The Gatekeeper: A Memoir

Often scathingly funny, frequently tender, and always completely engaging, The Gatekeeper is Terry Eagleton's memoirs, his deep-etched portraits of those who influenced him, either by example or by contrast: his father, headmasters, priests, and Cambridge dons. He was a shy, bookish, asthmatic boy keenly aware of social inferiority yet determined to make his intellectual way. The Gatekeeper mixes the soberly serious with the downright hilarious, skewer-sharp satire with unashamed fondness, the personal with the political. Most of it all it reveals a young man learning to reconcile oppositions: a double-edged portrait of the intellectual as a young man.

Oxford professor, best-selling author, preeminent literary critic, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist, Terry Eagleton knows all about the claims of competing worlds. One of his earliest roles growing up Catholic in Protestant England was as "the gatekeeper"-the altar boy who at reverend mother's nod literally closed the door on young women taking the veil, separating the sanctity of the convent from earthly temptations and family obligations.

Often scathingly funny, frequently tender, and always completely engaging, The Gatekeeper is Eagleton's memoirs, his deep-etched portraits of those who influenced him, either by example or by contrast: his father, headmasters, priests, and Cambridge dons. He was a shy, bookish, asthmatic boy keenly aware of social inferiority yet determined to make his intellectual way. "Our aim in life," he writes of his working-class, Irish-immigrant-descended family, "was to have the words 'We Were No Trouble' inscribed on our tombstones." But Eagleton knew trouble was the point of it all. Opening doors sometimes meant rattling the knobs. At both Cambridge and Oxford, he gravitated toward dialectics and mavericks, countering braying effeteness with withering if dogmatic dissections of the class system.

The Gatekeeper mixes the soberly serious with the downright hilarious, skewer-sharp satire with unashamed fondness, the personal with the political. Most of it all it reveals a young man learning to reconcile differences and oppositions: a double-edged portrait of the intellectual as a young man.

Publishers Weekly

Eagleton (The Truth About the Irish) has never been shy about expressing sharp, penetrating opinions. In this entertaining memoir of his childhood and intellectual development, Eagleton lives up to both sides of his reputation, coming off as both an astute social critic and a sharp-tongued cad. He expounds on his Cambridge adviser ("his role as a teacher was to relieve me of my ideas"), Mormons ("It was their lethal American blandness which proved hardest to take") and his Young Socialist cadre ("At one point in the group's career, venereal infections were circulating almost as rapidly as theories of neo-colonialism"). Clearly, Eagleton can be snide. But he can also be profound. He writes seriously and convincingly about Oscar Wilde, Wittgenstein, working-class intellectuals, Catholicism and liberal politics. Eagleton fiercely defends the radical left's ambitions and offers sharp critiques of globalization and the apparent triumph of capitalism. But he recognizes socialist failings his description of a typical leftist conference will elicit howls of laughter from those who have attended similar events. On his religious upbringing, Eagleton is even more damning. As an altar boy, he served as the "gatekeeper" in a convent whose nuns were never allowed to go outside or see a man. Later, he attended a seminary, which introduced him to the problems that have lately plagued the Church (how do you separate the boys from the men in a Catholic school? "[W]ith a crowbar," writes Eagleton). In little more than a hundred pages, Eagleton manages to be lewd, irritating, solemn and idealistic, all at the same time. (July) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Terry Eagleton is the author of, among other books, Literary Theory and The Truth About the Irish. He has also written a novel, several plays, and the screenplay for Derek Jarman's film Wittgenstein. He has been Thomas Warton Professor of English at Oxford, and Fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and is currently Professor of Cultural Theory at Manchester University.