Wilfrid Sheed (1930–2011)

Excellent novel by an unfairly forgotten author. Anyone who could make office politics at a small literary magazine this engrossing, hilarious, and heartbreaking deserves to be back in print.

I found the incessantly flippant tone of this biography tooth-gratingly twee and very off-putting. It turns out that Wilfrid Sheed is an ex-Catholic, which goes some way towards explaining his patronizing although affectionate attitude, but perhaps the family setting of his childhood in which (according to his description) everyone had to be unrelentingly humourous also contributed.

Chesterton was once called an "obese mountebank". Obese he certainly was, "mountebank" he wasn't, except in the sense that he knew from long practice and a flair for construction how to hold the reader's attention till the last paragraph, whether in an essay or a novel. This selection of articles and poems retains its interest even though they were written more than 70 years ago, because he knew how to treat serious and perennial topics in a light-hearted way.