Swift: God’s Knight-Errant

In hard-biting bio-fiction that would make Jonathan Swift himself grin wolfishly, this novel explores Swift’s rise to power, his struggles for the Irish, and his near-incestuous relationship with Stella, his younger student and lifelong friend. Swift’s demonic and self-haunting personality comes through page after page: “Man, he reasoned, is more than the sum of his jism.” But later, after he’s acted with crude, imprudent violence: “He could no longer deny that he himself was a bona fide Yahoo, a blight on the perfection of God’s created universe.” In sum, the man behind the sharpened pen opens up to the reader with his varied moods and judgments.