Word: herzog
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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...
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...
...comment, like the book itself, underlines the fact that in some ways this century has made Bellow a profoundly conservative man. "That was one of the things I was trying to say in Herzog, too," Bellow admitted to TIME Correspondent Martha Duffy. "Today you can simply be distracted to death. Tearing the self apart has become a social duty...
...years ago took up calmer residence in a five-room apartment on Chicago's South Side. It is a bachelor's flat-no curtains, orderly bookshelves and unobtrusive modern furniture. Three marriages have left Bellow with three sons, age 25, twelve and five, and three divorces. Herzog, which camped on the best-seller lists for a winter, brought him financial security, though -he cannot help remarking-it was praised for a lot of the wrong reasons: "topical, Jewish and political reasons." He no longer needs to make money from teaching, but Bellow continues to follow a pattern familiar...
...Herzog: Silly questions get silly answers...