MixedThe New York Review of Books... [a] gigantic projected tetralogy ... Totaling some 2,500 pages so far, it has already become a work that is stunning in, if nothing else, the sheer Brobdingnagian magnitude of its narrative ambition, a feat of reportorial industry impossible not to admire. The difficulty in Caro’s third volume, though, is that the intermediary passage of Johnson’s progress it follows...was largely confined to parliamentary theater...that it would take Caro over a thousand pages, far more than in either of his previous volumes, to narrate this interim stage in Johnson’s story would seem a testimonial to its indefinite dramatic currency; and one cannot escape the impression that Caro has expended great effort to somehow make it matter with a piling up of words about it. Over those expanses of prose, one bafflingly encounters profusely detailed but strangely weightless stretches ... Throughout there are arrestingly rich scenes ... But those scenes mostly decorate what turn out to be...essentially pseudo-happenings. More dispiritingly, there persists from the prior two volumes Caro’s understanding of Johnson, which reduces him to a mere vast appetite for power—as if he amounted to not much more than a stupendous political Snopes.
