The consummate ironist, Groucho Marx's onscreen persona involved such disdain for any claims to authority and sincerity—including his own—that he sought to undermine them with virtually every word and gesture. It's the persona that made him and his brothers heroes to anyone who has ever found value in absurdity, anarchy, and hilarity. Real life, of course, was a different story, but it's hard to imagine a Groucho wholly detached from the man with the greasepaint mustache and the witty rejoinders. Though he portrays his subject as a man of some cleverness, the greatest flaw of former Time writer Stefan Kanfer's Groucho is that he never finds the connection between the private Groucho and the public one. Biographers of artists tend either to fall in love with their subjects, finding the genius in their day-to-day lives that they brought to their craft, or to view their private lives with a pity bordering on disdain, an unfortunate by-product of their creative activity. Kanfer's book leans heavily toward the latter approach. It's not a portrait of the clown as vampire like Roger Lewis' chilling The Life And Death Of Peter Sellers, but Groucho portrays Marx as a distant, miserly, often foolish man. There's no reason not to believe it, and it's fine as a collection of biographical information, but there's little to counterbalance this view aside from a few dozen superfluous pages of movie dialogue that will be familiar to anyone looking to read the book in the first place. Worse is a lack of psychological insight into Marx, his brothers, or anyone else, aside from an elementary-level Freudian analysis of Marx's relationship with his mother and his tendency to ruin the lives of the women who loved him. This trend ultimately reverses itself in the final chapters, in which an aged Marx becomes the virtual prisoner of a young gold-digger, but by that point Groucho simply seems like a warning against the perils of living too long. A comic of such profound talent and influence, whatever his flaws as a man, deserved a better end than his life or this book provides.