Word: bellow
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There is nothing of the charlatan in Saul Bellow, and perhaps it is time to admit that he is a seer. The author of The Adventures of Angle March, Henderson the Rain King and Herzog observes his age with no excessive charity. Chaos? Yes. Senselessness? Yes. Disintegration and despair? Be the author's guest. The dour view itself is not remarkable. Well-wrought chaos and subtly evoked senselessness have never been in such abundant literary supply. A reader thinks, with varying respect, of Mailer, Heller, Vonnegut, Cheever, Barth...
...question marks a line between Saul Bellow and every other modern American novelist. His early work moved, sometimes falteringly, toward the question. His later novels move with increasing confidence toward a personal answer. What Bellow continues to do with splendid energy in his new book, Mr. Sammler's Planet, is nothing less than clear a place in the rubble where a man can stand. An affirmation? The cant word embarrasses. It suggests fetid molecules of doubt coated with pine scent. But yes, Bellow affirms...
...know. Perhaps; but Sammler is the first Bellow character who has not misplaced the information so thoroughly that an entire novel was required to follow him through the search for it. The earliest searchers found nothing. The hero of Bellow's accomplished but thin first novel, Dangling Man (1944), sleeps, eats, does nothing. There is little focus to his faint discontent, and while his paralysis of spirit is clearly a statement of some kind, it is not one that he understands...
...different Bellow came bursting out in 1953 with The Adventures of Augie March, a big, dizzy, exuberant book. Augie is tough, cheerful, naive, a searcher and an optimist. His problem: where to roost? The Jewish life of his Chicago boyhood? Wonderful! A spell as a thief? Why not? The university? That too. The book ricochets about the Chicago of Bellow's own young manhood; but if the author has a wild yarn to tell about a madman in a lifeboat, he ships Augie out on a tanker; if Mexico appeals to author or hero, off they both...
Augie was a lucky book, as Bellow admits: he has said that his method of writing it was to stand ready with buckets waiting to catch what came. Augie's wistful, cheerful, aimless adventuring won Bellow his first National Book Award (the second came for Herzog...