Admirably, she has consulted far-flung archives, pored over unpublished documents, conducted interviews with dozens of de Man’s relatives, friends and acquaintances. Her account of his chaotic childhood and adolescence, marked by his older brother’s death and his mother’s suicide, is compelling. Her story about his early adventures in New York is picaresque: The penniless, handsome young immigrant (his blond good looks are mentioned repeatedly) ascends, in the space of a few months and at the price of a few lies, into the inner circle of one of the city’s most exclusive intellectual salons (Dwight Macdonald’s), where he meets the powerful older woman who sponsored him (Mary McCarthy, who got him a temporary teaching job at Bard College). But when Barish starts to speculate that the young adventurer may have made McCarthy pregnant (she had a miscarriage), basing the speculation on slim circumstantial evidence (he was visiting her and her husband during the summer when the child was probably conceived, then stopped seeing them; a year later, McCarthy wrote a nasty letter about him to a professor at Bard), the reader’s hackles go up. Is this narrator reliable?

In fact, with a careful reading of the book, hackles go up quite early. Among the most damaging claims made by Barish is that de Man, besides his role as a literary columnist at the collaborationist newspaper Le Soir (which some called Le Soir volé, to distinguish the “stolen” publication from its prewar version), was scheming to start “a luxurious art journal whose raison d’être would be to promote the entire range of the most bizarre Nazi ideologies. Its editor in chief would be Paul de Man.” This charge is based on a document signed by Le Soir’s editor in chief, de Man’s boss, Raymond De Becker, who was condemned to death for treason after the war, in part for promoting this idea (De Becker’s sentence was later commuted). The proposed magazine would be financed by the German Foreign Office and would have De Becker as publisher and de Man as “secretary of the editorial board — that is, its editor.”

The magazine never got off the ground, but the handwritten prospectus for it was part of the prosecutor’s dossier at De Becker’s postwar trial. According to Barish, the prosecutor “chose to ignore or did not notice that the closing pages . . . of the document were in a different handwriting, which was that of Paul de Man.” The author makes an enormous leap of judgment here, but does not substantiate it. She reports that one of the people she interviewed, who worked with both men at Le Soir, identified De Becker’s handwriting “instantly” on a copy of the prospectus, but she gives no indication that she asked him about de Man’s handwriting. Even more sweepingly, she asserts that “internal evidence suggests that the idea” for the magazine “probably originated with de Man” — a hugely incriminating claim, but again unsubstantiated. This kind of vagueness occurs at other crucial moments as well, along with hypotheses that turn into “facts” a few lines or pages later.

The reader is asked to take a lot on faith, starting with faith in the author’s judgment and in her knowledge of language and history. In this instance, one’s faith is shaken not only by the imprecision, but by at least two factual errors. In French, neither “editor in chief” nor “editor” corresponds to “secretary of the editorial board,” the job Barish says De Becker listed for his 22-year-old protégé. The secretary of the editorial board is in charge of shepherding articles through the editorial process, not setting policy. A small error, to be sure, but it makes one question Barish’s claim that de Man was the mastermind behind the Nazi magazine project. And the way she formulates that claim signals another error: De Man, she says, had earlier organized the Prix Rossel, a major Belgian literary prize awarded by Le Soir, equivalent to France’s Prix Goncourt. The Prix Rossel is indeed prestigious (it is still being awarded annually in Belgium), but it was discontinued while Le Soir was under Nazi control. The prize de Man was involved with was a different one, concocted for the circumstances. It’s not clear who thought it up, though Barish once again moves from hypothesis to “fact” in attributing the major role to de Man.

This too may seem a small error, but there are too many of them, and they tend to distort an already complicated story. That’s not to mention the ham-fisted explanations when Barish ventures into philosophy, or intellectual and literary history. Reading her comments on de Man’s ideas, or on Bataille’s or Sartre’s, is like watching a film out of focus — it’s all there, but very approximate.