Hitch 22: A Memoir

A long, arduous, often rambling but nearly always interesting trip through the life and thoughts of a colorful and opinionated writer, Hitch-22 offers a unique look at events and people so varied that it's worth the trip simply for the breadth of knowledge and experience contained within. One is struck again and again over the head by Hitchens's extreme literary promiscuity and knowledge by way of his near constant onslaught of references, allusions and block quotes. The impression left is that it must be tiring to live inside such a brain, so entangled with the works of past literary genius and folly, not only because the memoirs themselves are quite tiring.

Especially admired, though, is his ability to write simply enough, but without pretense and staleness. His prose is continually charming and pleasantly diverse. The narrative, if there is a consistent one, mirrors the volatility of his life. One gets the sense that Hitchens really isn't trying to impart any large lesson or derive a set of morals from his life, but rather just to convey it as it came: confusion, violence and shifting ideologies throughout.

There is no specific overarching benefit to be gained from reading Hitch-22, but it is a holistically rewarding book, even if barely so. I hesitate even to say that it is worth the tiresome effort required to finish it, but at the same time I don't feel remorse for having done so. I think I may have learned a thing or two, and perhaps some seeds of wisdom have been sown through my vicarious experience of his life. Either way, the memoirs feel appropriate to the man, which I suppose is all that a man could ask for.

Inevitably provoking strong feelings of love and hate, Christopher “Hitch” Hitchens does his job well. He's a deliciously articulate polemicist with a fearless, chutzpah-soaked ego that revels in pointing out how hypocritical, weak-minded and, well, stupid other people are. At times - such as when - together with Dawkins and the New Atheist troop - he attacks All Religion, it can be grating and overly self-satisfied. At other times - such as when he lurches from a Trotskyist youth to a pro-Iraq War stance railing against “Islamofascists” - it is riveting (if, still, provocative). This memoir, which is less a traditional biography and more a series of essays about different parts of his life - childhood, parents, Iraq, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said - is just wonderful. Like all good intellectuals writing their memoirs, he drops names left and right - and the names are pretty badass (Susan Sontag! Martin Amis! Rushdie and Said!). Furthermore, he paints a fascinating picture of the intellectual movement as it was experienced in the 80s and 90s. Overall, even if you don't (or can't!) agree with everything he says, he's a wonderful sparring partner and an inspirational mind. In 2010, he learned he had stage 4 cancer of the esophagus - very sad news indeed. I can only augur that he confronts this with his usual courage and wit. From his sharp, touching essays from Vanity Fair regarding his illness (“Tumortown”, “Miss Manners”), it seems he's doing just that.