This is such a provocative, self-indulgent work of egotism masking as a story of (amongst other things) egotism, that shouldn't work and yet - maddeningly - does. Every time you are ready to hurl the book away because of some crass comment it's followed so quickly with acute insight that you don't. Every time you groan because here Lewis is taking you through many pages of an unstructured analysis essentially of what a Burton and/or Taylor film means to him, you stifle it because you are so quickly engrossed in the quality of the observation. It gets to the stage when you don't even mind when Lewis writes openly about himself.
Baffling, acute, digressive, undisciplined, thoughtful, selfish, observant, laconic, opiniated, well wriiten, vulgar, knowledgeable, insensitive. This book is all of these things and more. And despite myself, I have to say mostly brilliant. ( )