I have a bad habit of reviewing books I haven't yet finished ... but I'm becoming frustrated enough with this one that I feel a need to pause and say why.

Elledge certainly has a laudable goal: he wants to "save" outsider artist Darger from repeated accusations of being either a pedophile or a dangerous, violent man who wished awful harm to children -- tendencies which, many have said, lie behind his obsessive, often upsetting work. Elledge's thesis is that Darger was often abused in his youth, partly on the (specifically) queer and often predatory streets of Chicago and partly in the institutions in which his hapless father repeatedly left him ... and that he was a gay man who enjoyed a long-lasting, committed relationship, and that queer motifs echo throughout the unbelievably long, illustrated novels that he wrote.

Does he make a convincing case? Well.

I confess I have to say "well ... sometimes." Is it a believable narrative? sure, why not? There is nothing outlandish in it. but plausibility is not the issue. The problem is that so very much of it is based in conjecture. Elledge worked for years on this book, but he (at first, anyway) repeatedly admits that he's necessarily had to reconstruct things, to fill in the gaps.

There are just ... SO MANY gaps. And after a while, the author simply stops admitting that he is presenting a conjecture, that much of the evidence could (I guess -- I'm not a lawyer) be characterized as "circumstantial", and silently edges into an implicit stance that he is presenting fact.

I don't want to accuse Elledge of having "an agenda," because that has a problematic, stupid edge to it, but unfortunately (for me, anyway) the chosen narrative is pushed *so* hard, and over and over, that a sense of special pleading inevitably builds up, whether it is actually there or not. I also feel like much of the wonder of Darger's work gets passed by. Again, it's possible this impression will change in the last part of the book -- the part I haven't read ... but I keep wanting to scream "could you say a few words about why Darger might have written A NOVEL THAT IS OVER 15,000 PAGES LONG? or why his autobiography veers off into ALMOST 5,000 PAGES ABOUT A TORNADO NAMED 'SWEETIE PIE'?"

But that's me -- what I want. Which may not matter at all.

UPDATE: so yeah, Elledge does say a few things about the works in the latter part of the book. And overall, I'd say he does a fine job of humanizing Henry Darger. In the end the book is a sensitively drawn portrait of a deeply damaged man, whether you agree with the details or not.

This is the story of how years of abuse, neglect, and poverty altered the character of one man growing up at the turn of the 20th century to seek comfort for the torture he experienced, partly in his attachment to another man for some decades, and partly in the outpouring of written and visual art. The historical record is patchy during Darger's youth, but the author makes a fairly convincing case for the punishing effect of sexual trauma and other cruel treatment at the hands of various institutions for the destitute. Darger's own writing leaves clues for how he was drawn to the power of story to express the feelings he could not bottle up inside him, but it unclear exactly how he got started teaching himself painting and illustration. It's possible that there was some exposure to these in one of the institutions where he was kept or conceivable that he saw something of this where he worked at menial jobs many years during his adulthood. So like a biography of an artist of the distant past, where we have no access to records of how the artist devised the methods that made the work famous, we have an outsider artist of the not so distant past (Darger died in the early 1970s) whose creative process seems to come out of nowhere.
The author spends a lot of time speculating about connections and causes for features of the subject's life based on very small shreds of evidence, in my opinion, not always successfully. The excerpts of Darger's sprawling works (I did not know that he had not written only one, but three massive volumes during his lifetime) are apparently not easy to organize in any way that someone who hasn't already read them could gain a sense of what they are like. Reproductions of the paintings here also fail to show the level of detail that make them so striking. I think there may be other biographies and critical works which might describe these aspects more thoroughly. ( )