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But for all the relevance of marginalization in Said's life, the book sometimes stalls in its exhaustive exploration of periphery. While he clearly gets de-centered more than the average world citizen, his memoir neglects to recognize displacement as a fairly universal psychological condition. Who, as a child, doesn't feel out of place? The disservice lies not in some insensitivity toward Everyman's childhood, but rather in Said's own failure to distinguish between two distinct forms of displacement. He treats familiar experiences of personal estrangement with the same attention and intensity as his family's forced expatriation. Yet for American-born readers -- with emigration in our history -- tales of displacement and cultural hybrids rarely elicit shock.

Though "Out of Place" illuminates the liminal space Said inhabits throughout his personal and political life (liminality, with its suggestion of in between, is a central theme in his criticism), it neglects to consider the most interesting space of all: the intricate path his theoretical work snakes amid theoretic schools -- post-structuralism, post-colonialism, liberal enlightenment and deconstruction.

It's in his intellectual work that we see Said live up to the rebel reputation so often ascribed to him on his book jackets. Unlike postmodernists such as Derrida and Baudrillard, who dispensed with the very notion of authority altogether, he still believes in truth and the possibility of speaking it. Where Derrida might explore his own subjectivity ad nauseam, Said never renounces the authority to fight concrete battles (Palestinian self-determination, for example) and use theory as one of his weapons.

Though he doesn't discuss it in terms of his intellectual work, his ambivalent relationship to authority plays out emotionally in "Out of Place." Cold, reserved and critical, Wadie Said raised his son with dramatic scoldings and mysterious silences. Said writes:

"The most terrible thing he ever said to me -- I was twelve then -- was, 'You will never inherit anything from me; you are not the son of a rich man,' though literally of course I was."

In response, Said spent years attempting to secure the affections of this distant man. Said loves his father with a mix of rebellion and reverence. The hot and cold of this relationship is echoed and elaborated in his dealings with all sorts of authority structures. He describes himself, early on, as "the boy who went to school and unsuccessfully tried to follow (or ignore and circumvent) all the rules."

Said's memoir, of course, comes with baggage: Reading "Out of Place" means reading it against allegations of dishonesty recently leveled against him. In the September Commentary -- published before Said's memoir hit bookshelves -- Justus Reid Weiner accused him of fudging his Palestinian heritage. Said, he claimed, was not expelled from Palestine and did not attend school there as he has suggested. The Said camp fought back. Supporters cast Weiner as a Zionist Kenneth Starr: You're wrong, and even if you are right, get a life.

Wait until the book comes out, said Said's defenders, then we'll be vindicated. Indeed, "Out of Place" offers sufficient evidence to exonerate Said of any blatant obfuscation. (Christopher Hitchens and others have offered thorough, point-by-point refutations of the allegations.) But at the same time, the book allows, inadvertently, an understanding of why a Justus Reid Weiner might choose the road he did. While Weiner's critique homes in, piddly-like, on the minutiae of the personal as opposed to the political, it was Said who first made the details of his personal life so politically important.

But the most remarkable thing to see in the debate was the reduction of two decades of scholarship to a week of tit-for-tat quibbling. Critics split into two camps; suddenly the way to think about Said was simply liar or not liar. Ostensibly, Said fought such party-line thinking all his professional life. His scholarship revolves around the ideal of the "secular critic" -- that intellectual who eschews "filiation" (alliance based on birth, nationality or profession) in favor of "affiliation" (allegiances born out of "social and political conviction, economic and historical circumstances, voluntary effort and willed determination"). Yet like so many public intellectuals, he has used the facts of his biography to bolster the authority of his ideas.

"Out of Place" lets us see him better than any of his previous writing has, and this seemed to be what he was after. Diagnosed with leukemia in 1991, he decided it was time to look back on a life largely obscured by the movement of exile. And as in the best of his criticism, he is able to make beautiful sense of the abstract and complex:

I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self ... These currents ... at their best, they require no reconciling, no harmonizing. They are "off" and may be out of place, but at least they are always in motion ...

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