Ronson is asked by the friend of a friend to investigate the appearance of an elaborate handmade book, Being or Nothingness, that has begun appearing in the pigeonholes of academics and other wonks across the world. The book starts, for want of any better launch pad, with a shaggy dog story. Finishing up, you gaze at his bibliography and wonder, with a sigh, where to begin. His subject is huge and tragic and terrifying but there is something tinny and unfinished about his investigation. He skates when you want him to dig he does that amazed, disingenuous thing, when a little old-fashioned anger and indignation would serve him far better he makes peculiar connections between things that are not really connected at all. But it also reveals, sometimes painfully, the limitations of his journalistic technique. Ronson's new book is provocative and interesting, and you will, I guarantee, zip merrily through it. And, in the case of The Psychopath Test, perhaps more than occasionally. T he difficulty with reviewing Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test is that, if I am to be honest, I risk sounding like a person with no sense of humour – and who wants to be one of those? Certainly not Ronson, whose joke rate is as indiscriminate as it is high, by which I mean that though the belly laughs come thick and fast – my God, he is funny – they are occasionally accompanied by a certain kind of queasiness.
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