Bookplanet: review of serious book on Michael Jackson

The ABC's of That Damaged Man in the Mirror -- by MARTHA SOUTHGATE

When I was a child, I spent a lot of time lying on my bed, thinking about the Jackson 5. Ask most African-American women who entered adolescence in the 1970's, and they'll tell you the same. We all had our favorites - Jermaine was mine, I wanted to be different - but we all had to agree that Michael was the star. Preternaturally talented, with the voice and face of a brown angel and the kind of perfectly shaped afro that many strove for and few achieved, he was an unforgettable, electric presence. For urban African-Americans he was something new - a teen idol who really could have been the boy next door. And even for those who didn't have such a personal identification, there was irresistible song after irresistible song. Tell me, who among you can listen to the opening riff of "I Want You Back" and not begin to smile, maybe even to dance? It's impossible to be still. It was such a glorious beginning.

What on earth happened?

That is the question Margo Jefferson (long a critic at The New York Times) takes up in her stimulating, engaging new book, "On Michael Jackson ." In this cultural critique, Ms. Jefferson examines Mr. Jackson as both man and symbol, freak and talent, subject and artist, and tries to parse out the meaning of his endless, increasingly disturbed and disturbing public presence in our national consciousness.

Early in the book, Ms. Jefferson asks: "But who is Michael Jackson's double? Is it the brown-skinned self we can no longer see except in the old photos and videos? Is he a good man or a predator? Child protector or pedophile? A damaged genius or a scheming celebrity trying to hold on to his fame at any cost? A child star afraid of aging or a psychotic freak/pervert/sociopath? What if the 'or' is an 'and'? What if he is all of these things?" Ms. Jefferson, in her incisive, intelligent way, doesn't pretend to have the answer to any of these questions. But she takes them all up and holds them to the light.

First she examines Mr. Jackson's childhood, which is about as far from the happy public relations picture painted in the heyday of the Jackson 5 as you can imagine. Instead, it was rife with exposure to violence at the hands of his lothario father and loveless sex in the hard-knock gutbucket clubs and gin joints that the boys played in their early days. They were not one big happy family.

Take a sensitive, talented child and put him into the high-pressure, high-abuse situation Mr. Jackson was born into. Disaster was inevitable. The particular form it took? As we all know, Michael has found his own special way to be crazy in public.

Ms. Jefferson takes no definite position on whether Mr. Jackson is a child molester. How could she? This is not a piece of investigative journalism and she works only from the public record. (She has not spoken to any of the parties involved in his 2005 trial on child sexual abuse charges.) Furthermore, she's up against the fact that though the jury found him not guilty, everybody has an opinion. What she does is attempt to put Mr. Jackson and his obvious emotional difficulties into some sort of social, racial and cultural context and to do that rare thing, show some thoughtful compassion.

In the early part of the book, she traces Mr. Jackson's sad childhood and the road that led him and his brothers to their uncomfortable post as world-renowned entertainers. She then takes a long look at how his race and gender have mutated through plastic surgery, and spends some time looking closely at the images in some of his best known music videos, "Thriller" in particular. She ends with the trial. Throughout, you are aware of Ms. Jefferson's passionate engagement with the subject; it's like flipping through magazine photos of the man while the Jackson 5's "Greatest Hits" plays in the background and your really smart friend breaks down her theories about him for you.

To some extent, this episodic structure is a flaw. While the book is engaging, well written and consistently on target, I sometimes found myself wondering if it really added up to more than the sum of its very sad, discrete parts. This man had horrible parents and he's a mess. He's been poorly treated by his family and by the culture and has reacted by becoming a freak. What does it all mean? Ms. Jefferson doesn't fully illuminate the larger cultural implications of Mr. Jackson's fame and fall. She pushes on them briefly - our obsession with childhood, our confusion about race and gender behaviors, what we do to, for and with talented children - but doesn't tie them in a deep way to any larger themes.

But maybe that's too much to expect from this story. Maybe no one could do it. Or maybe there isn't really much more to be said. Michael Jackson is just a successful pop singer, after all. Maybe this particular American life is just too strange to stand as anything other than its once-glorious, now-pathetic self. Ms. Jefferson elegantly allows us to consider it whole. But in the end we walk away, shaking our heads in befuddlement. Maybe it's better to just put on "I Want You Back," smile sadly and leave it at that.

(Martha Southgate is the author of three novels, the most recent of which is "Third Girl From the Left" (Houghton Mifflin).)