Conspicuous Consumption

   Patrick Wright has chosen to focus his massive account of the last ten years of Uwe Johnson's life, spent in Sheerness , on the place. The detail we absorb from Wright about this neglected and depressed locale—I seem to remember it being referred to as "the back end of the Thames"—is staggering. It seems trite to say that the places we spend our days make us who we are, but how many biographers take that seriously? Most seem content to tell us what their subjects do while more or less ignoring where they were. Wright, adopting the opposite approach, focuses most of his 750 or so pages on the bleak, depressed place Johnson made his home. In those pages we do get the facts of Johnson's life, but much more we get the facts of Sheerness, Sheppy, and the bleak place that was England in the 1970s.  The book's great strength is its discursiveness. From Sheppy and Johnson, Wright journeys widely., and as much as we enjoy reading about our subject, especially in the sub...