True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen
Richardson’s biography is dispassionate and thorough, but it is, like his subject, distant. One never warms to it. The details of so many safaris and junkets and shark hunts are recounted that the eyes glaze, but these details are rarely the sort of intimate, earthy ones you hope for. Matthiessen is not an especially sympathetic character ... By the last third of his life, Matthiessen traveled so often, on the slightest pretext, that it was clear he was running away from something (himself, commitment) and toward something else.
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Untangles the mixed observations and complaints of Peter’s many friends and lovers over a life that led to the peaks of Zen. Richardson’s fine-toothed research establishes Peter’s importance as a writer and a singular inhabitant of his time. That is the strength of a great biography—which True Nature is, illuminating Peter as an interpreter and translator of all things human as well as a defender of the natural world and everything in it, even as he inflicted great pain on his family, especially the women he loved.
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Richardson...tracks his elusive prey along every uneven path with heroic thoroughness in his huge biography, assisted in great part by the journals, unpublished manuscripts, and letters the prodigious author generated in such profusion ... If there’s something slightly missing by the end, it may be simply because Matthiessen always found himself not quite complete and sensed there was something more, just around the corner, on the page and in real life. Till his final breath, he was in search of some grand summation or crowning epiphany.
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