Richardson’s biography is dispassionate and thorough, but it is, like his subject, distant. One never warms to it. The details of so many safaris and junkets and shark hunts are recounted that the eyes glaze, but these details are rarely the sort of intimate, earthy ones you hope for. Matthiessen is not an especially sympathetic character ... By the last third of his life, Matthiessen traveled so often, on the slightest pretext, that it was clear he was running away from something (himself, commitment) and toward something else.
Untangles the mixed observations and complaints of Peter’s many friends and lovers over a life that led to the peaks of Zen. Richardson’s fine-toothed research establishes Peter’s importance as a writer and a singular inhabitant of his time. That is the strength of a great biography—which True Nature is, illuminating Peter as an interpreter and translator of all things human as well as a defender of the natural world and everything in it, even as he inflicted great pain on his family, especially the women he loved.
Richardson...tracks his elusive prey along every uneven path with heroic thoroughness in his huge biography, assisted in great part by the journals, unpublished manuscripts, and letters the prodigious author generated in such profusion ... If there’s something slightly missing by the end, it may be simply because Matthiessen always found himself not quite complete and sensed there was something more, just around the corner, on the page and in real life. Till his final breath, he was in search of some grand summation or crowning epiphany.
The first biography of the writer, and an engaging one at that ... The heft of the book—at more than six hundred pages, it is exhaustively researched and exhausting to read—reflects the writer’s convictions ... Grounded in remarkably candid interviews with Matthiessen’s family members and lovers.
Did Matthiessen ever find what he was looking for? Richardson’s elegant and rigorous biography wisely leaves the question open ... Matthiessen embodied many ironies, but one might feel particularly evergreen: The conditions that make possible a search for existential fulfillment are often what make it so very difficult to find.
Richardson...draws on a treasure trove of archival material and hundreds of interviews to provide the first full-length biography of Matthiessen. Beautifully written, insightful, and engaging, True Nature is a tour de force depiction of a charismatic, restless, self-absorbed, immensely talented literary lion.
This is a brilliant biography, bristling with ground-clearing primary-source research, filled with every findable fact about this writer, and, in an added twist as rare as it’s welcome, written with serious narrative flair.
A solid, standard literary biography ... Persistent and lengthy footnotes attest to Richardson’s reluctance to lose any detail. He is a skilled and diligent writer, a ferocious researcher, passionate about his material and highly congenial to the reader ... Becomes more engaging as Matthiessen comes of age and reaches maturity. He wound up leading an extraordinary life ... What to make...of the culture illuminated by Peter Matthiessen’s trek through it? Richardson avoids simple judgments. He offers the reader a complex, flawed human being ... American culture emerges, in the form of Peter Matthiessen, as an unceasing mass of appetites demanding to be fed, often at enormous cost to others.
Richardson’s carefully cross-hatched study of his subject depicts him in the wild, in all habitats and seasons ... In Richardson’s account there are many Matthiessens and they all get their due. Like a pith-helmeted anthropologist with his crates and cabin trunks, Richardson has completed his gruelling expedition and has the tales and trophies to prove it. Matthiessen never fulfilled his early promise of writing the great American novel, but the story recounted in Richardson’s pages is of a very considerable American life.
