Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex and Man About Montecito, isn’t one for book learning, he reminds readers of his new memoir, “Spare.” And yet its pages are dappled with literary references, from John Steinbeck (“He kept it tight,” the prince writes admiringly of “Of Mice and Men”); to William Faulkner, whose line from “Requiem for a Nun” about the past never being dead, nor even past, he discovers on BrainyQuote.com; to Wordsworth and other poets. Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” though, hit a little too close to home. “Lonely prince, obsessed with dead parent, watches remaining parent fall in love with dead parent’s usurper…?” Harry writes. “No, thank you.”
He prefers to sink into TV comedies like “Family Guy,” where he admires Stewie, the unnervingly mature baby, and “Friends,” where he identifies with the tortured Chandler Bing. Reading “Spare,” though, one kind of wants to snatch the remote control from his hands and press into them a copy of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22.” Not because of Harry’s military endeavors (unlike Yossarian, he seems to have felt sane only in active combat) but because of the seemingly inescapable paradox of his situation.
