The life of Gilbert Keith Chesterton is, like the man himself, large—too large to be contained within a book. So, while I don’t consider Kevin Belmonte’s new biography of Chesterton to be a rousing success, I don’t consider it to be a miserable failure either. Given the bio, any graphy of Chesterton will fall short in some way or another.
Nonetheless, I am surprised by how little engaged I was by Belmonte’s book. I genuinely liked the author’s William Wilberforce: A Hero for Humanity. And blurbs by Donald Miller (of Blue Like Jazz) and Eric Metaxas (of Bonhoeffer) raised my level of expectation for Defiant Joy. But I was disappointed.
For one thing, Belmonte told me little of the life of Chesterton. In many ways, this book is a biography of Chesterton’s books and their critical reviews (which are quoted copiously). Of the details of Chesterton’s marriage, however, or his workaday world, or his personal friendship with ideological opponents (George Bernard Shaw, for example), we get sidelong glances but not long stares.
For another thing, Belmonte quotes Chesterton and his reviewers too much. In Chapter 1, for example, which examines Chesterton’s early years, approximately 37 percent of the text is block quote. And that excludes quotations that were too short for block formatting. Looking at the other chapters, this percentage of block quotes to total text seems to hold steady. I don’t have a problem with quotations, of course, especially not from Chesterton. But such extensive quoting suggests to me that Belmonte is letting others do his work for him a good deal of the time. At times, Defiant Joy seems like a Chesterton florilegium held together by occasional biographical comments, rather than a biography with select quotations that illustrate or prove a point.
(Belmonte has released The Quotable Chesterton in tandem with Defiant Joy, in which Chesterton quotes are arranged topically with brief explanatory essays scattered throughout the text. I am enjoying that book much more than Defiant Joy and hope to review it separately.)
At the outset, I wrote that I considered Defiant Joy neither a rousing success nor a miserable failure. It’s not what I hoped for in a Chesterton biography. But after reading it, I did pick up Chesterton’s biographical sketches of Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas and begin reading them for myself. You will have to decide for yourself whether you stop at Belmonte or go straight to Chesterton.
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