Provocative Harpo Marx bio demands some heavy academic lifting

If you’re the kind of reader who shies away from heavy-duty academic noodling and psychologically complex examinations of cinema icons, then the scholar, critic, essayist, novelist Wayne Koestenbaum’s dense, abstract love letter to the most enigmatic silent comedian of the early talkies era is one to avoid.

But cinema buffs with a taste for quirky, exotic and highly personalized theorizing on pop culture will find a challenging, if occasionally daunting, read in “The Anatomy of Harpo Marx (University of California Press, $29.95).

Koestenbuam’s lavish, 336-page paperback – packed with thumbnail photos – is essentially a wordy effort to analyze every move and gesture the voiceless Harpo Marx made on screen in 13 Marx Brothers comedies. To some, the author’s minute attention to obscure detail and his decidedly peculiar psychosexual focus on Harpo’s physical attributes might seem more than a little obsessive, odd and off-putting.

Readers with patience to wade through Koestenbaum’s far-flung literary and cultural asides (ranging from Dostoevsky to Emily Dickinson and beyond) or his naked tangents on personal childhood memories (including, literally, musing on the shape of his own navel), the biography delivers some pure moments of zestful literary acrobatics.