Schulz and Peanuts, by David Michaelis, is a completely absorbing, stunningly researched, pain-scorched biography of the last century’s most influential cartoonist.

Charles Schulz’s genius was built on traits common to great artists: unstinting discipline, narrowness of focus, solipsism, arrogance, self-doubt, independence, competitiveness, an embracing humanism, hunger for the new, a sense of unquenchable aloneness, and a taste for passive aggressive revenge.

I knew enough about Charles Schulz going in to understand that his avuncular public image belied a lifelong sense of torment and so wasn’t shocked or surprised to learn of his dark side. What did startle me was just how autobiographical Peanuts turns out to be.

Snoopy’s weird relatives from the strip’s last years evoke Schulz’s unhappy memories of his brawling, drunken Norwegian maternal relatives. His oil-and-water pairing with his first wife (she, extroverted and demanding; he, introverted and withholding) plays out, alternately, in Charlie Brown’s struggles with the wily, domineering Lucy, or in her fruitless, bullheaded advances on the resistant Schroeder.

At one point, when their long marriage is finally crumbling, Joyce Schulz is frantically looking for evidence of an affair. If only she’d bothered to read the strip, she’d have found everything she was looking for, in Snoopy’s delirious infatuation with the cute girl beagle at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm.

Michaelis takes full advantage of the ability to insert salient strips into his text, using them to illustrate his points. His two-paragraph description of the ritual power of reiterative comic strip elements is brilliance distilled. The worst criticism of the book I can make is that he buys in a little too hurriedly to the idea that the genius of the strip drains away when Schulz remarries and achieves a greater sense of emotional security. But then the book already exceeds five hundred pages, and a more exhaustive take on the later years would probably expand it beyond endurable length.

muskrat_john, you doubtless know this already, but this book is for you.

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