Walls and Bridges shows John Lennon to be as mercurial as ever. I anticipated an unbearable suffering occasioned by the collapse of one of this century's most public love affairs—after all, Yoko Ono was presented as the membrane between agony and peace for Lennon, between illusion and reality. Yet the relative clearheadedness of this album suggests that she may have been only the most recent in a series of causes from which Lennon is extricating himself with customary agility. He seemed more pugnacious, more doctrinaire, more vulnerable when Yoko was supposedly supplying him with bliss than he is today.

For the first time since the formation of the Beatles, Lennon is on his own and, remarkably, he seems to find that tolerable, though half the numbers on Walls and Bridges record his pangs of loss. (pp. 72, 74)

The insights are reformulations of the lessons of Plastic Ono Band...