In this colourful distillation of the life of the "volcanic" James Joyce, O'Brien excels in her own linguistic dexterity as well as in her understanding of the complex mind of the writer. Her insight makes one wonder why writers don't write biographies of each other more often. "Writers have to be monsters to create," she maintains, but the Joyce she shows us is irresistibly human in his fears of madness and of lightning, his courtship of betrayal, his drunken impersonations of Isadora Duncan dancing, his manipulation of the pretensions of the literary world and his tender but misguided relationship with his demented daughter, Lucia. O'Brien concludes that his great power lay in being able to encompass body and soul: "No other writer so effulgently and so ravenously recreated a city . . . for him as for Sophocles, great stories began in the family cauldron."