Volume 35, Number 11 · June 30, 1988
Yes
By Robert M. Adams
Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom
by Brenda Maddox
Houghton Mifflin, 476 pp., $24.95
Writing the biography of Nora Barnacle Joyce was from the beginning a formidable undertaking, rendered more so by the abundance of expanding material on James Joyce's life and works. It should be said at once that Brenda Maddox has carried off the hazardous enterprise with remarkable success. Not that she has written, technically speaking, a good book. It is flatly written and padded with material that relates much more directly to Joyce than to Nora; it is often full of trivial details and it has longueurs; for extended stretches it treats simply as boring distractions Joyce's writings, which are the main reason for a modern interest in this mixed-up couple of scruffy Celts in the first place. Yet in the end it emerges as a humanly fascinating and impressive portrait, alive and open in a lot of ways that the subjects of purely literary biographies usually are not.
Review, 1941 words
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