Jonathan Coe is a novelist — a very good novelist. He is not a biographer; indeed he dislikes biography, as he frequently tells us. Given that, he’s done a damn good job. Poor B. S. Johnson leaps off these pages: pathologically morbid and clinically depressed, wildly superstitious and self-dramatising. requiring perfect love and devotion from everyone — women, publishers, agents, even critics — and becoming suicidal and violently vengeful when they can’t provide them; ‘a large, blond, maudlin man’, as a friend said; ‘unassuageable,’ said another, tormented and absurd.
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