Renegade

December 5, 2011
Turner’s latest plunge into Henry Miller’s epic life brims with zeal for both Miller and his fiction. Turner (Into the Heart of Life: Henry Miller at One Hundred) argues that Tropic of Cancer’s storied history reflects that of the nation, and to prove it he delves into 200 years of folk heroes and pop culture—which results in questionable digressions. The mythologizing German boy from Brooklyn, whose family had a strain of mental illness and anti-Semitism, becomes the adult who pursues his sexual compulsions in Times Square and goes on to befriend prostitutes in Parisian slums. As an autodidact, Miller begins writing several novels, one about a wife who runs away with a female lover, and another with the help of his lover Anaïs Nin. Turner artfully obscures details missing in Miller’s “violently anti-literary” life, but occasionally tries to thicken the plot with bizarre, unnecessary psychologizing. Though the book succeeds as a biography, as the making of Tropic of Cancer it proves underwhelming. Agent: Robin Straus Agency.

January 1, 2012
There is little to admire in the life of Henry Miller. He was a misogynist, an anti-Semite, a philanderer, a shameless self-aggrandizer, and a mooch who lived off his wife's earnings from turning tricks. Beyond the fact that Tropic of Cancer made several of those Top 100 lists a few years ago, there isn't much of his often brutish, scatological fiction that is held in even middling high regard today. But that's not to say that he doesn't fascinate. As a self-styled literary renegade, his personal historyhis wild marriage to June, his relationship with Anais Nin, his bohemian lifestyleattracts more sustained interest than his extensive oeuvre. But Tropic of Cancer was indeed groundbreaking, and as Turner demonstrates so well, the novel stirred such controversy when it was finally published in the U.S. in 1961, nearly 30 years after its appearance in France, that it helped pave the way for the liberation of American letters. Turner provides a great deal of background to show how deeply autobiographical the novel is in its gritty details and its in-your-face ethos.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)