A symbol in search of a meaning …

… Book Review: James Joyce - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In "James Joyce," Gordon Bowker does an efficient job of presenting the often bleak realities of Joyce's childhood. Since that childhood became the raw material of so much of his fiction, Mr. Bowker is wise to emphasize it. Yet Mr. Bowker has a devotee's tendency to always discern in the work the thinly disguised facts of the author's life or background. There are occasional moments when the attempt to see life and fiction as mirrors of each other becomes so stretched as to distort the picture of both. Joyce was an intensely autobiographical novelist, and, like all such writers, he made things up.