Word: bellowing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That doesn't sound so much like horror or anarchy or even the insides of the horror, the causes of it. It sounds more like studied expression, a bit of stylized rhetoric and not a real indication of where the problem lies. Possibly Bellow intends to convey the impotence of to speech about the subject. But that seems unlikely. Though Corde is not Bellow, there is an unmistakably close relationship between the intellect of creator and character...
...another, more important, reason why the reader can never feel so urgent a threat from the debris of the city as Corde lies in the logorrhea of the work, idea-rrhea, maybe, would be a better word. Bellow has long made the wild stringing of ideas a calling card of his, utilizing it next in Herzog. The average Bellow chapter contains mention of more great thinkers than there are on the Modern Library publication list, and usually he pulls it off. But in The Dean's December one senses the so-called "novel of ideas" working back-on itself, turning...
...somehow large quantities of "Baudelaire and Rilke, even Montesquieu and Vico; also Machiavelli; also Plato" still get slathered over everything. The novel does not asphyxiate beneath this icing. But it is certainly not Bellow's best staff...
Luckily, crime and the underclass are not the only element in The Dean's December. Bellow may not have achieved the great foray into the alien waters he had hoped for, but he remains brilliantly entertaining on his home turf. In particular, his characters are dazzling. Valeria Raresh, Corde's mother-in-law, for whom the Corders have traveled to Rumania (Bellow, incidentally, also went to Bucharest several years ago with his mathematician wife on a similar journey) lies in a state hospital, her face criss-crossed with tapes and tubes. After a coronary and a stroke, it is only...
There are plenty more, and Bellow again demonstrates his keen sense of how all these disparate people are thrown, indeed, bonded together over huge distances and years. Even in this his "dark" book. Bellow shows a strong instinct for seeking out and lauding the crumbs of humanity he finds in the interstices of an inhuman world. The appearance of crowds of Valeria's friends at her funeral dressed in the threadbare finery they saved from the pre-way years is an occasion for quiet joy. And in the give-and-take between Corde and his wife. Bellow demonstrates his acute...