Word: bellowing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...DEAN'S DECEMBER; By Saul Bellow; Harper & Row; 312 pages...
...richest, Saul Bellow's freestyle prose reads as if a Division Street Dostoyevsky were writing a book called Thus Spake the Nobel Savage. In Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), the author's tone took a Spenglerian edge as the novel's elderly New Yorker ruminated on the decline of the West Side and, inferentially, civilization as the author knows and reveres it. Sammler had political repercussions. Bellow was accused of being aloof, insensitive and a neoconservative. He has calmly and disdainfully rejected these labels as simplistic...
Lindberg is a good con man. Contemporary literary critics can be lifeless and dutifully impenetrable. As Saul Bellow's Von Humboldt Fleisher put it in Humboldt's Gift, "Their business is to reduce masterpieces to discourse." Lindberg takes care of more business than most readers may care to handle. But his new readings of old books demonstrate how ingeniously some of our best writers juggled the subject of high ideals and low practices. It is an act that requires more than grace under pressure. In Lindberg's felicitous and confident phrase, it takes "poise in ambivalence...
...gate is jammed and does not close. The pack wheels and madly bolts for the 6-ft.-wide opening. But Robison and his mount block the way. He grabs the hulking steel frame and yanks it shut behind the wild bunch. Confined for the first time, the mustangs bellow with anger. In his fury, an aging stallion throws himself against the steel grating, opening a gash across his forehead...
...suspicion is a shrewd one." Yet, oddly, people do not seem to object to being gossiped about as much as they once did. After all, as macrogossip has instructed, any gossip is a form of attention, a sort of evanescent celebrity. Even gossip works to keep away what Saul Bellow called "the wolf of insignificance." Privacy is not the highest priority; on the contrary, a certain emotional exhibitionism has been gaining ground. Of course, it can get out of hand: a man happy enough to be gossiped about as the office philanderer might grow queasy at learning that gossip...