Shorter notice

Books like this remind me of a familiar bumper sticker: If you can read this, you’re too damn close. If you’re seriously interested in reading a six-hundred-page study of bisexuality (or anything else) by a professor of English at Harvard, you probably don’t care what this review says. That goes double for Marjorie Garber, whose previous books include Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, whose current dust jacket sports effusive quotes from Gore Vidal, Alice Walker, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (by their blurbs ye shall know them), and who is somewhat less than likely to lose many hours of sleep should she learn that The New Criterion got a bit huffy over her latest. So I’ll keep it short: This isn’t a book. It’s a bloated compendium of everything Garber knows, or thinks she knows, about bisexuality, with a bagful of literary theory stirred in like flour to thicken the...