer. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.