Word: herzog
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...HERZOG by Saul Bellow. 341 pages. Viking...
...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's sub sequent novel, Henderson the Rain King, rambled even more; and in Herzog the tension has snapped completely in a flood of good will...
...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...
...Herzog, despite his learned jokes and sophisticated dalliances with a series of ladies, is that common figure of today's literature: the anti-hero champion of the ordinary life, whose plain decency is contrasted with the theatricality and contrived cruelties of everyone around him. The novel is an attack on the proud intellectualism of over-ratiocinative Jews (and others). "We love apocalypses too much," Herzog decides, "and crisis ethics and florid extremism with its thrilling language. Excuse me. I am a simple human being, more or less...