It's not often that a book can make me gasp out loud involuntarily. Stuart: a life backwards is moving, funny, sad, extraordinary. I'm quite sure I've never read anything like it before. The high-wire act Masters pulls off of telling the biography of a personal friend, with himself as an omnipresent but not intrusive character, is a real feat of storytelling. He makes himself a foil for Stuart without getting cute or cynical or maudlin. And Stuart. Stuart! What a person. And what a portrait. Baffling, hilarious, thoughtful, violent, wise, generous, self-destructive to an unbearable degree. The parallels with Jack are obvious, although so are the dissimilarities.
And the revelation in the epilogue is just, well, gasp-inducing.
And the revelation in the epilogue is just, well, gasp-inducing.
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