She writes, in the final pages, despite the apparent surrender to Heaven, “I want so badly to believe in God”—suggesting that she hasn’t yet taken Steps Two and Three. Or has she? In the acknowledgements, she thanks a pair of Orthodox Jewish organizations, the Chai Society at Yale University and Chabad House of Ft. Lauderdale, which haven’t been mentioned earlier in the book. So who knows what steps she might have taken after the narrative was completed? Whatever the case, Elizabeth Wurtzel is an intriguing girl who has succeeded in sneaking some dangerously good ideas into places, and into the minds of readers, where ideas like that aren’t normally encountered. This is a valuable and important service.
THE best way to jump-start a novelist’s reputation—or to kill it—is to write his biography. Forty-one years ago, Mark Schorer performed the latter act upon the sodden corpse of Sinclair Lewis by publishing an 867-page autopsy report. Elegantly written but seemingly endless, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life was the first of the big-time blockbuster pathographies, the story of an unlikable alcoholic who somehow contrived to produce Main Street and Elmer Gantry in between benders. Unlike most of its offspring, it was reasonably sympathetic—but not to Lewis’s work, for which Schorer had little use, calling him “one of the worst writers in modern American literature.”
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