Word: bellowings
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...that Saul Bellow is just too nice a guy. He obviously wishes the world well; he wants the world to be pleased with him; and this benevolence, or "potato love," as Bellow calls it, may have damaged the work of a writer who has long been on the threshold of the U.S. literary pantheon but has never quite managed the "big" novel that would put him there permanently...
...Bellow's early novel, The Victim, had the tension of tragedy: an eerie encounter between a Jew and an anti-Semite in which the Jew turns out to be as much persecutor as victim. This first succes d'estime was followed by the book that made Bellow a popular success as well: The Adventures of Augie March, a picaresque tale of a Jewish Huck Finn who bounces about the U.S. and Mexico sampling and quickly tiring of all manner of jobs, creeds and persons. But Augie sacrificed the dramatic tension of The Victim and rambled. Bellow...
...Goose. Few novels have been longer awaited or more often deferred. It has been seven years since the publication of Henderson, during which time Bellow has traveled in Europe on a Ford Foundation grant, then settled down at the University of Chicago as Fellow of the Committee on Social Thought. Lecturing on literature in the afternoons, he has spent his mornings working on Herzog and on his first play, The Last Analysis, about an aging Jewish comedian with a scheme to save humanity, which will open on Broadway this month...
Individual episodes in Herzog are brilliant; Bellow can wring a rare pathos out of the most unlikely, unlovely material: scenes of common, everyday, squalid home life, with the kids sniffling, the wash on the line and mommy savaging daddy. No one, in fact, slices life with a sharper eye than Bellow. But on the whole, the new novel is disappointing. Moses E. Herzog, teacher-scholar, is everybody's door mat. Things happen to him; he does nothing. He is tossed out of his own home by his wife and her lover. He is bullied by lawyers, psychiatrists, cops...
...keeping with the chief character, Bellow's prose is sometimes pudding-soft, mushy and too sweet; but at other times it is as good as anything he has written. In fact, where the novel does not limp, it moves majestically, as in a grimly tender description of the death of Herzog's mother. It is just that Bellow does not seem to be covering any new ground. Toward the end, Herzog reflects: "I look at myself and see chest, thighs, feet-a head. This strange organization, I know it will die. And inside -something, something, happiness . . . Something produces...