But Hitchens isn’t, of course, a mere chronicler, and Hitch-22 is no less appealing as a primer of brilliant literary style than as a record of high-altitude political wayfaring.
Were the book simply a point-to-point navigation of the author’s political and social itinerary since he launched his career as a journalist-cum-polemicist in the early 1970s, it would be a compelling story. It’s hard to imagine on the proof of Hitch-22, the vivacious, rambunctious tour of one of the more fascinating lives any writer has led over the last six decades, that Hitchens ever even entertained committing that particular transgression. “ ‘The one unforgivable sin,’ she used to say, ‘is to be boring.’ ” From his future nemesis Bill Clinton, whom he knew slightly at Oxford, he discovered that if you could give a good speech or “cut any sort of figure on a podium, then you need never dine or sleep alone.” From Gore Vidal, just one of a small battalion of erstwhile comrades whose closeness evaporated with the invasion of Iraq, came the sapient advice that “one should never miss a chance either to have sex or to appear on television.” But the life lesson that was undoubtedly of the most value to Hitchens was dispensed not by a titan of print or public life but by his mother, Yvonne. Reading the boisterous memoir Hitch-22, one can glean lessons both practical and profound that Christopher Hitchens learned from the very many people whose paths crossed his throughout his outsize life. Today, NBCC board member Eric Banks discusses autobiography finalist Christopher Hitchens's Hitch-22: A Memoir (Twelve). Each day leading up to the March 10 announcement of the 2010 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty-one finalists (to read other entries in the series, click here).
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