Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer

Turner’s latest plunge into Henry Miller’s epic life brims with zeal for both Miller and his fiction. Turner (Into the Heart of Life: Henry Miller at One Hundred) argues that Tropic of Cancer’s storied history reflects that of the nation, and to prove it he delves into 200 years of folk heroes and pop culture—which results in questionable digressions. The mythologizing German boy from Brooklyn, whose family had a strain of mental illness and anti-Semitism, becomes the adult who pursues his sexual compulsions in Times Square and goes on to befriend prostitutes in Parisian slums. As an autodidact, Miller begins writing several novels, one about a wife who runs away with a female lover, and another with the help of his lover Anaïs Nin. Turner artfully obscures details missing in Miller’s “violently anti-literary” life, but occasionally tries to thicken the plot with bizarre, unnecessary psychologizing. Though the book succeeds as a biography, as the making of Tropic of Cancer it proves underwhelming. Agent: Robin Straus Agency. (Jan.)