Robert Hughes: Memoir panned by the NYT
The writings of the art critic and social historian Robert Hughes, his friend and fellow Australian Clive James once observed, were “the product of an innocent abroad who has consciously enjoyed every stage of his growing sophistication without allowing his original barbaric gusto to be diminished.”
In his new memoir Mr. Hughes chronicles the first installment of that journey from provincial boyhood to urbane adulthood. The volume begins with a horrifying car accident that Mr. Hughes suffered, at the age of 60, in May 1999 — an accident conjured in all its bloody awfulness with unnerving, Goyaesque detail — and then flashes backward to his youth in Sydney in the 1940s and 50s.
By virtue of his kinetic language and restless, observant eye, Mr. Hughes is close to incapable of being boring, but this uneven book is not one of his better efforts. His descriptions of Australia here lack the historical depth of field displayed in his stunning history of that country, “The Fatal Shore,” and his asides about various artists lack the fierce critical acuity displayed in his galvanic study of Goya (2003) and his 1990 collection of essays, “Nothing if Not Critical.”
As for his personal reminiscences, they run the gamut from the riveting to the banal, from the marvelously entertaining to the category of simply T.M.I.: too much information. His descriptions of friends, family members and acquaintances can be colorfully Dickensian, but his excursions into self-analysis often feel forced and oddly lumpy....
The trouble with “Things I Didn’t Know” is that the reader knows there is a pony there, can even see the nose and tail of the pony from afar, but after going to the trouble of trying to see the pony up close, discovers that Mr. Hughes has only half-finished the job of excavating the poor beast.
Read entire article at NYT
In his new memoir Mr. Hughes chronicles the first installment of that journey from provincial boyhood to urbane adulthood. The volume begins with a horrifying car accident that Mr. Hughes suffered, at the age of 60, in May 1999 — an accident conjured in all its bloody awfulness with unnerving, Goyaesque detail — and then flashes backward to his youth in Sydney in the 1940s and 50s.
By virtue of his kinetic language and restless, observant eye, Mr. Hughes is close to incapable of being boring, but this uneven book is not one of his better efforts. His descriptions of Australia here lack the historical depth of field displayed in his stunning history of that country, “The Fatal Shore,” and his asides about various artists lack the fierce critical acuity displayed in his galvanic study of Goya (2003) and his 1990 collection of essays, “Nothing if Not Critical.”
As for his personal reminiscences, they run the gamut from the riveting to the banal, from the marvelously entertaining to the category of simply T.M.I.: too much information. His descriptions of friends, family members and acquaintances can be colorfully Dickensian, but his excursions into self-analysis often feel forced and oddly lumpy....
The trouble with “Things I Didn’t Know” is that the reader knows there is a pony there, can even see the nose and tail of the pony from afar, but after going to the trouble of trying to see the pony up close, discovers that Mr. Hughes has only half-finished the job of excavating the poor beast.