Word: sammler
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...Chicago, he wrote for a local Socialist journal,the Soapbox; in the '40s, he was on the fringes of theleftish Partisan Review crowd. Two decades later, he found himself at odds with the student movement, anathematized by radicals as a reactionary--the eponymous émigré intellectual of Mr. Sammler's Planet. In the late '80s, when the culture wars erupted, the Nobel laureate was forced to defend the canon of Western literature against "politically correct" students and professors eager to indict that tradition as a syllabus of dead white males. But he actually belonged to no faction, identified with...
...look meant to impress the Swedish Academy? Who knows, but who could blame him? Roth has already won every major book award, and literary-conspiracy theorists could point out that a wider world view may have helped Saul Bellow win a Nobel Prize in 1976. Like Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet and The Dean's December, The Human Stain makes a good case for the decline of humanism, civility and common sense. Roth also gives us a bleak look beneath the surface of the nation's current self-satisfaction. Silk's off-campus troubles include an affair with Faunia...
...have to love second-time lovers Lily Manning and Rick Sammler, cursed with time deficits, blessed with complementary beauty--she is flush with earthy warmth, he, all icy-eyed angles. Through their fugitive courtship--making out in back seats and living rooms in rare moments without the kids--you thrill with them. When Lily moans, "I've got two kids. How can I take my clothes off?," you want to buy her a drink. Once and Again has the makings of a feel-good hit. What it lacks is the complexity and daring of Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz...
...worse. Liberals and leftists have long attacked him as an insensitive conservative. Feminist discontent about the women in his fiction has been duly registered. More recently, Brent Staples, an editorial writer for the New York Times, objected in a memoir to the portrayal of a black man in Mr. Sammler's Planet, and in March, critic Alfred Kazin wrote in the New Yorker that "my heart sank when I heard that Bellow once asked, 'Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans...
...immediate conclusion -- that the culprit is the Haitian boyfriend of her Austrian au pair girl -- will offend liberal sensibilities, especially since it turns out to be correct. Bellow has ruffled racial feathers before, notably in Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970) and The Dean's December (1982), and his new heroine's thoughts will not heal those old wounds: "These people came up from the tropical slums to outsmart New York, and with all the rules crumbling here as elsewhere, so that nobody could any longer be clear in his mind about anything, they could do it." But Clara is here...