Review of Hitch-22

(This post was adapted from an e-mail sent in February 2014).

Several months ago I finished listening to Christopher Hitchens' memoir Hitch-22. I recommend the audiobook or the print versions, but for different reasons.  Listening to Hitchens' distinctive English clip and cadence is a pleasure in and of itself, but even more so since his death.

Since his memoir also reads as an excellent bibliography to modern English canon, it's a great starting point to review the works of Seigfried Sasson and Wilfred Owen and move onto more contemporary poets like Evelyn Waugh and James Fenton.  He cites the influence, personal, political, and literary of other British novelists like Martin Amis and Ian McEwan.

But for someone who delights in being the smartest man in the room, his defense of supporting the War on Saddam (not, he pointedly wrote, the War on Iraq) is rather weak. His memoir is not a good window to his philosophy, which he belatedly describes as anti-totalitarianism (but sounds more like a reboot of classical liberalism) or even to the totality of his life.  He made no mention of his first wife and divorce and only passing mention of his second.  His children were tertiary characters at most.

Initially I felt that his contributions to the literary field he spends much of the book praising were transient because he did not describe the significance of his writings, but now I feel that omitting these details was clever because it left me wanting to learn more (which will drive sales) and classy. I appreciated his creation of pithy and biting sentences, his confident bordering-on-belligerant tone (he loves employing the descriptor "fascist"), and diction.  I liked that his comments on fellow writers was interesting, fair and honorable.

His precision about politics is eclipsed by his passion several times throughout the work. For example, he repeatedly employs "fascist" to characterize the 1967 Generals' coup, the aging regimes of Franco and Salazar, the juntas in Argentina and Brazil.

As a polemicist and a essayist, he was right to employ the term.  It's fair to expect a reader to do some follow-up work after an essay. But for a self-described political polemicist and admirer of Orwell, Hitchens brakes the rules Orwell outlined in "Politics and the English Language" distressingly often (especially rule five).  Books, especially audiobooks, must be more self-contained lest the audience get lost.  Sometimes I felt like he was writing the memoir for his coterie than the people he claimed to want to defend.

But most readers associate fascists with the Schutzstaffel goose-stepping their way into Vienna or the cartoonish Mussolini standing on a tank.  He noted that the Greek generals' tried to ban the letter Z and abused the civil rights of its citizens and debased them physically and added that the Argentine military perfected the sadistic art of throwing people out of airplanes and turning verbs into nouns. He used powerful terms often and before defining them.

In spite of these criticisms, I have no doubt his spoken memoir will continue challenge, charm, and inspire audiences now and into the future.  Even though I never met him, I could not help but feeling I made a new friend after listening to him for 17+ hours and as I reached the end, I could not feeling a little sad became I wanted to know what he would say about the civil war in Syria, the rapprochment with Iran, the crisis in Ukraine, and the legacy of 30 Rock.

It's a delight to read and listen to and for that reason it may be the only book that I recommend doing both simultaneously.