Atlas’ own intelligence and wit is as pervasive and persuasive as his infectious enthusiasm. The book is rife with footnotes (they average out to almost one per page), and while these often provide fascinating additional information, many of them feel unnecessary and slow down the reading of the main narrative. That is a minor quibble, though. The Shadow in the Garden is an arresting book, at once personal and broad in its purview. And by exploring the art of biography—why he writes it and why we read it—Atlas bares his own soul a bit, too. 'The specialty you choose is your own disease,' he writes, borrowing an adage from psychiatry. 'If so, I had chosen my subject wisely.'”
'Facts matter,' James Atlas declares in The Shadow in the Garden, a rueful, meandering and for the most part engaging and instructive meditation on the kind of biography he himself practiced in books on Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow — that is, literary biography ... Confessions of a Biographer is more like it. He dishes dirt with the lively enthusiasm of a hack at work on a celebrity tell-all, the difference being that much of the dirt is his own ... Prying into the lives of others can provoke guilt in some, but Mr. Atlas is hardly a prurient biographer (he admits to being more interested in the writings of his subjects than their amatory exploits)... The author is often funny, especially when unearthing forgotten characters, and in his footnotes he cuts loose, displaying a zany side ... James Atlas is death-haunted, and so is his book.
The Shadow in the Garden is at least partially a defense of Atlas’s honor in response to the harsh reception of this earlier [Bellow] book. What saves the memoir is the self-awareness with which Atlas presents his personal experience. At times he is less defensive than apologetic, eager to get it right ... The memoir is divided between the light and the darkness of biography, illustrated by the empathic triumph of his first book and the empathic failure of his second. He contextualizes both experiences by interweaving discussions of the history of literary biography ... The suggestion is that The Shadow in the Garden is written on behalf of all the biographers whose honesty about their subjects was interpreted as gossip, or whose readability was maligned as salaciousness. Such are the pitfalls of the genre. But is biography writing worth it? Atlas thinks it is.
Atlas relays all with wry hilarity, bighearted candor, and effervescent passion for the art of literary biography, from the toils and thrills of research to the lonely struggles of distillation, interpretation, and composition ... Atlas’ expert, provocative, and enlightening 'biographer’s tale' is a work of both depth and radiance.
His biography was unremittingly negative and his moral judgments portrayed him as superior to his subject. Atlas is least interesting in the present book when he talks about himself and tries to disguise his egoism and arrogance with a veneer of mock modesty ... The Shadow in the Garden has no clear structure. Atlas was urged to follow chronology and avoid a meandering narrative. But he has no table of contents, chapter titles or preface to guide the reader through his chaotic work. He jumps around like a demented frog, returning to the same subjects in different chapters and dropping derivative sketches of Greek and Roman historians into the middle of the book. Hundreds of pointless and irritating footnotes force the reader to jump between two parallel texts ... Atlas, who can’t quite break free from his subject, ends his book with a description of his own life that inadvertently recalls the sad end of Schwartz. The writer took out his garbage, suffered a heart attack and died in the elevator of a seedy Times Square hotel. Atlas carries his garbage bag out to the hall, pushes the button of the elevator and hurries back to his apartment before something terrible happens to him.
He devotes one chapter to the history of biography and, though it’s relatively brief, it’s satisfyingly thorough. He spends several pages parsing James Bowell’s up-close-and-personal Samuel Johnson coverage. Elsewhere, he talks about the demands of gathering letters and other artifacts. He covers the serendipity that can accompany those searches ... Chatting about his life he is often witty and, less often, merely cute. I did appreciate his mentioning, in regard to rereading, that 'You can never read the same book twice.' How indisputably true that is! ... Let’s just say that as Atlas presents it, biography is a labor of love where the exact nature of that love (giving precedence to love of family?) can be questioned. That message of love of one’s calling, as relayed in this 'tale,' just might be the genuinely significant one the dedicated biographer has to send.
The Shadow in the Garden spills a biographer’s secrets. James Atlas does that with élan and perhaps a bit more material than one may need to know ... Well, I’ve hardly begun to say how enjoyable the reading of Atlas is, and I’ve told you very little. Sometimes though, as the old song written in 1953 and sung by Kitty Kallen goes, 'Little Things Mean A Lot.' Atlas’ details inform large stories.
The author is especially insightful about the pitfalls and occasional advantages of choosing a living person as the subject of the biography. His relationship with Bellow became so complicated at times that he found it difficult to sort out his own feelings. A brutally honest examination of the biographical craft and a good companion piece to Richard Holmes’ This Long Pursuit.
...witty, conscientious, and perceptive work ... Atlas also provides a rich literary history of biographers ... Part literary history and part memoir, this is a lively and elegant biography of biography itself.
