Robert Caro

I'm not sure when I first came to the conclusion that I had to read the books of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson, but there were already three of them when I started (now there are four and soon, one hopes, there will be five). I had read an excerpt or two in the 90s and then there was a bunch of hoopla when 2002's installment, Master of the Senate, was released, and I read an excerpt of that one too. It was all compelling and very readable stuff and Johnson came off as a fascinatingly entertaining character, an impression I already had from reading Arthur Schlesinger's (fawning, even hagiographic) biography of Robert Kennedy. I read about the books one too many times, someone mentioned how much they liked them, and next thing you know I checked them out of the library and started reading them.

Although the three volumes I've read so far comprise, by my quick estimate, 2500 pages, it didn't take very long to read them. The books were far better than I could have ever imagined, even taking into consideration the fact that I must have been pretty sold on the idea of them already to undertake such a reading project. Caro's prose is a bit much at times if you stop and think about it, but he keeps you glued to the page. The New York Times magazine did a piece on him this week and the author does a good job of describing what's a little bit excessive about Caro's writing:

Caro has a bold, grand style — sometimes grandiose, his critics would say. It owes something to old-fashioned historians like Gibbon and Macaulay, even to Homer and Milton, and something to hard-hitting newspaperese. He loves epic catalogs (at the beginning of “The Power Broker” there is a long list of expressways that would not be out of place in the “Iliad” if only the Greeks and Trojans knew how to drive) and long, rolling periodic sentences, sometimes followed by emphatic, one-sentence paragraphs. He is not averse to repeating a theme or an image for dramatic effect.

But I'm not complaining. The one-sentence paragraphs are hilarious, but the books are (all) masterpieces.

I have been recommending these books ever since, whole-heartedly, but I have only ever succeeded in convincing one other person to read them--I guess a multi-volume biography of LBJ is a hard sell. But that person has become as enthusiastic a fan of the books as I am. 

In two weeks the 4th volume comes out. Caro was to have finished the series with this volume (at one point there were only going to be three), but he is now planning on writing one more. They have been coming out at a rate of, on average, one every ten years. Caro is 76 years old. He has apparently made a will stipulating that, if the last volume isn't finished when he dies, nobody is to finish it for him. So now fans of Caro are holding their breath, hoping that he stays healthy. God forbid he gets hit by a train or something. It would be a real tragedy. After all, he hasn't even gotten to LBJ's presidency until this latest volume, which supposedly only goes up to 1964. 

If all goes well, though, the fifth volume will be finished before Caro is. I plan on rereading the first three before I read the fourth. These are some of the greatest books of our time, and also some of the most pleasurable to read. I cannot recommend them highly enough, read them now!