gfmosser 's review for:

Joe Gould's Teeth by Jill Lepore

3.0

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Lepore's historian longings for the missing literary contribution are honorable. The short chapters keep the pace going, and the focus on Gould's support by the literati while clearly suffering mental illness is an interesting example of white male privilege. But she falls short of making the pretty obvious conclusion that his rants and notebooks of supposed oral history were never going to be a culminating project, that there was no there there. Did it take a whole book to not fully admit that? I think not. Just like Gould rose to prominence in the New Yorker profiles, this piece could have lived as the New Yorker abridged version and left most of us with zero questions beyond that assessment.