Hitch-22 is among the loveliest paeans to the dearness of one’s friends — Mr. Hitchens’s close ones include Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and the poet James Fenton — I’ve ever read. The business and pleasure sides of Mr. Hitchens’s personality can make him seem, whether you agree with him or not, among the most purely alive people on the planet.
Hitchens represents a far more noble intellectual tradition: the rapscallion iconoclast. Being able to shape-change, shed skins, sit on the hillside overlooking suburbia like a coyote, Hitchens represents a dying breed of public intellectual whose voice matters precisely because it can’t be easily pigeonholed or ignored ... At the core of Hitch-22 are Hitchens’s British anxieties about class and decline of empire ... But, in truth, Hitch-22 shows us more how Hitchens is a great pamphleteer — like Thomas Paine — rallying against perceived social injustice and religious fanaticism. While his targets are sometimes wrong — like Mother Theresa — his originality of argument is always refreshing.
Hitchens has plucked the gowans fine but he has also travelled to enough war zones and disaster areas to know whereof he speaks, and to speak with authority and purpose; his frame of reference is enormous, his tenacity, courage and loyalty exemplary and, as anyone familiar with his work can attest, he is a master of the English sentence. I try to think of an autobiography I've enjoyed as much and the only contender that springs to mind is that of Anthony Burgess.
Whether you like him or not, he's probably the best political writer in the United Kingdom or the United States, and his new memoir, Hitch-22, is smart, funny and unexpectedly touching ... Hitch-22 is almost three memoirs in one -- literary, political and personal -- but it's smooth, cohesive and relentlessly readable. Hitchens proves especially good at chronicling his education as a writer, as well as his friendships with fellow authors like James Fenton, Edward Said, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie ... Hitchens' reflections on matters literary and political are witty, intelligent and absorbing, but it's really the chapters about his family and his childhood that make this such an accomplished memoir.
Hitch-22 sparkles with funny stories, treasurable quotations, witty apercus and deft descriptions. Why then did I find myself reading it with increasing distrust and eventually, I have to say, distaste? ... Hitch admits right at the end that Hitch-22 is “a highly selective narrative”. It is indeed — and it is the stuff he leaves out that worries me ... But the biggest lacuna in the book is women. Apart from the long opening chapter about his mother, we barely encounter another woman for the next 400 pages, which is odd given Hitch’s reputation as a Don Juan.
It is, in its way, an autobiography. But it isn't quite that, since Christopher Hitchens isn't all that concerned with the day-to-day details of the life he has lived. He's rather more concerned with the ideas that have driven that life (Marxism, socialism, justice, truth, the decline of the left) and the historical encounters and moments that have marked it ... It is every bit as revealing as those memoirs, but it's a book that makes you want to argue with its subject rather than absorb - or contemplate - the lessons of the life lived. It's an apologia - a self-justification - as much as a memoir ... It also leads to one of Hitchens's failings here: an inability to appreciate that the personal and political are sometimes desirably kept apart ... Hitch-22 is one of the few self-portraits varied enough to believably contain a complex man.
...we learn little about the friendships of Hitchens’s that soured as he began his political metamorphoses, and we hear practically nothing about his fondness for drink, though he does treat us to a brief audit of his intake ... None of this means that Hitch-22 isn’t marvelous in its own way. But it’s probably a misnomer to call it a memoir, and easier to enjoy if one thinks of it as a collection of essays instead ... Some will find his version of events sympathetic; others will find it a cliché, the inevitable rightward drift of an old Trotskyist; and still others will violently quarrel with his tangents and disquisitions, as Hitchens so often makes one do ... Christopher Hitchens may long to be a cogent man of reason, and he can certainly be a pitiless adversary. But he knows there are two sides to any decent match, and it’s touching, in Hitch-22 to see how often he’ll race to the other side of the court to return his own serve.
Hitch-22 is a 420-page apologia pro vita sua in which the personal and the political are constantly entwined. The early chapters offer wonderful evocations of his parents ... "Suave" is perhaps the best word to describe his prose style. No matter how noisy the buzz of the late-1960s revolutionary movements, no matter how passionate the warring ideologists, Hitchens always contrives to sound detached, loftily appreciative, self-admiring, as much at home fondling a leather-bound wine list as a Marxist tract ... Initially mortified by the moral burden, Hitchens links up with Daily's family and evokes the soldier's life with heartfelt tenderness. It's the emotional highlight of an extremely beguiling book - by turns passionate and defensive, argumentative and seductive – from a man who stood several times at the gate of history and was never satisfied with what he saw.
How, then, does Christopher Hitchens think? Several times in the book he expresses his loathing of fanaticism, especially religious fanaticism, which in his account is a tautology ... The man who emerges from this memoir is a bit like them: clearly intelligent, often principled, and often deeply wrongheaded, but above all, a man of faith.
...In a book that omits many credible expressions of self-doubt – and which therefore largely fails to shed much self-knowledge – such intimate disclosures come across as unearned and excessively stylised ... It is hard not to admire the sheer virtuosity of his prose, yet it is rare to mistake it for wisdom or good judgment ... From one certainty to the next, he has leapt across the stepping stones of life, only rarely dipping a toe into the murky waters of doubt. Hitch-22 has its redeeming qualities – perhaps most vividly in Hitchens’ telling of his mother’s quiet determination to turn him into an English gentleman. Yet the book mostly fails to accentuate whatever redeeming qualities its author has.
The blustering, obscene, insatiable, limitlessly restless author of Hitch-22 doesn’t come across as much of a priest manqué, not even a whisky priest. What he most resembles, to an almost uncanny degree, is a particular kind of political romantic ... In one of the many striking digressions in Hitch-22, Hitchens argues that the big difference between revolutionary socialists and Fascists is that revolutionary socialists are at least capable of changing their minds when confronted with evidence of the horrors that have been committed in the name of their creed ... ...A long, discursive, occasionally gripping, intermittently diverting but sometimes rather boring book. It is not very funny, despite being crammed full of jokes.
If in this memoir Hitchens resists interrogating himself with the same vim, he is never less than lively, inquisitive, fearsomely well read and, best of all, an independent thinker. Most people you can package after hearing one snippet of their philosophy. You can’t package Hitchens, even when hearing all he has to say, which is quite a lot ... You sense that when push comes to shove he is more interested in being controversial than accurate ... Hitchens knows how to write; but there’s a whiff of old Edam in some of his potshots. As well, a whole pack of hounds not barking in the night ... And while he doesn’t have the monopoly he thinks he does on what it means to be alive, he makes journalism worthwhile, by forcing us to have one more reflection, take one more look.
...An engrossing account of his lives as a British Navy brat, a socialist activist and a leading essayist and intellectual of our time ... In this frank, often wickedly funny account, Hitchens traces his evolution as a fiercely independent thinker and enemy of people who are convinced of their absolute certainty ... Revealing and riveting. There's little about his brother, his two marriages or his children, but other memoirs may follow.
