It’s with the greatest respect for the legacy of Steve Jobs and the storytelling prowess of author Walter Isaacson that I have to confess: I arrived at the end of the book they made together with a sense that it’s all somehow … ordinary.
“Was he smart?” Isaacson says in the book’s final pages. “No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius.”
So is this expansive, exhaustively thorough and balanced doorstop of over 600 pages a work of genius -- the kind Isaacson nudged close to in say, his Einstein or Benjamin Franklin biographies?
No. But it is exceptionally ... workmanlike.
Already a runaway hit via a staggering volume of downloads and hard-cover purchases, the book is an undeniable event.
With its minimalist black and white cover -- a cover reconfigured by the inexhaustible perfectionist Jobs -- it’s the Apple wizard’s last great marketing coup.
Touchingly, and you know he means it because he was notoriously thin-skinned when criticized -- Jobs authorized a warts-and-all portrait because, as he said, “I wanted my kids to know me.”
The very closeness Isaacson necessarily achieved with his terminally ill subject, in the view of noted Jobs savant Joe Nocera of the New York Times, “made it nearly impossible for Isaacson to get the kind of critical distance he needed to take his subject’s true measure. He didn’t just interview Jobs; he watched him die.”
It’s asking a lot of even resolute researcher Isaacson to bring Jobs fully to account for his churlishness, his reflexive selfishness, his self-delusion, his casual and sometimes not so casual cruelties. But since that never really happens -- Jobs in passing admits a to a couple errors, but seem to bury real contrition with his storied magical realism -- this feels like 85 percent of the story without the redemptive part, in which the sacred monster would come out from behind his objects and confess to his sins.
Attempts at pulling insight out of the man are rebuffed at times by Jobs’ singular tunnel vision. Early on Isaacson, proceeding from the wizard’s confessed early love for “Moby-Dick” and “King Lear,” asks him if that’s because he relates to their “willful and driven” central characters.
And then? “He didn’t respond to the connection I was making, so I let it drop.”
Jobs admits to being “ashamed” just once, for refusing to let his parents accompany him onto the Reed College campus when he matriculated in the fall of 1972.
Readers may give Isaacson points for his delicacy, but such openings seem rare. Much later, with Jobs on his deathbed, there are more lost opportunities for the summarizing mea culpas: “By then his eyes were closed and his energy gone, so I took my leave.”
Perhaps it’s unfair to ask Isaacson, after all the testimony he’s assembled showing Jobs’ tyrannical style, to sit at his bedside like Church Lady, calling him to account. But the result is a sense of incompletion, of the quarry having once again -- and now irretrievably -- eluded the pursuer.
