A generous interpretation would be that White’s uneven structure is an attempt to mimic the workings of memory, which often behaves like a bad novelist, with its crudely drawn characters and messily unresolved plots. But that seems unlikely. If his experience of spending 15 years in Paris was as refined as living “inside a pearl”, his memoir seems more like the “heap of jewels, unstrung and unpolished” that Nahum Tate saw in Shakespeare’s King Lear. Yet each episode gleams so beautifully it almost doesn’t matter that some of the jewels turn out to be made of paste.