‘It’s your book,’ Steve Jobs told his hand-picked biographer Walter Isaacson two years ago. ‘I won’t even read it.’ He was as good as his word: the Apple mogul died in October without having done so, leaving Steve Jobs as an apparently unvarnished account of his life and times.
Now, there is something a little odd about this. Jobs was gravely ill with cancer. His ostensible purpose in commissioning the book was so that his children, to whom he had for many years been an absentee father, might come to ‘know’ him. But most people in a similar predicament would simply have talked to their children, spent time with them, shared memories, made amends. Jobs instead gave forty rambling and none-too-revealing interviews to a journalist that mainly corroborate Carlyle’s dictum about genius being ‘always a secret to itself’.
Did Jobs not trust his interpersonal skills? Was he hoping someone else might be able to understand him better? Isaacson is not the biographer to speculate. In fact, he’s not the biographer to do much more than take dictation. The result is a book that describes often in quite fine detail what Jobs did, but imparts precious little sense of who he was.
Isaacson’s recurrent motif in exploring Jobs’ character is that he possessed what peers call a ‘reality distortion field’. ‘In his presence, reality is malleable,’ says a contemporary. ‘He can convince himself of practically anything.’ This seems like a fancy name for a relatively commonplace idea – that Jobs invested most heavily in facts that suited him, ignored those that didn’t, and intimidated those whom he could not cajole into sharing his vision. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is that the expression was borrowed by a former colleague from the classic Star Trek two-parter, ‘The Menagerie’, in which the phenomenon is a gift of a doomed alien people, the Talosians: in Silicon Valley, sf was a lingua franca.
Jobs undoubtedly had the capacity in rare measure, but it doesn’t really get a biographer very far, and repeated references to it, as though it is an explanation sufficient in itself, lend the book a kind of relentless superficiality. Again and again, we’re told that Jobs was ‘charismatic and inspiring’ while also ‘an asshole at times’. Isaacson had access to all the major figures in Jobs’ personal and commercial life, and he has interpreted their banalities as profundities. There are numberless variations on: ‘Steve is a one-of-a-kind guy. You know that about him when you do business with him.’ The business transactions tend to be narrated in a bland magazine prose, such as when Jobs is negotiating with Disney’s Bob Iger about the acquisition of Pixar.
‘I want you to know that I am really thinking out of the box on this,’ he [Iger] said. Jobs seemed to encourage the advances. ‘It wasn’t too long before it was clear to both of us that this discussion might lead to an acquisition discussion,’ Jobs recalled.
Opportunities to delve more closely into Jobs himself, meanwhile, go begging all too regularly. In May 1978, for example, Jobs’ sometime girlfriend bore him a daughter, Lisa. Jobs wanted nothing to do with her. ‘I didn’t want to be a father, so I wasn’t,’ he told Isaacson succinctly.
What Jobs did instead was name an ambitious Apple computer project the Lisa, while claiming ludicrously that this stood for ‘Local Integrated Software Architecture’. This, says Isaacson, would have caused ‘the most jaded psychiatrist to do a doubletake’. As a biographer, alas, he does no more than nod.
Isaacson also allows Jobs to repeat, for the umpteenth time, an urban myth that Time intended to make him Man of the Year in 1982, then decided, after he skirmished with journalist Mike Moritz, to honour the personal computer. ‘We’re the same age, and I had been very successful, and I could tell he was jealous and there was an edge to him,’ says Jobs. ‘He wrote this terrible hatchet job, so the editors in New York get this story and say “we can’t make this guy Man of the Year”. That really hurt.’
Bizarrely, Isaacson reports that he knows this story to be untrue. He was privy as a Time junior editor to cover discussions, and the personal computer was always designated for the mantle, never Jobs. Does he confront his subject with the unreality of his man-eating grievance, a case of the ‘reality distortion field’ serving as an instrument of self-torture? Does he heck.
Isaacson is not altogether imperceptive. He is best when he has someone to contrast Jobs with, whether it be Bill Gates, or John Sculley, the PepsiCo executive whom Jobs lured to Apple who then engineered his 1985 ouster. When he has Jobs on his own, however, he lapses into the lamest cod psychology. Isaacson is excited to learn, for instance, that the youthful Jobs read King Lear and Moby Dick with pleasure, then rather let down: ‘I asked him why he related to King Lear and Captain Ahab, two of the most wilful and driven characters in literature, but he didn’t respond to the connection I was making, so I let it drop.’
The daftest passages are where Isaacson plagues Jobs for what is ‘on’ his iPod, citing Steve Levy’s assertion in The Perfect Thing (2006) that this is one of the 21st century’s crucial character tests: ‘It’s not just what you like – it’s who you are.’ So to what does Jobs listen? Nothing special. Early Dylan and Beatles; no Eminem. Ho-hum. But Isaacson goes on and on, extracting from Jobs such deathless judgements as: ‘Donovan did some good stuff, really.’ What he actually provides is counterevidence to the whole gushy consumerist crock that we are simply composites of our tastes in popular culture. But he’s in too deep to see it.
In the end, the definitive testament to Jobs is not what was on his iPod, but the iPod itself, and the whole suite of related products, iMacs, iPhones, iPads and all, in the sense that you’re never quite sure whether you’re in the presence of simple beauty, sterile fetishism or both. A personal disclaimer seems in order. This review was written, amid an iPod’s shufflings, on a MacBook Air, whose box is still sitting in the corner of the room because it was somehow too neat to throw out straight away. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.