The natural

Frank has been part of the political landscape for about as many years as Ted Williams was part of the Red Sox lineup. Both will be remembered for their fierce independence, for their sometimes-tempestuous relationship with the Boston press, for their great skill at the games they played, for their incomparable role in left field. All that and one thing more: They wanted to be remembered as the best there ever was.

Now Frank, in his 15th term in the US House, has something that Williams possessed in plentitude: a biography. Indeed, Stuart E. Weisberg’s “Barney Frank’’ is a lot like the early Williams biographies: heroic, sympathetic, and marred by the author’s irritating insistence on referring to the subject of his biography by his first name. That said, Weisberg has assembled a thorough portrait of Frank and a compelling Baedecker to Massachusetts politics in the last quarter of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st.

For Frank, like Williams, was cranky, impatient, rude - and utterly brilliant. The strike zone of the politics Frank plays so well is the House rules. Even as a freshman he had an uncommon interest in and affinity for those rules, which so often make his colleagues’ eyes glaze over. Frank is known for his outside game - the smart quote, the wise insight. But he is also the magus of the inside game - the mastery of the peculiar totems and taboos of Congress.

The Frank story is well-known among Boston pols and Greater Boston readers: how a boy from Bayonne, N.J., goes to Harvard, graduates, and is eventually drawn into the circles of the remarkable men of his era - Michael J. Harrington, the liberal congressman from Beverly; Michael S. Dukakis, the three-term governor; Kevin H. White, the mayor Frank supported and then spurned. Then, of course, there was Frank’s announcement of his homosexuality, the scandal of the prostitution ring run from his home, his role in the Bill Clinton impeachment, and the recent economic implosion.

Even so, between hard covers this is a good tale, though in Weisberg’s telling it is far too long (500 pages) and far too cozy. Weisberg worked for Frank and remains his friend, and in too many passages this volume takes on the tone of an affectionate memoir rather than a steely-eyed biography. What emerges, however, is a glimpse of a politician who cannot say he suffers from under-exposure but who surely is the victim of oversimplification.

Here’s an example: In our mind’s eye Frank is a loyal partisan. But in these pages we are reminded that in 1978 he supported Republican Senator Edward W. Brooke against Democrat Paul Tsongas in the Senate race and Republican Francis Hatch against Democrat Edward J. King for governor.

Almost as dramatic was his endorsement of Joseph Timilty over Frank’s former boss, White. Frank never practiced blind loyalty, as White wasn’t the only ally with whom he broke. Dukakis was another. The “idea is not to work for a person but for your ideals,’’ Frank said in a Playboy interview a decade ago.

Why is Frank so - well, so Barney? In part because, as this biography shows, his interests are both broad and deep. In part because he is not only a student of politics but also of policy. And in part because he can be - because his instincts and intellect are so sharp and often because his opponents are so overmatched.

For who can tangle, day in and day out, with a man who reacted to a now-forgotten Clinton administration contretemps over a national monument in Utah this way: “None of the allegations in the Republican letter, and I assume they gave it their best shot, rise to the level of a crime. Let me use a technical term - those are stupid.’’ Or with a man who said that independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr had been pursuing the Clintons since “shortly after my bar mitzvah.’’ Or with a man who let flow these bon mots, also from the Clinton episode with Monica Lewinsky: “I never thought that I would be sitting around talking about oral sex in front of my mother.’’

Frank likes to say that he would rather be rude than bored, and in that narrow measure his public life must be marked a success. But, as Weisberg shows, his personal life has been marked by deep loneliness, regret, and drift. In this regard, the personal life of the man does not match the public life.

Of all the important moments in this volume, the one most vividly drawn is the titanic House race he fought with Representative Margaret M. Heckler when the two were thrown together after the 1982 redistricting. This may have been one of the greatest House races in New England history, and Frank’s victory sealed his role as a major figure in Massachusetts politics.

“Heckler underestimated Barney and made the mistake of assuming that she would not have had that hard a fight against Barney because he had won in 1980 by only a slim margin over an unknown dentist,’’ Weisberg wrote. No one would make that mistake again. You can say many things about Frank - and in truth his opponents have said many things about him, many of them nasty - but you can no longer say he is underestimated.

David M. Shribman, for a decade the Globe’s Washington bureau chief, is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.