Doris Lessing

Carole Klein
Duckworth £18.99, pp284
Buy it at BOL

In the first volume of her autobiography, Under My Skin, Doris Lessing wrote that in 1992 she had heard of five American biographers working on her. One of them, she supposed, must be 'concocting a book out of supposedly autobiographical material in novels and from two short monographs about my parents. Probably interviews, too, and these are always full of misinformation.' She is writing her autobiography (she says wryly, without much hope) out of 'self-defence', as an attempt to 'claim her own life'.

Carole Klein's very bad book must be one of those pending biographies. Kitty Kelley's life of Nancy Reagan was once described as a literary 'drive-by shooting'. Klein is more respectful of Lessing, but she may still make her subject feel as if she's been mugged.

Klein presents her subject's resistance as an advantage. Because Doris Lessing declined to be interviewed for this book, she writes, she has been able to rely on published sources and interviews with acquaintances (many of whom appear, queasily, as people 'who wished to remain anonymous'), without 'the benefit or hindrance of the subjective lens through which she would have viewed my thoughts'.

Lessing is, admittedly, an extremely difficult and intractable subject, and not just because she's very much alive and kicking. Like other major writers who have moved through complicated processes of transforming their own life into fiction and out into large political and social issues, and who have never stopped growing and changing in their beliefs and opinions, Lessing is a hard nut to crack.

To do her justice, Klein doesn't entirely collapse the tricky relation between the work and the life, but she doesn't analyse it, either. We have to make do with this sort of thing. 'She explored her African past in her books', or 'She postulates that a great many women begin to write out of a need for self-understanding', or 'Lessing's own conflicts surrounding motherhood have all been rendered in her fiction'.

Lessing's wilfulness, stubbornness, scorn, arrogance, coldness and irritability, and her refusal to be accountable for what she's done, are frequently emphasised, with corroborating evidence from (usually anonymous) rejected assistants or thwarted interviewers.

The text is littered with typos and errors and the prose style is shoddy and clichéd ('a girl who roamed the African veldt'... 'the pages continued to erupt from her typewriter'. It has the air of being written uncorrected and at high speed. But then I suppose the point was to get in first.